Hello world! As this first gasp into the void of creation, I was asked to share the fruit of my endeavor as an intern at the Brown County Art Guild this semester. Things in the nonprofit sphere are HECTIC as we all well know! BUT, there have been moments of opportunity to create using curation theory in which we share a common interest, dear reader. I can hardly be comprehensive about all of the moving parts of my projects at the Guild, including talking with community partners, preparing for digitization, movement of archival materials, protective concerns for renovation, meeting/working with Guild Artists, helping to stage exhibitions, and learning from the lovely staff! Yet, an early, pleasant highlight was to be able to put together a display of memorabilia to complement our wider exhibition of historical paintings from founding members of the Guild (works from the nineteen-teens, which is notably WAY before the Guild’s founding of 1954).
As a side tangent, the subject matter following these important early Brown County artists of Curry Bohm, Fredrick Rigley, Ken Gore, VJ Cariani, Carl Graf, and Marie Goth (you might of heard of them) on their trips to New England was not always well known or accounted. Marie Goth’s early history and education in portraiture is widely credited to time spent in East Coast/New York Art Schools, but it was derisive among some as to whether the group went out and painted together. Thus, dear reader, my exhibition of photographic proof through scrapbook photos and VJ Cariani landscape studies had extra resonance as a linchpin introduction.
Back to the matter at hand, my exhibition was to serve as an entry point to guests entering the building to see the historic exhibition. In fact, it quite literally was in the entry way right outside the main door, smack dab in the glass built-in case AKA the “FISHBOWL”— see below.
The challenge with these materials was to make it appealing to the viewer with limited materials on hand. I did not want things to be flat or very samey, just photo after photo with no way of distinguishing. Thus, I incorporated different levels, historical objects, and angles to keep the viewers attention, as well as garnishes (fake plants) to appeal to the natural subject matter w/o being dangerous to materials. You might even notice my careful mounting of one particular picture to an artists palette, which I marked as a creative way of tying things together as well as interesting “framing”. Overall, I think the layout helped to contextualize things and make it so people viewed every particular object to question how things fit together. From my observance of foot traffic through the Guild since the exhibition opening and party, the effect seems to mostly be achieved with guests commenting on how it served as a good introduction to the bigger historic exhibition.
My favorite part of putting together this exhibition was how it humanizes these artistic monoliths who can often be knee-jerk analyzed in a very removed, conceptual way. While it is important to analyze the components of an artistic work, it is at least equally important to understand the material conditions and the artists’ mindset at the time. Many of these artists were still students of the profession in this point of their career before later renown, which puts them in a more relatable light. This information is given by these youthful photos, with extra points given to how Genevieve Goth playfully displays her cat in one — both very relatable and why I chose that scrapbook page to show apart.
The fact that much of this exhibition comes from a scrapbook of records from Marie is key, as it resonates the emotional importance of this period to the artists (photos were definitely not as disposable as now!). It should be noted that Marie, having documented the trip with a scrapbook, also famously documented each Brown County Artist through her lenses of Portraiture (the SAME artist portraits now on display at the Guild, the LAYERS!). Apart from all this information, I think it is good to note that the exhibition is displayed away from the main historical exhibition of paintings so that it does not distract the viewer from focusing on the main works themselves. Thus, you do not tell the viewer explicitly how to interpret, and people can ultimately choose how to engage works themselves.
As a concluding remark, if you have read this far you should definitely make it out to the larger exhibition by Oct 27, 2024. It is especially true if you are a fan of IU Collections and featured artists. This is why I chose not to display the main event — NO SPOILERS, be a patron! The reason I say this is that Curry Bohm (featured in the Guild exhibition) is a heavily represented artist in the IU Memorial Union specifically, and there is a trivia fun fact to be had — as the Guild currently displays Bohm’s large seascape “Eastern Blow” with grand detail in marketing, IU has its own smaller iteration of the work (https://m.facebook.com/