Mapping the Museum/WCMA @ Night

A teaching and curatorial project at Williams College & Museum of Art, 2016.

Winter Study offers Williams students the chance to take just one course for four weeks during  the month of January. I recently taught Mapping the Museum - Intervention and Participation in Contemporary Museum Life. In the class, students dove into artists working with Institutional Critique and institutions engaging in experimental practices in order to critique themselves.

The students studied artists such as Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, Machine Project and the Guerrilla Girls, and institutions/initiatives like Portland Art Museum’s Shine a Light, Museum of Jurassic Technology, Santa Cruz MAH, and The Hammer. While presenting and researching these individuals and institutions, they looked at how these artists/institutions connect to audiences and reinvent how a visitor interacts with exhibitions or the space. 

The class ended with a WCMA @ Night event, where the students presented museum interventions that engaged with WCMA collections, space, and staff in unconventional ways. The project was collectively authored by the students, WCMA staff, and me. Collaborators included students Hannah Atkinson, Kate Kennedy, Ken Kim, Molly Murphy and Jamie Sullivan, staff Rachel Heisler, Nina Palaez, and Caitlin Tucker-Melvin.  We invited Matt Anderson aka Crank Sturgeon to bring his audio students to participate as well.

See the syllabus and related texts here