Student co-curates Indian art exhibit, Sacred & Sensuous

Tell us about your research project.

For my summer fellowship, I am curating a number of exhibitions on India for the Lora Robins Gallery. My main project is the exhibition "Sacred and Sensuous: Hindu Art from the Collection," which features a number of pieces from the museum’s permanent collection. The primary research component of my project has been to provide information on the history and significance of the objects in the collection, about which very little is known. I will then use my research to write IDs and panels for the exhibition, which will explore a variety of Hindu art by looking at it in context of narratives from the Sacred Hindu texts. The three primary themes explored will be The Family of Shiva, The Evolution of the Elephant and The Avatars of Vishnu. The exhibition will open in the fall and will continue through June of 2008.

In addition to my primary research project, I am also assisting with the exhibition "The Inner Eye: Folk Art of India from the William and Ann Oppenhimer Collection," which will open in tandem with "Sacred and Sensuous," and will run through December of 2007. This exhibition features contemporary folk art from India, on loan from the Oppenhimers. I have also been involved in the research component of this project, interviewing artists in India and writing the panels for the exhibition. The final exhibition on India that will be opening this fall is "Passing through India: Photographs by Lee Gimpel." Lee is a Richmond grad who traveled throughout India for three months, documenting his trip. His photographs will be displayed in the T.C. Williams School of Law, and I am currently working to edit text submitted to show with his photographs.

How did you get involved in the project?

This past spring I took museum studies, a class offered by Richard Waller, director of the University Museums, as part of the arts management concentration. During the course of this class, an e-mail was sent out to art history students by staff at the museum looking for summer fellows interested in applying for research grants to assist with the collection. I contacted the museum staff in February, and we started putting together an exhibition idea for my research proposal. Richard Waller is my advisor and even though applying for the fellowship was not a direct result of the class I took with him, it was a great opportunity to get to know both him and the museum staff before starting research for the summer.

What sparked your interest in the curatorial field?

It’s an interesting story that relates to another class I took at Richmond. My freshmen year I took an art history survey course just for fun. (Little did I know I would end up majoring in it!) The final paper for the class involved writing a research paper and exhibit proposal for an object of my choosing at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. (Of course, the object had to be relevant to the time period of the class, which covered all art up to the middle ages.)

I choose an Egyptian sarcophagus from the museum, assuming that the research portion would be fairly simple since it seems civilization as a whole knows quite a lot about Egypt. Turns out I was a little off in my estimate of general knowledge of ancient Egypt. After searching every book in the Egypt section of the library, I still had found nothing on my sarcophagus. My professor suggested contacting the VMFA, who promised to send over all their information on the object.

Two days later a letter arrived, apologizing for the fact that they knew nothing about the object since it was on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The curators at the VMFA suggested calling the Egyptology Department at the Met for further information. Of course, the Egyptology Department is not exactly a publicly listed number, and so it took quite a bit of work to get through. I called every library at the Met with a publicly listed number until I found a librarian who took pity on me and internally transferred my call to Egyptology…

Two hours later, when I got through, it was only to discover that my sarcophagus had been on loan for the past 50 years and that the Met hadn’t exactly been doing all that much research on it either. In fact, the only research ever done on it had been out of print for 150 years and was only to be found in antique bookstores in England.

Long story short, I showed up the next morning in my professor’s office with the above story to tell. She got really excited and told me that I should become a museum curator. To this day, I have not figured out what about my above experience indicates that I would enjoy curatorial work. However, an hour and a half later, after having had her dump large 20 pound volumes pertaining to the work she had done as a curator at the Met some years ago on to my lap, I left her office feeling that I would like nothing more than to be a museum curator. I’m not sure why, but the idea has really stuck with me, and in a way, my research this summer is a direct result of that fateful day.

You’ve got a crystal ball. What’s next?

I will continue to work at the University Museum in the fall as a curatorial assistant and will finish up my concentration in arts management in the spring with the course "Philanthropy in the Arts." Hopefully, my experience this summer will provide an excellent background for finishing my concentration and degree in art history. I am currently choosing the topic for my art history senior thesis, and continuing to work with folk art from India is a distinct possibility.

After graduation, I definitely want to continue to work in museums and hopefully curate full time one day. I’ll probably end up in graduate school at some point, since most curators have at least a master’s degree in museum studies, if not a Ph.D. My dream job would be curating the doll collection at the American History Museum. (Though they currently do not have a full time curator to deal just with dolls, I’m sure they’ll soon recognize their need for one!)

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