ARTH 3295
USU Student Online Exhibitions
May 2 - August 20, 2022
The Project
In the spring semester of 2022, students enrolled in ARTH 3295 at Utah State University were tasked with curating their own virtual exhibitions. ARTH 3295 is an art history course on the art of Americans of Latin American descent or Latinx. Collectively, this year’s show is titled Latinx Art: 3 Perspectives.
Curating a show is no mean feat, especially for those with limited knowledge of Latinx art and cursory experience with museology. Nevertheless, students launched themselves into the endeavor, absorbing a vast quantity of information and distilling it into their exhibitions with remarkable aplomb.
The result of a semester’s worth of critical and creative thinking are featured on this webpage. The course instructor, Dr. Álvaro Ibarra, and the staff at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art wish to recognize the hard work of all participants, to show appreciation for students’ remarkable scholarship and artistry.
Process
In developing an exhibition, students were given two dozen works of art from the NEHMA collection, artwork produced by members of the Latinx community. Our budding curators also had to select from over one hundred pieces derived from across the United States, objects produced from the twentieth to the twenty-first century.
The most basic objective was filling their gallery with art objects in a compelling design. However, creating a visually appealing exhibition was only one challenge among many. As students learned more about the art of Latinx from course readings, lectures, and their own research, various themes emerged as viable conceptual lynchpins for their exhibitions.
Issues regarding race, culture, ethnicity, religion, and nationality became thematic foundations for many projects. Others focused on formal investigations that explored stylistic phenomena in Latinx art. In developing exhibition didactics, students had to harness a tremendous amount of discourse into a short and impactful document that garnered the interest of the museumgoer.
Allison Allred, for example, challenges past applications of narratology in Latinx, returning agency to artists that routinely lose their agency in the art world (Fig. 1). The slippage between assumptions versus reality in the formation of identity is pursued by Isabella Marrott, specifically examining the presentation of life-defining moments for Latinx artists (Fig. 2). For her part, Emma Duffin unveils the trauma experienced by artists that endured physical, emotional, and cultural displacement by presenting works that mediate purported borders (Fig. 3).
Exhibition Literature
Each exhibition is accompanied by all manner of promotional and educational material. Physical posters and flyers inform the arts community of upcoming shows, QR codes conveniently guiding visitors to the online abode for Latinx Art: 3 Perspectives. Once in attendance of a virtual exhibition, museumgoers may peruse informative catalogs and engage virtual tours. Gallery texts direct the viewer’s inquiry and frame the curator’s perception of a work. Audio guides provide virtual docents for visitors seeking an immersive experience.
Beyond the poster produced by Grady Bing, every cover for the requisite exhibition catalogs function as promotional material (Fig. 4). The accompanying literature contains the show’s didactic and descriptions for pivotal works. Texts focus the museumgoer’s appreciation within the larger thesis of the exhibition, masterfully encapsulated in Emma Duffin’s insight on Figure/Ground: “Esparza’s work, in itself, is a displacement…an adobe structure inside the white box of the museum.”
Arguably the most engaging contributions in the realm of exhibition material were the audio guides. Students’ audio guides ran an average of fifteen minutes; they functioned to summarize the themes and their application to key works in the exhibition for the visitor. Allison Allred’s audio guide, for example, was an exercise in the clarity of conviction. As an artist-turned-curator, she presents her analysis in an empathetic fashion. In a more radical approach, Isabella Marrott gave voice to a sympathetic narrator in her tour, foiling stereotypical proclamations about Latinx held by the museumgoer with the sincerity of the audio performance.
Conclusion
Like any good contemporary work of art, the real value lies in the process. That said, academia still insists on the importance of the product. This semester, the students of ARTH 3295 engaged in a less orthodox learning process, one that threw them into the proverbial deep end of the pool. And they succeeded in producing exceptional exhibitions. Albeit virtual and ephemeral, their individual shows exist in perpetuity as literal bits of conceptual art, sustained by the memory of a shared experience.
Acknowledgements
This virtual exhibition was made possible through funding provided by the Nora Eccles Harrison Teaching Fellowship. Professor Ibarra would also like to extend his thanks to Zaira Arredondo Mata, Levi Leckie, Donna Brown, and Katie Lee-Koven at NEHMA. Additionally, designer Grady Bing deserves recognition for producing a wonderful exhibition poster.
