Summary:
This section details the programmatic elements of Open House and includes examples of some of the printed materials and links to articles and reviews. It also serves as a brief reflection on educational programs, which I viewed as a way of holding (attention and engagement) and touching (ideas, people, relationships). The program list includes basic information along with my additional commentary on the relevance of the program in gray text.
Wish You Were Here
Printed exhibition materials include an invitation postcard (click for PDF), mailed to approximately 2,000, distributed to artist and collector mailing lists, and dropped off at libraries, cafés, and other venues, a press release, banners for the outside of the building, posters for the campus and region, and interior building signs. Articles and reviews (the project summary has links) also provided insights on the exhibition and encouraged visitors to attend.
Publics
The audience for the exhibition and related programs was made of multiple publics, including the participating artists and collectors, the institutional audiences (internal, but varied, including students, employees, and families), and outside audiences (not monolithic either).
Attention: Holding, Touching
Educational and outreach programs allowed visitors to make and take time: to pay attention not only to the objects, but to hold time in suspension (for a time) while they considered (approached or touched) the ideas that the curatorial project offered.
Open House programs offered opportunities to experience the physical and the emotive: the tactile pleasure from picking up something that seems to fit the hand perfectly, touching as a way of learning how something was made, lifting an object and being surprised by its weight or center of gravity… or only imagining these sensations. These experiences were enriched with memories and stories, fostering an emotional connection between people, things, and histories.
Programs, Expanded
Programs were not just public-facing activities.
For example, the Classical Languages Department display, while housed within the Open House exhibition, served as a self-directed pedagogical program for two interns. The interactive sculpture by Democracy of Sound (exeter)/DOS(e) functioned as a piece in the exhibition as well as a learning project for students and the faculty advisor. Significant Objects was a program that addressed internal audiences, and the need to engage employees across job hierarchies and departmental lines. It also performed as a collection within the context of the exhibition.
The postcard collection on display in the Class of 1945 Library, offered by Stacey Durand, gallery manager, also had programmatic overtones. We typically use the library display cases in a curatorial manner (rather than simply for marketing). The cases extend, expand, or even debate with the exhibition themes in ways that elucidate the roles of the gallery and the library as producers, containers, and instigators of knowledge(s). The postcard project had the impact of a program: it provided a way for others to connect to familiar objects (postcards), learn about the life and family history of a colleague (Stacey) and consider the idea of preserving everyday, personal experiences and observations within the traditional scholarly function of the academic archive (the library).
Epistemology Class
January 2015
A special program developed for a Phillips Exeter Academy epistemology class co-taught by instructors in the Religion, Theater & Dance, and Science departments.
We used touch, storytelling, and discussion to discover how objects addressed questions including: Does an object or collection produce knowledge? Or just point at some other affiliated knowledge? How is an object part of a knowledge system, and how are these systems determined? What do the sensory qualities of objects offer in terms of knowledge? What does the narratives evoked by objects speak to how knowledge is constructed and communicated?
Reception & Post Party
Friday, January 23, 2015, 5-7 pm; 7-9 pm
Lamont Gallery
A reception for collectors, artists, students, employees, and the general public.
This reception brought an opportunity to intersect across departmental lines, institutional roles, and job responsibilities. The post-reception party was a smaller gathering of collectors and PEA affiliates on the rarely accessed 4th floor of the Academy Library. This level houses the library’s delightful special collections, which include paintings, furniture, books, photographic and print portfolios, scripts, manuscripts, and more.
Scenes from “Waiting for Lefty”
Sunday, February 15, 2015, 4 pm
Students performed scenes from Clifford Odets’s 1935 play, “Waiting for Lefty,” in conjunction with the Department of Theater & Dance and the History Department’s Great Depression Symposium.
Although performance is not new for many contemporary galleries, it is still somewhat of a novelty here. The gallery, a more intimate space for collaboration and experimentation, offers a different context for live works, which have included poetry, song, instrumental pieces, dance, and staged readings. Like the vignettes of objects in Open House, “Lefty” is a series of vignettes about a labor strike. The play offered a rich symbolic territory for considering the objects from the 1930s and 1940s which were on view in the gallery.
Hard Times: The Great Depression in America
February 15-17, 2015
A symposium (click for PDF) at Phillips Exeter Academy sponsored by the History Department connected with the Odets’s staged reading as well as objects in the exhibition.
This collaboration addressed sociopolitical themes such as labor, wealth, poverty, industrial production, mass communication, and representation through the objects on view (e.g., the Dorothea Lange photographs and the radios) and through imagined scenarios where the objects would have been present (such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats).
Bugs, Cracks & Rust: Objects Conservation
Friday, February 20, 2015, 12:30 pm
A lunchtime presentation by 3D objects conservator Scott Fulton from the Harvard University Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology.
We placed objects from the Lamont Gallery collection on a blanketed work cart so that visitors could stand in close proximity while Scott Fulton presented on the objects' materials, how the objects aged, and what environmental and situational conditions contributed to their deterioration. Ethical considerations were also discussed, including themes such as restoration versus conservation, changing standards in object storage, and repatriation. Fulton is an exceptional and passionate conservator who has traveled with Harvard University's collection of glass flowers.
PEA Paint by Numbers
Wednesday, February 25, 2015, 2-4 pm
A drop-in program that invited audience members to contribute to a large-scale paint by numbers painting of Academy Hall, the main administrative building on campus.
Audience members were especially taken with the collection of paint by numbers paintings in Open House. We used our lobby entrance as a makeshift pop-up studio to encourage visitors of all ages to reimagine an iconic Academy building in festive and evocative ways using the paint by numbers technique.
Class, Group Visits & Informal Programs
Throughout the exhibition
Lamont Gallery
Group visits by occurred throughout the duration of the exhibition. These included visits by Phillips Exeter Academy classes from the English, History, and Religion departments and intern meetings, as well as visits by outside schools and community groups.
