Panel 5.3: Art+History

9:00 am–10:30 am

Meg Rotzel (chair)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Art+History, Curating Between Disciplines“

Leah Nahmias

American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, “How History is Random, How Interpretation is Arranged: Crafting an Educational Program for Art+History“

Jill Slosburg-Ackerman

Massachusetts College of Art and Design, “ART+HISTORY: Import/Export”

The theme of this year’s NEASA conference is “The Arts and the Public” and the schedule of panels, workshops, and speakers looks pretty stimulating!  The conference will take place at the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1154 Boylston Street, Boston.  Information about registration, accommodations, and parking are all available from the NEASA website.

From the text of the proposal:

In 2009, public humanities graduate students in Brown University’s Department of American Civilization commissioned an exhibition of site-specific artworks inspired by the historic Nightingale-Brown House.  The exhibition and related programs inspired conversation about how historical narrative is crafted while presenting a distinctive model for engaging audiences in historical sites and museums through contemporary artwork.  In addition to an art exhibition, Art+History was also a laboratory for re-thinking historical house interpretation through contemporary art, suggesting a way that historic sites and arts organizations can incorporate new voices and audiences in the creation of narratives about shared pasts.  This presentation brings together a curator, an educator and an artist to discuss the exhibit and its themes.

Meg Rotzel, curator, will discuss the process of conceiving and organizing the exhibit; the process for inviting participation from artists, students, and the general public; and the challenges of mounting contemporary work in a historical space.

Leah Nahmias, educator, will present her paper “How History is Random, How Interpretation is Arranged: Crafting an Educational Program for Art+History,” which addresses the goals of the curriculum Place Explorations, framing it in the context of traditional art and history museum education practices.  The paper addresses the possibilities (and need) for an interdisciplinary art museum education model presented in Art+History.

Jill Slosburg-Ackerman, artist, will discuss her practice as it relates to the artwork Import/Export and how the combination of places and things extend or alter meaning.  As Slosburg-Ackerman notes, one of her goals was to “extend the venues for encountering sculpture by placing hybrid works of art…in locations that are outside of conventional art spaces with the purpose of collapsing conventional boundaries between works of art and the mundane.”

Read about the project here.

Sound Reliquary

We will post more information about the panel in the future, so stay tuned!

For more information on NEMA’s 2010 conference, please go here.

To learn more about Kate Burgess’s work, please visit her thesis website.

[hitting] upon a central question regarding creativity in historical and artistic processes that could be explored with success. They nurtured truly imaginative work with collaborating artists and devised public presentation and education strategies to support it.

Of Import/Export, the reviewer noted

Slosburg-Ackerman engaged the house as physical space; she used the china and photographs in ways that made me imagine a range of family and servant relationships within the building—who was getting those teacups from the pantry shelves, drinking tea in the library, organizing children’s activities and so on. Her arrangement of contemporary Asian art im- ages served to underscore the colonial wealth and mother country relationship (conscious or not) that the dining room paneling suggests.

The reviewer also appreciated the methodological questions raised by Keep the word vanishing until the end.

The review ends by praising the exhibit:

[T]he Art + History project goes far to meet the standards Henry Glassie suggests for public history projects: “ . . . [to adhere] to a standard of excellence . . . to be oppositional on behalf of . . . complexity against simple argument. [Projects] ought also to be beautiful . . . because that’s the way you catch someone and bring them in.”

The review can be found in Vol. 31, No. 4 (Fall 2009) of The Public Historian.  The John Nicholas Brown Center has provided a link to the PDF of the article.

This post will also be included in the Critical Perspectives portion of our website.

Winner will be announced at a February 8th Ball in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

At the same time that the curators were planning the exhibit and were seeking input from fellow students in the public humanities program, I was preparing to present the Public Humanities to an audience at the National Council for Public History’s annual conference.  To that point, Al had done much of the technical part of developing the Toolbox.  I wanted to test our model–to see if it really was as straightforward and easy to build a website on no budget as we claimed–and I wanted to be more technically proficient for the upcoming conference presentation.  It was also clear that Art+History could use more than just a press release to help publicize the exhibit.  Further, we all felt that we wanted some sort of documentation of the project so that future public humanities students (or students or cultural heritage organizations elsewhere) could learn from the project.  In an ideal world, we could also post teaching materials for prospective field trip participants.  To all of these ends, I volunteered to build a website for Art+History using only tools described in the Public Humanities Toolbox.

