Opening Up The Curatorial Process
 I've been in Baltimore, MD for the past three weeks working at the Walters Art Museum on a curatorial project with twelve Baltimore area teenagers that will culminate in an exhibition at the museum in December entitled The Portrait Re/Examined. Because I have done a number of residency projects with museums over the past two decades, and also because I have also recently been engaged in more and more curatorial projects, I wanted to see if I could construct a residency project that both opened up the curatorial and institutional space to the participation of a group of young people. I also wanted to structure this project around the ways in which the human subject has been represented throughout art history, and the ways in which the ideas contained within historical paintings have informed my own photographs. This was a particularly fortuitous opportunity for this kind of investigation, since the Walters is an historical museum with diverse objects ranging from Renaissance and Baroque era paintings (including the first Raphael Madonna painting to enter the United States), to Greek and Roman antiquities, and Far Eastern ceramics. They also have the largest collection of Ethiopian objects and artifacts outside of Ethiopia itself. Taken altogether the collection encompasses some 22,000 objects spanning fifty-five centuries of art. The collection was assembled by the Walters family, with the son Henry establishing the museum with the works bequeathed to him by his parents William and Ellen. The museum opened it doors to the public in 1934.















The project is a collaboration between two institutions, the Contemporary Museum and the Walters. My traveling exhibition Class Pictures will be opening in tandem at the Contemporary in December as well, so both projects will be on view simultaneously, and cross programming developed between both institutions. I had first met the Contemporary's director Irene Hoffman when she was at the Cranbrook Art Museum some ten years ago, and we talked then about working on a project together, but it didn't pan out at that time. Jackie Copeland, the Education Director at the Walters was at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis when they mounted my mid-career survey exhibition  in 1995, and she was keen to collaborate with the Contemporary. The stars aligned, and here we are! Shaping the various projects I have done is always an interesting challenge, as I have always hoped that the shape of project would be specific to the particular institution and the possibilities that that particular institutional context suggests. Having done a number of projects in which I have made photographs of the students while having them engage in other activities around the idea of the portrait and issues of representation, I was curious to see how I might structure a project around a curatorial practice instead of an art making one. This is all a continuation of my long standing interest in de-territorializing the institutional space of the museum, and reinventing it as a more dialogical kind of space that opens itself up to greater participation, multiple levels of accessibility, and conceptual interventions.













The residency began with my coming to the museum for a week to go through the card filing system of images. Yes, the entire collection of 22,000 object is on index cards with images affixed to the back, with the acquisition number, title, artist name, etc. The museum is working on getting it all on a computer database, but it's been a slow process. So, working with the librarian I identified all of the paintings and objects that contained human subjects. After going through slide files after slide files, I further winnowed this down to those paintings , drawings, or prints that were portraits of a more psychological or expressive kind. I managed to come up with a manageable but diverse selection of some 140 cards that the students would reference from wide ranging historical periods and mediums. In addition to that I provided the students with a selection of my own photographs ranging from 1975 to the present that would provide the other side of the historical equation in this process. It was decided that the students would first select one of my photographs and then scour the collection (using the cards) for objects that resonated for them with these photographs. Once the selection was made, we then went to storage to view the actual objects, and proceeded according to their response to the actual object. After that initial selection was made over one week, I returned for two weeks working with the students.















Given the size of the collection, it has turned out that a number of the paintings the students selected have never even been exhibited since they were acquired by the Walters family. As a result some required extensive conservation that ultimately ruled them out. Still, we have ended up with a good number of works that will exhibited at the museum for the first time. The students have not only made an interesting and informed selection or works, but are currently developing the interpretive materials (cell phone audio guides, exhibition texts, web materials, etc.) that will contextualize the selected photographs and objects. The project also encompassed a deep examination of the institutional space, with visits to the conservation lab, presentations by the various museum staff from every department, and this morning an "all hands on deck" meeting with all of the department heads and staff, including the museum director, covering everything from the exhibition's budget breakdown, condition and necessary conservation reports for selected objects along with a report on the number of conservation hours needed to make each object ready for exhibiting, issues of display (and again conservation) for the three dimensional objects, registrar questions about budget and time frame issues related to shipping of the photographs from Boston's Howard Yezerski Gallery, questions about framing for the few selected objects that have no frames or whose frames are not in exhibition ready condition, etc., etc. The final checklist of objects was to be confirmed by the end of the day and submitted to the various departments so that everything could be finalized.















With an exhibition master plan now firmly in hand, and the director Gary Vikan enthusiastically signing off on everything, we will be meeting with the exhibition designer on Monday to begin developing the scale model layout for the show, and continuing the discussion and refining of the interpretive materials. Education staffer Lindsey Anderson has been a constant and invaluable logistical and  pedagogical partner throughout, and Education Director Jackie Copeland has been deftly managing the numerous interdepartmental exchanges of information. These students are certainly getting more of an education into the working of the museum than I ever imagined when I was 15-18 years old! I'll share final images of the show with you in December when it opens. Watch for it on the web too, with links to both the Contemporary Museum (www.contemporary.org) and the Walters (www.thewalters.org).

