Models

In developing an exhibition, students were given thirty works of art from the NEHMA collection, artwork produced by Latin Americans or members of the Latina/o/x community. Our budding curators also had to select from over one hundred pieces derived from across Latin America, objects produced from prehistory through the Pre-Columbian, Colonial, Modern, and Postmodern eras.

The most basic objective was filling their gallery with art objects. Based on the architecture of NEHMA, students reified their exhibitions in virtual space with SketchUp (Fig. 1). SketchUp is a free and user-friendly modeling program, a tool that allowed students to juxtapose artwork in a myriad of combinations quickly and conveniently. Multiple iterations were rendered and jettisoned in the search for compelling designs.

Mastering SketchUp was not one of the aims of this project. Nevertheless, many students produced visually stunning models that could be appreciated as artworks in and of themselves. In one example, Emilia Anderson transformed a wing of the museum into the Pre-Columbian labyrinth at Chavín de Huantar (Fig. 2). Others, like McClain King, stayed true to the museological tradition of pristine, white walls (Fig. 3)

Themes

Creating a visually appealing exhibition, however, was only one challenge among many. As students learned more about the art of Latin American 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 Latin American 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.

Jade Walker, for example, challenged the notion of the avant-garde in Latin American art, suggesting a less romanticized and more conceptually rigorous method is necessary (Fig. 4). For her part, Whitney Romney explored biases in the perception of identity as communicated via the artificial construct of the portrait tradition (Fig. 5). Clara Harmon pursued the slippage between assumptions versus reality in the formation of identity, specifically examining gender roles in Latin American art (Fig. 6). Caitlyn Schmidt negotiated the Western European bifurcated conception of celestial and terrestrial cosmologies, presenting works that mediate these polarized understandings (Fig. 7).

Exhibition Literature

Every exhibition is accompanied by all manner of promotional and educational material. Posters and flyers inform the arts community of upcoming shows. Once in attendance of an exhibition, museumgoers may peruse informative pamphlets. Gallery texts can direct the viewer’s inquiry or frame their perception of a work. Audio guides provide virtual docents for visitors seeking a multi-media experience.

While posters were not produced per se, every cover for the requisite exhibition booklet functions as promotional material (Fig. 8). The booklet also included informative biographies of featured artists for visitors unfamiliar with artists in the NEHMA collection like Leo Limón or Yolanda González (Fig. 9). Lastly, the accompanying literature contains the show’s didactic and descriptions for pivotal works (Fig. 10). Texts focused the museumgoer’s appreciation within the larger thesis of the exhibition, masterfully encapsulated in Kaily Davis’ insight on the Las Limas Madonna: “The Olmecs believed that human beings give the gods power and life…animated by human belief” (Fig. 11).

Arguably the most engaging contributions in the realm of exhibition material were the audio guides. Students’ audio guides ran an average of fifteen minutes, summarizing the themes and their application to key works in the exhibition for the visitor. Zarya Hoffman’s audio guide, for example, was an exercise in the clarity of conviction. Presenting new interpretations for religious iconography is supremely difficult (Fig. 12). In a more radical approach, Molly Etchberger gave voice to an unreliable narrator in her gallery texts, their stereotypical proclamations about Latin Americans foiled by the audio performance. Audibly, the curator confronts the viewer’s acceptance of cultural clichés.

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 3320 engaged in a less orthodox learning process (one that threw them into the proverbial deep end of the pool) and 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 an experience.