I learned a lot by creating this website.  Some of what I learned was trial and error: how to use WordPress, how to embed images and links, how to make applications like Flickr and Scribd interoperable with our WordPress frame, how to incorporate the New Urban Arts project blog.  To some extent, as I learned I was also teaching Rosie and Meg how to add things to the site, so that they were empowered to add or change content.  (This idea, that the Public Humanities Toolbox makes it easier for novices or non-experts to add content and share resources, was one of the major premises I was hoping to test!)  I wanted to keep things as basic as possible, so we chose one of WordPress’s free layouts (K2-Lite) and worked within it rather than changing any coding to customize font, text, layout, etc.  Though they are incredibly beautiful–and we have our colleague Esteban Ucrós to thank for that–the header and graphics for this website are relatively simple files that have been plugged into the existing layout.

So, was it successful?  I learned a lot in the laboratory of the Art+History website.  I figured out how to build a basic website; I gained clarity about the strengths and weaknesses of the Public Humanities Toolbox model.  For these reasons, the exhibit was a personal laboratory for testing a completely separate question than those raised by the curators.

But beyond my personal lab goals: Meg and Rosie felt that the site allowed them  to publicize the exhibit and to share behind-the-scenes glimpses into their work as curators.  It provided a forum for the artists to share statements on their works.  Teachers and students could find information about booking a field trip and curricula to use in the classroom.  We had a forum to share reviews of the exhibit as well as the critical reflections of key people involved in the project.  The site also exists as a record of the work of many months and many talented and creative people.  I think we were able to make all of our work, as well as our final product, more transparent to the public and provide a place for that same public to critique our efforts.  This last is fundamental to my philosophy of public humanities, and especially to my rationale for why more organizations should embark on digital projects and how digital projects are especially suited to this purpose.  So yes, as a laboratory experiment, I think we were successful.  Though some of my initial ideas for the website–teachers guest blogging about bring their students to the exhibit, for instance–never materialized, I am still incredibly pleased with how it turned out.

Interoperability refers to the idea that there are independent parts that can also work seamlessly together and present a unified final product; interoperability is signature characteristic of Web 2.0 initiatives.  One of the strengths of the public humanities program as it evolves at Brown is that our projects are interoperable.  In other words, there are opportunities for us as students to chart our individual goals and develop personal projects that also contribute to and support others’ work. On the surface it may appear that the website for Art+History was built simply as a website to explain and publicize the exhibit and programs.  However, if we probe it further, we uncover that the website has also served another purpose, as an opportunity for me to test and develop a separate project.  The Public Humanities Toolbox model of building digital projects is predicated on the idea of interoperability, so I am delighted to find this quality in the public humanities program as a whole.

I welcome your feedback about my reflections here and about the website as a whole.

Best,

Leah Nahmias

In the case of the Nightingale-Brown House, its story involves five generations of the Brown family, who were involved in or touched by slavery, imperialism and trade. I wonder, if a singer were to record an album there, what would it sound like?

Import/Export by Jill Slosburg-Ackerman

Taking a new look at this old house, Cate McQuaid, Boston Globe, August 19

“Every summer when I was growing up, my parents would drag the family to a historic mansion for an afternoon of edification. It seemed that time had stopped in these places, with their plush carpets, velvet ropes, and winged chairs I was forbidden to sit in. There was nothing I could see to connect all the polished tables and portraits …”

More here!

Narratives of orientalism, colonialism and slavery are teased from the objects already in the house, and the work acts as a framing or display device… But Slosburg-Ackerman’s tone is extremely conversational, a formal play and activation of contradictions in the space rather than a refusal of them. “It’s very much responding to the things I’ve learned about the place,” she told the Independent, “but then just forgetting it to some degree. The story is more my story.”

Though Herrera-Prats poses as a historian, she makes it plain that her evidence is dubious… Though earnestly displaying the results of her investigation, she is not mastering a historian’s discourse–she is happily struggling.