Photographs: (from top) Students view works from the collection in the museum's storage vault; students compare photograph and painting which have similar themes; initial selection of works using reproductions; students visit the conservation lab; students begin placing objects in the scale model of the gallery. 
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Birmingham on My Mind

September 15, 1963 - Fifty Years Later

One night, many years ago, a book appeared in my suburban Jamaica, NY home. My parents had attended a lecture that James Baldwin had given at our church, Calvary Baptist Church, and had returned with the book in hand. While the church never struck me as a particularly activist one, our minister, Rev. Walter S. Pinn, had let it be known on more than one occasion that he had marched besides Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There was a small black and white photograph hanging in the church vestibule that proudly and permanently testified to that fact. Most likely my folks purchased the book after Baldwin's talk as part of SNCC's fundraising efforts.
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On The Passing of Two Giants

This has been a difficult month, what with the loss of poet and activist Louis Reyes Rivera, and even more recently the esteemed artist Elizabeth Catlett. Both Rivera and Catlett were artists who were unabashedly forthright in their adherence to the cause of social justice, and equally as forthright in their adherence to practicing at the highest level of of their respective art forms.
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Reshaping The Art/Museum/Public Experience

The past few months have been interesting ones for those interested in the ways in which art practice, public institutional practice and their various audiences interact. As the economy has taken a downturn lately public institutions have begun to think about the ways in which they do or do not engage that larger audience that their very survival depends upon.
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The recent passing of Dr. Billy Taylor was marked by notices of his contribution to jazz music as both musician and advocate. Taylor, in addition to being a seminal jazz pianist, had sustained for over four decades a position as one of the music's most visible and preeminent spokespersons, having taken on the role of educator and institution builder among his numerous other accomplishments in the field.
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Recent Censorship Recalls Spirit of an Earlier Era

In 1936 Adolf Hitler, German Chancellor, instructed Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, to put together an “exhibition of shame”, depicting the “deterioration of art since 1910”. Ziegler gathered a group of what were called “art inspectors” to trawl through the public museums and galleries. The committee compiled everything from some 100 art collections they considered useful for defaming the Modernist movement.
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John Boehner Fires the Opening Salvo

I had the rather auspicious fortune to be in Washington, DC for several days this past week when the opening salvo of a new round in the Culture Wars was fired by Congressman John Boehner.
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A Different Kind of MoMA?

On a recent trip to New York I had one of those rare epiphany like moments where I found myself standing in front of a group of works that spoke clearly to how the work we do as artists might actually matter in the world. Such was the impact of this show on me that almost every other exhibition I saw both before and after in those three days came to feel almost meaningless, like so much empty, aestheticized and useless decoration.

National Endowment for the Arts chair Rocco Landesman was in Chicago recently, holding a series of meetings, gatherings, and conversations with various institutions and the arts community.

I was the speaker at the Yale University School of Art Commencement this past Monday. The School of Art ceremony followed the school wide ceremony on the Old Campus where, among others, Aretha Franklin fittingly received an honorary Doctor of Music degree. The feeling of well earned and shared accomplishment was palpable walking amongst the families of the graduates, and I was reminded yet again of the hard work and sacrifice that these moments are invested with.
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Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Photo © by Jason Smikle
About Me
About Me
Chicago, IL, United States
I began making photographs in 1969 after seeing the "Harlem On My Mind" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had inherited my first camera the year before from my godfather Artie Miller when I was fifteen years old. I began my first project "Harlem, USA" as a direct result of that exhibition and my own family's history in the Harlem community. Born in Queens, NY my formal training began by apprenticing to local commercial and fashion photographer Levy J. Smith and then later studying at the School of Visual Arts with Larry Siegel, William Broecker, Shelley Rice and Sid Kaplan. I completed my undergraduate work at Empire State College under the guidance of Mel Rosenthal and Joe Goldberg and did my MFA at Yale University in the graduate photography program under the watchful and rigorous eyes of Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson, along with Lois Conner, Frank Gohlke, Susan Kismaric and Joel Sternfeld. Classes with Robert Farris Thompson and Michael Romer significantly rounded out my graduate work. A former Guggenheim and NEA fellow, I am currently Professor of Art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where I have taught since 1998.
"What's Going On?"
"What's Going On?"
Marvin Gaye's signature song "What's Going On?"--a musical critique of a world gone off track--provides an apt framework for looking at the role of art and cultural production in the larger society.

With so much art being made at all ends of the market, it's always a good thing for artists to look both forward and back in trying to access the role that art can play in a larger society, a society that actually exists largely outside of the distorting bubble of the Art World. When one of my students recently answered the question of why she was in school in an MFA program with, "So I can be a part of the system," I knew it was time for a reassessment and a forum from which to look at the various histories in my own little corner of the art and "real" world.

Artists used to be the ones who led the charge to challenge the system; they were the proverbial "fly in the buttermilk," the monkey wrench that mucked up the system and made it act, function, and exist in new ways. Artists were the ones who created paradigms of everything the system was not. James Baldwin once said, "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

This blog will range freely over a range of issues, highlighting individuals, events, and ideas that provide a catalyst for thought and reflection. Hopefully for younger artists it might provide a sense of a world both in and outside of the so-called art world, and hopefully provoke a conversation about the relationship between the two while offering a thought or two about just what ones work might be about as one attempts to engage both history and the contemporary moment.

For others this blog might serve as a window into how one particular artist, after three decades of practice, sees and thinks about the vast world of human social and aesthetic experience. Consider this my own small commentary or my brain periodically laid bare for your perusal and consideration.

Feel free to use the "Comments" button to share your thoughts and responses if so provoked.
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