Newswise — The creation process has inspired two Ursinus College students in their own creation of a major exhibition in the college art museum. Senior Lisa Minardi and junior Sarah Kauffman are the curators of "Creation: Art, Identity, Spirituality - Selections from the Permanent Collection." at Ursinus College's Berman Museum of Art in the museum's Main Gallery through April 9.
The process of curating an exhibit created wide campus interest, and has allowed students to document how they are changed in some way by the art. The students' reactions in prose and poetry have become part of the exhibit itself.
The exhibit encompasses various interpretations of creation, both as a process and product, from different cultures, time periods, and genres. Highlights include a selection of southeast Asian pottery, bronze Hindu sculptures, Pennsylvania German works, and compositions by Walter Baum, Albert J. Adolphé, Francoise Gilot, Marc Chagall, and many other artists. There is whimsy in a table of Lego blocks for on-the-spot creations.
"While this selection may seem at first a rather surprising medley of objects, we strongly felt that having objects from a large variety of cultures and time periods would help further explore the pervasiveness of the creation theme throughout all human societies," wrote Minardi in the exhibition catalogue. Minardi and Kauffman researched the collection, selected the works to be exhibited, designed and installed the exhibit and have developed programming to accompany the show and involve the campus community.
A museum on campus provides unprecedented opportunities for students, according to Lisa Hanover, Berman Museum director. "The museum serves as a laboratory for students in all disciplines to do independent research on objects, develop summer fellows projects that incorporate a visual component, or to work as museum assistants with hands-on opportunities in all facets of the museum operation," said Hanover, who is also the president of the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries, a national organization.
"Curating this exhibit has been a really wonderful challenge to determine how to engage the audience, the students here at Ursinus, in a more interactive way so the art becomes a part of their own experience," said Kauffman, a self-initiated theater arts major from Monrovia, Md.
As co-presidents of a student museum advocacy group, the Berman Buddies, Kauffman and Minardi said that they have learned that the key to getting students interested in the museum is to encourage them to participate in both event and exhibition planning and development. "Berman Buddies meetings became an important think-tank to generate ideas for the show and recruit volunteers for the installation," noted Minardi, of Perkiomenville, Pa., a history and museum studies double major. Campus organizations including the southeast Asian Student Association, The Lantern (literary journal), Literary Society, UC Blue Skies Environmental Club, Pro-theater, and the Folksong Society offered to get involved, and students and faculty researched and wrote exhibit labels or response pieces. Others wrote from their own backgrounds on a creation story.
"We wanted to encourage people to be inspired by the idea of creation to create their own part of the exhibit, hence the Lego table," added Minardi. "We wanted to celebrate the diversity of the visitors and participants, so we included a globe. Not wanting to leave anybody out but finding it impossible to include everybody's story, we installed blank labels in the front gallery for visitors to write their own creation stories."
This is not the first exhibit Minardi has curated. "Selections from the Pennsylvania German Collection," installed as an internship in spring 2003, was recently shown at the Historical Society of Trappe, which operates the Henry Muhlenberg House and Dewees Tavern. She is also working on a senior honors project stemming from a 2003 Summer Fellows research project at Ursinus, which involved taking digital photographs of all the Pennsylvania German fraktur in the Berman collection, translating them from the original German, and producing a compact disc of the digital images for visiting scholars. She has worked for two years at the Berman Museum as the curatorial assistant and is involved in many local historical societies and museums.
Kauffman, a creative writing minor, spent the summer as an intern at the Washington, D.C., Center for Arts and Culture. She is poetry editor for The Lantern, a staff member for the women's magazine, From the Belly, is involved in several student organizations and works at the Writing Center.
Having a museum on campus, she said, is "a cornerstone to the liberal arts education, although it is many times overlooked. For me, working among visual art provides me with a physical presence that embodies the ideas I learn and discuss within the classrooms at Ursinus," she said.
"I have learned about the space art provides to create and instigate dialogues, questions, and awareness of social and political issues. Curating this exhibit has been a really wonderful challenge to determine how to engage the audience, the students here at Ursinus, in a more interactive way so the art becomes a part of their own experience."
Berman Museum Curator of Education Susan Shifrin pointed out that the Creation exhibit "fits into a whole set of wider museum education and access initiatives that we're working on at the Berman -- integration of the museum into the curriculum, developing students' sense of being stakeholders in the museum and developing students' skills as interpretive mentors to each other and to younger students," said Shifrin, a visiting assistant professor of art history.
The Creation exhibit has generated a wide range of campus involvement including activities related to Women's History Month, and for the faculty of the Common Intellectual Experience course, required of all first-year students, so the instructors can plan tie-ins with the works of art. The dance and music department faculty are planning events tied to the exhibit, and an artist in residency program, Mystic Arts of Tibet, Mandala sand painting, is planned Feb. 2 through 5, 2004.
Ursinus College, founded in 1869, is a highly selective, nationally ranked, independent, coeducational liberal arts college, located on a scenic, wooded, 165-acre campus, 28 miles from Center City Philadelphia. The Berman Museum of Art is one of a number of cultural attractions on campus, which are open to the public. The museum is known for its diverse collections, which include 19th- and 20th-century American landscape and Impressionist paintings and watercolors; 18th- and 19th- century European and American portraits and landscapes; and a Pennsylvania German collection of significant art and artifacts. Admission is free.
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