A few days ago I was invited to talk to the student curators participating in Jack Rasmussen’s innovative curator class at American University.
At the same time that I met, talked with, and then spoke to the class, I was fortunate enough to not only get inside the focus and purpose of the five student curators, but also received an early peek at the installation process of the show itself, which opened with a gallery talk a few days later on Thursday, June 29.
The exhibition, with the most modern youthful title (somewhat borrowed, I imagine, from MTV’s "Real World" series) of "The Real (Art) World: 5 Curators. 5 Artists. 1 Museum," has the aforementioned cast of five students in their first curating assignment; the students are: Bernard Birnbaum, Nicole Ferdinando, Meg Ferris, Roxana Martin and Daniela Rutigliano.
The assignment's starting point was somewhat the same for all the students: review artist submissions and proposals and slides sent to the Katzen since it opened its doors a while back, and select an artist for each curator to showcase in the exhibition.
Birnbaum selected Dave D’Orio, Ferdinando selected Marie Ringwald, Ferris selected Jiha Moon (who seems to be everywhere at once these days), Martin picked Genna Watson and Rutigliano picked Ariel Goldberg.
Of the above artists, I was very familiar with Ringwald (a Trawick Prize finalist and an artist whom I included in Seven) and Jiha Moon (a Trawick Prize winner); the others were all new to me.
Meg Ferris passed the first test of my "why did you select blankety blank?" question, as she answered that she had selected Moon based on her visual impressions of Moon’s elegant work and her statement about her work.
When I saw the work, Ferris had already hung it on the wall, and was preparing to add some wall text. We spoke for a while about “textitis,” that fatal disease of most postmodern minimalist art, where the text is often more interesting than the artwork itself, and Ferris seemed to agree that in Moon’s case the artwork should be allowed to carry the exhibition’s focus, rather than text about Moon’s art.
Article comments