A collaboration with the Columbus Museum of Art
During 2022 and 2023 our department continued its close collaboration with the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA). Following a model set by earlier shows, Prof. Kris Paulsen taught a graduate seminar in Curatorial Practice in autumn semester 2022, which consisted of planning and co-curating a show at the Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art. The show opened in September 2023, after over a year of work by Prof. Paulsen, the students in the course and our partners at the museum.
Sarah Rosalena: In All Directions is a mid-career survey of the artist’s work from 2019-2023. Rosalena is Assistant Professor of Art in Computational Craft and Haptic Media at UC Santa Barbara and a fascinating artist working at the intersection of indigenous craft techniques and contemporary technologies such as machine learning and 3D printing. Working across a range of media, from weaving and beadwork to ceramics and sculpture, Rosalena produces objects that break boundaries and borders imposed by colonization, looking to outer space through the lens of craft. To quote Prof. Paulsen’s introductory essay in the exhibition catalog, “Rosalena’s processes and practice culminate in objects bearing unique tactile and conceptual qualities that expose the fact that conventional means of understanding space, time and history are unsteady and full of cracks…Obscured, invisible, lost, dispossessed and erased data find embodiment and material forms through Rosalena’s processes.”
The exhibition was an opportunity to involve graduate students across several departments in the planning and execution of a major museum exhibition. The exhibition included graduate students from the Departments of History of Art (Maika Kagawa Bahr, Mia Kivel, Sterling Nix and April Riddle), Art (Christine Fashion and Hannah McCasland) and Arts Administration, Education and Policy (Julia Harth and Amanda Tobin Ripley). In the graduate curatorial seminar, taught a year before the show opened, students worked with Prof. Paulsen to research Rosalena’s work, to contextualize it within broader historical and artistic narratives, and to begin producing the texts that would accompany the exhibition (which students workshopped and peer-edited). They met with the artist several times, who suggested readings and avenues for interpretation. They also immersed themselves in the practical aspects of exhibition making: grants, learning guides, layout/design and the production of a catalog. The collaboration constituted a reinvigoration of The Pizzuti’s mission: what new CMA director Brooke Minto called “a laboratory for integrative, experiential arts education.”
We hope to continue this kind of curatorial collaboration with the Columbus Museum of Art in the future, and to develop new opportunities for curatorial training for our PhD program through a new graduate certificate in contemporary art and curatorial practice that is currently under construction. In the meantime, a huge congratulations to Prof. Paulsen and her students on a fantastic show.
Karl Whittington
Professor, Chair of Department of History of Art
