Kaitlyn Spina - Exhibitions
Hi everyone! I am an exhibitions assistant at the Tang, and last year I worked on an ongoing project involving curating the show Making Meaning: A Skidmore Bestiary, which was in the entryway of the Saisselin Studio Art Building from August to December 2016. In January 2016, Rachel Seligman, the Tang’s Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Elizabeth Karp, the Tang’s Head Registrar asked me to help curate a show, which would be a collaboration between the Tang and the Schick Art Gallery in Saisselin. Working as a collections assistant with Elizabeth at the time, I came to this project familiar with many objects in the Tang’s permanent collection and was excited to work as a team with Rachel, Elizabeth, and Schick Curatorial Assistant Rebecca Shepard.
Looking in the Tang’s collection, Rebecca noticed an abundance of objects depicting animals (like the ibis pictured above) that came from both a wide variety of cultures around the world and are composed of many different materials. She loved the idea of curating a show that involved a selection of these creatures in order to celebrate the act of “making,” a very fitting theme for the studio art building. Together, we looked through the Tang’s collection and generated a list of objects we wanted to include in this exhibition, and in the process of choosing these works of art, we started thinking about the show as a type of multicultural bestiary. At the time, I was taking an English course on Chaucer with Professor Kate Greenspan, and learned that she is an expert on traditional bestiaries. Through meetings with her and research of my own, I collected a history of the bestiary and found that we could, indeed, curate our own three-dimensional version of a bestiary.
Once we decided that the bestiary would be the theme of this exhibition, I spent the rest of the spring and the first half of the summer researching the animals depicted in our chosen artworks within the context of the cultures and time periods from which they came. My research unearthed many fascinating thematic connections, including the extinction of animals due to human or environmental causes and cultural myth as a way of informing man’s views or depictions of some creatures. We also decided to reach out to Special Collections Curator Wendy Anthony, who helped us select a few artist’s book versions of bestiaries to add to the exhibition.
In addition to researching the objects for the show, I also spent the summer writing wall texts and making an exhibition booklet to accompany it. As an English major, I love researching, writing, and revising, so this process of sending drafts of these texts to Rachel, Elizabeth, and Rebecca was particularly exciting to me.
We installed the display at the beginning of August, and in the fall I had the chance to further collaborate with Professor Greenspan by inviting her to speak at an opening reception for the exhibition. It was a great success! I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to work closely with so many intelligent, creative people from various departments on campus, as well as using my background in collections and exhibitions departments to help make this show. Working at the Tang during my time at Skidmore has provided me with a professional education in addition to my academic one, and the Making Meaning: A Skidmore Bestiary project was a very fun way of combining my interests in writing, art handling, and curating.
