As part of the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design’s annual NEXT Festival, a group of graduate students in the museum studies and interactive design programs teamed up to commemorate America’s semiquincentennial with an exhibit examining the country’s collective history.
For the exhibit “American Made,” which will be on display in the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery of the Flagg Building until May 14, students collaborated to display 21 pieces of traditional artworks from GW’s collection like photographs, pottery and textiles in conjunction with interactive elements like a touchscreen map and audio components throughout the exhibit to showcase certain pieces’ deeper historical context. The professors and students behind the exhibit said it aims to highlight the nation as an “unfinished story” and the evolving definition of what it means to be an American.
Laura Schiavo, the school’s deputy director and associate professor of museum studies, who teaches a graduate Curatorial Research and Planning class, tasked her students last fall with designing an exhibit for the United States’ 250th year by choosing from a list of objects from the GW collection of artwork and The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, ranging from pottery and paintings to poetry. From there, Schiavo said students were able to determine the larger themes for the exhibit, including the people, places and symbols that fit their chosen theme of “American Made,” signifying that the country’s 250 years of history stem from unique stories.
“We didn’t yet have a sense of how it was going to be organized,” Schiavo said. “We didn’t know that until we had the objects. Once we had the objects, then the students worked conceptually on the idea of nation. They did research on their specific objects, and we decided on what the themes would be for the show.”
Schiavo said that in the fall, the students researched their chosen existing art pieces, wrote exhibition scripts and labels that introduce and provide context for the pieces and collaborated with the subject-matter experts for their pieces before teaming up with an interaction design class this spring to enhance the pieces with interactive elements.
“It’s really important for me as a museum studies person teaching exhibitions that the students get to make an exhibition, but we don’t have the skill set to make an exhibition,” Schiavo said. “We can only do it collaboratively. We either need designers, or we need interaction designers, or we need graphic designers.”
One of the exhibit’s pieces is “Tagged,” a contemporary quilt by Patricia Kennedy-Zafred on loan from the textile museum, depicting discrimination against incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II. Schiavo said the goal with the exhibit was not to tell visitors how to think about American history but supply them with tools to confront it, with “Tagged” representing a chapter of American history that visitors may not be aware of.
“We are a nation of immigrants and of people brought here against their will, and that has always been the case,” Schiavo said. “And I think that this exhibition is a really beautiful way to think about that, to confront that, to wrestle with the complexity of the country and still sort of enjoy the significance of 250 years of country, and to some extent, add your story.”
Sam Shelton, an adjunct graphic design professor who teaches a Collaborative Design Project class, said his students formed design teams with Schiavo’s class which included an interactive map team, who worked to develop a digital map where visitors can post geo-located photos that show their own experience in the country. He said the classes also formed an audio-visual team, which developed short podcast clips to accompany art pieces in the exhibit, like the photograph “After the Funeral” by Steve Hart, which depicts grief during the AIDS epidemic.
Shelton said that museum studies students also worked directly with Corcoran graduates’ own design firm, Fourth Floor Design Collective, to help design the physical exhibition space and installation.
“There’s all these hidden meanings that I think the work that my class has done are going to allow visitors to understand it, but then it’s still up to the visitor to figure out how they want to interpret that,” Shelton said.
Arisha Shumael, a sophomore interaction design major, said she was part of the audio experience team that compiled “mini podcasts” available throughout the exhibit via QR codes, which added context through interviews with scholars and experts on the subject matter or narrations tied to the art pieces.
“In crafting that interview I had to come up with questions that I thought would accurately align with the message of the exhibit,” Schumael said.
Shumael’s team reached out to Art Historian Jennifer Van Horn for an interview to add context to a painting titled “The Washington Family,” an engraving by John Sartain based on a portrait by Edward Savage. The portrait depicts the family of George Washington with a black man in the background, which Schumael said Van Horn commented on as an author who wrote a novel about portraits of resistance during slavery in America.
“It was a similar idea with ‘Tagged,’” said Shumael. “How can we prioritize people at the center of the story, like the Japanese Americans who were interned?”
Shumael said while the museum studies students chose the objects and the story they wanted to tell, designers could control what to include in the piece, like the final cut of each audio piece.
“The theme was largely decided by the museum studies students,” Shumael said. “It’s almost like they’re our clients, I would say they chose the objects. They shaped the story of what they wanted to tell.”
