Exhibition as conversation

For working artists on Penn’s Weitzman School of Design faculty, curation and exhibition design present opportunities to think differently about how art is created and understood, and, importantly, to do so in partnership with other artists, patrons, and art viewers. They approach these practices with a range of formal and informal training and experience, and an interest in the relationships between different works of art, and between art and politics, history, and the environment.

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Earlier this year, artist and associate professor of fine arts David Hartt designed an exhibition of films and photographs by Gordon Matta-Clark, the famed American artist known for explorations of the built environment and urban decay who died in 1978. The challenge, for Hartt, was how to present work that was “for lack of a better word, canonical,” in a new and interesting way. He chose to present the work, largely curated by the gallery, in the context of the contemporary push toward exurban sprawl, an extension of the urban decline documented by Matta-Clark.

“For me, curating is about participating in a conversation,” says Kayla Romberger, a lecturer in fine arts and design at Weitzman and co-founder of Ulises, a bookshop and exhibition space in Philadelphia. “I see it as a creative act not unlike art making, but it tends to grow in dialogue with participants, including the public.” At Ulises, Romberger and her other co-founders host four curatorial “seasons” a year, inviting artists to display work connected to a specified theme or framework.

Another artist who presented work at Ulises in recent years was Ken Lum, the Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor at Weitzman. In 2005, Lum was among the organizers of the show Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1945,” along with Zhang Shengtian and Joanne Birnie Danzker, in selecting works of Chinese modernist artists and documentation of the cultural context. Finding documents and pictures to contextualize the works was a challenge, Lum says: “It was like total detective work.”

Later this year, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh will open “Black Photojournalism,” an exhibition of photographs from the end of WWII to the mid-1980s designed by David Hartt. Reviewing the material for the show led Hartt to turn to the idea of the library as an organizing principle for the exhibition. He designed furniture and displays with the intention of inviting people to spend time poring over the pictures. “It treats the viewer as a researcher,” he says. Like other exhibition design and curation projects, Hartt says it’s a matter of an artist bringing something of their own to the effort, and giving something up.

This story is by Jared Brey. Read more at Weitzman News.