Developed by Tie Jojima, Art History, Baruch College, CUNY
This assignment asks students to create a mock exhibition on any given topic that interests them, utilizing objects available online. Students will be asked to think about a theme for their exhibition, select a few works that support their ideas, and think about how the distribution of the works in the physical space helps to convey the overall exhibition’s theme.
Learning Goals
After completion of this assignment, students will be able to:
- Understand how exhibitions, in general, are devised;
- Express an exhibition statement concisely, justify its relevance, and support the topic with artworks or objects;
- Demonstrate how the placement of objects in physical space helps to convey an idea.
OERs & Course Artifact
Google Arts & Culture is a helpful resource because it has featured themes that are unconventional in a museum space (such as street art, Japanese origami, trans-artifacts, etc.). Museum websites are also a helpful resource because they have past exhibition statements and selected works or artists. This is an activity that would work well as a group assignment.
Activity
- Individually or as a group, students will choose a topic for the exhibition. It can be anything that was covered in class, or anything that they are interested in, as long as it can be supported by actual works of art or objects (for example, an exhibition that would be relevant for a specific community? Something overlooked in art history? A different artistic medium? Etc.)
- Write a brief exhibition statement on the topic, including its relevance and a thesis statement on the goal of the exhibition. (2-3 paragraphs)
- Choose 10-20 works from museum websites that will support your statement
- Think about how you will organize the objects in your exhibition: it could have subtopics, it could tell a narrative, it could be chronological, thematic, by color, size, etc.
- Draft a physical space (it can be by hand), noting where the objects would be placed in order to support the main thesis idea.
- Follow-up discussion with students explaining their goals and choices.
LicensING information
The Curate Your Exhibition assignment is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The Google Arts & Culture resource suggested above is zero cost but not OER or openly licensed.