During August 2016 orientation for incoming students, Associate Professor Catherine Whalen and second-year masters’ students Maggie Frick and Alyssa Velazquez made a presentation on Introspective: Contemplations on Curating. Installed in the Object Lab, this small exhibition, closing the week of October 10, was co-curated by participants in the spring 2016 seminar, “Curatorial Practice as Experiment: A Chipstone Foundation-Bard Graduate Center Collaboration,” taught by Whalen with Sarah Anne Carter, Chipstone’s curator and head of research. The objective of the course, which lies at the heart of a five-year partnership with the Chipstone Foundation initiated by Dean Peter N. Miller and Jonathan Prown, the Foundation’s executive director and chief curator, was to engage students in creative curatorial practice, leading to innovative, research-based and argument-driven interpretations of objects in physical and virtual space.

In the presentation, Whalen laid out the course’s aims, while Frick and Velazquez spoke about developing the exhibition with classmates and co-curators Clara Boesch, Anne Carlisle, Cindy Kok, Caroline O’Connell, and Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy. Their goals were to investigate and comment upon curatorial practice by recontextualizing objects loaned by Chipstone and drawn from the Bard Graduate Center Study Collection. The installation responded to fundamental questions about curatorial process: “Why do we choose an object for an exhibition?” “In what ways do our choices reveal subjectivity?” “How do curatorial decisions reflect and structure issues of visibility, value, collections development, and public engagement?” Frick and Velazquez highlighted the exhibition’s blog and “Objects in Action” events, which included “Making and Knowing”—where, participants examined items ranging from an eighteenth-century Staffordshire Toby jug to a Modernist melamine coffee cup as sources of inspiration for their own sculptures, collages, and color studies. In addition to being treated to a hands-on object study session, the new students were provided object-handling instructions by Barb Elam, associate director of Visual Media Resources and Study Collection librarian.

The latest iteration of “Curatorial Practice as Experiment” was the second for Bard Graduate Center. The first, in 2015, resulted in the student-curated exhibition Behind the Glass. This year, Chipstone generously hosted the class at the Milwaukee Art Museum for an on-site, weekend-long immersion in their collections, approaches, and new installations. Guest speakers included Margaretta Lovell, professor of history of art at the University of California, Berkeley; John C. Eastberg, executive director of the Pabst Mansion; and Frank Vagnone, principal of Twisted Preservation Cultural Consulting.

At Bard Graduate Center, the course featured lectures and workshops with distinguished scholars, curators, and artists. Among them were Steven Lubar, professor of American Studies, history, and history of art and architecture at Brown University; Elizabeth Duffy, artist and associate professor of art at Roger Williams University; and Glenn Adamson, director emeritus of the Museum of Arts and Design. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, students met with Sylvia Yount, curator in charge of the American Wing; Ronda Kasl, curator of colonial Latin American art; Nonnie Frelinghuysen, curator of American decorative arts; and Moira Gallagher, research assistant. In addition, BGC Academic Programs and Gallery staff instructed and supported course participants as they realized their curatorial goals.

- Catherine Whalen