“Exhibiting Artists’ Books: Three Perspectives from a Curatorial Seminar,” co-authored with Kristi Wermager and Gabriel Perri Silberblatt, in The Past as Portal: Teaching Undergraduates Using Special Collections and Archives, Summer 2011 Editors: Eleanor Mitchell, Peggy Seiden, Suzy Taraba Publisher: Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)
forthcoming
In this article, three authors describe their roles and experiences in a curatorial seminar offered winter term 2010 at Carleton College. Laurel Bradley, Senior Lecturer in Art and Art History, Director of Exhibitions, and Curator of the Carleton College Art Collection, provides an overview of the seminar and describes her strategies for engaging students with artists’ books and the curatorial process. Kristi Wermager, Curator of Special Collections in the Gould Library, describes the challenges attendant upon providing student access to the artists' books. Gabriel Perri Silberblatt, a seminar student, writes about his experience in the course and highlights special challenges and learning opportunities. The course description sets the stage for three points of view put forth in this article.
Curatorial Seminar: Artists’ Books course description. Artists’ books, representing a dynamic, non-traditional format for contemporary artists, comprise a collection within Carleton College’s Gould Library Special Collections. This curatorial seminar challenges a small group of students to immerse themselves in the collection, develop a set of organizing ideas and themes, and orchestrate an exhibition to be staged in the Art Gallery spring term 2010. In addition to working with primary materials, students will recommend a new acquisition to the collection and collaborate with the Special Collections Librarian on refining goals and developing curricular uses for artists’ books.
Laurel Bradley, Director of Exhibitions and Curator of the College Art Collection
As Director of Exhibitions and Curator of the College Art Collection, I teach a curatorial seminar every other year at Carleton College as a way to give students a taste of the curatorial process, and to directly “use” the art collection for teaching and learning. In 2010, I reached beyond the art collection under my care to another important campus resource – Artists’ Books in the Gould Library. Kristi Wermager, Curator of Special Collections, embraced the course and resulting exhibition as an excellent means to realize her goal of incorporating the collection into the curriculum; we sought to groom students as advisors and ultimately to “exploit” them as advocates for the collection and its use.
Curatorial seminars present tremendous challenges to students, most of whom are art history majors. In order to curate an exhibition within our short ten-week terms, students must quickly acquire at least a superficial mastery of a specific field before conceptual and practical work can begin; familiarize themselves with college holdings within that field; engage with curating, an entirely new method of knowledge production and analysis; perfect the art of writing museum labels for public consumption; and navigate the complexities of a group project even while making high-quality individual contributions.
The course outcome was not a paper exercise, but a real exhibition mounted in the art gallery spring term. I therefore restricted enrollment to six so that participants had time to cohere as a working group, and could meet with me individually as many times as necessary toward the end of the term. Course work progressed through a series of practical exercises to develop curatorial skills. Simultaneously the students refined their definition of “artists’ books,” and used the exercises to collectively brainstorm toward possible exhibition themes. After I cautioned that catch-all “Cool Stuff” themes such as “Treasures,” or “Highlights” was insufficiently intellectual or historically based, the students proposed umbrella concepts including: Artists Books and the Upper Midwest; Book Arts and the Liberal Arts, Artists’ Books as Social Critique; Revolutionary Tomes; The Codex and Beyond; Reading for Pleasure. Woven through many proposals was an interest in the radically experimental nature of form, and artists’ books as vehicles for revolution and reform. The final title, then, became Artists Books: Radical Messages, Revolutionary Means. Within the two major sections, subthemes included Radical Messages: Stories of Struggle, Engaging the Environment, and Identity; and Revolutionary Means: Predecessors, Livres d’Artistes, The Democratic Multiple, Institutional Critique, Out of bounds, and Free Verse.
Mid-term brought a sense of urgency to class proceedings. Even though the group had logged rich experiences by visiting other artists’ book collections, continuously explored Carleton’s holding through bi-weekly sessions in the Special Collections classroom, engaged with a visiting librarian about using artists’ books across the curriculum, and experimented with exhibition label formats, a long list of tasks remained. Texts, when written, were barely out of first draft phase. And final object choices proved elusive. Finally, Kristi and I cut off access to books not on the exhibition checklist in order to force the fledgling curators to focus and begin to refine thinking through writing. The final checklist comprised 54 books, and a few framed photographs, unbound sheets, and other artifacts to complement the book objects.
And then, during week six, one of the most exciting “real life” assignments came due. “Pitching an Acquisition to the Gould Library Special Collections” charged students with browsing the on-line marketplace for artists’ books, then selecting a single object (or group of related objects) and pitching this work as a potential acquisition to a panel of distinguished individuals. Each student had five minutes and was limited to a budget of $1000. In addition to introducing the object and artist, class participants had to contextualize the acquisition within the existing collection, and define how it would work in the upcoming exhibition. Students rose to the challenge, giving impressive performances grounded in sound selections. The mock trustee committee (comprised of a Dean, a Librarian, a faculty bibliophile, and a studio art faculty member) was able to support two acquisitions, instead of only one, as the two winning proposals came in under $500 each.
The course text, in addition to a survey history of artists’ books, was Beverly Serrell’s Exhibition Labels: An Interpretive Approach. Serrell’s “Big Idea” is a powerful tool to force a succinct project statement, which must then resonate within every other supporting text, including the introductory statement, the thematic labels, and the individual object labels. “A Big Idea is a sentence – a statement – of what the exhibition is about. It is a statement in one sentence, with a subject, an action, and a consequence.” Research and writing responsibilities were divided between students. Speaking for the group, those charged with orchestrating the general didactic labels, including the introductory statement and the two major section labels, had to submit their prose repeatedly to their classmates. Each student took responsibility for several groups of books, and had to produce labels of approximately 100 words for each object. These were edited up to 3 or 4 times, in individual meetings with the instructor, until text quality rose to a level I judged “proper for public consumption.”
Exhibitions are more than a selection of riveting objects complemented by interpretive labels. In the last weeks of winter term, students addressed public programs, publicity, the website and ways to bring books alive in a “do not touch” exhibition setting. However, the actual design of the space and rhythmic placement of objects proved beyond the scope of the course. The gallery staff took on the complicated tasks surrounding installation during spring break after grades had been submitted and students had left campus.
Reflecting back on the seminar, the rewards included a deepened knowledge of the collection for all parties, the pleasure of collaborating intensely with another campus curator, and delight in watching young curators blossom. Artists Books: Radical Messages, Revolutionary Means was more difficult to realize than previous collection-based exhibitions because of access issues. When planning a print or photography exhibition, one can rely on facsimile images to stand in for the real objects. But this project required that the books, in all their quirky 3-dimensions, be consulted directly under terms of restricted access. Even if the library database had included images for each object record, the complexity of these books would not collapse into a single image. Finally, the goal of using students to re-write a set of collection goals awaits realization. The Special Collections curator is currently engaged in drafting a statement inflected with the students’ passions and targeted interests discovered over ten weeks in winter 2009.
Kristi Wermager, Curator of Special Collections
At the Gould Library, Special Collections participates actively in the learning and teaching mission of Carleton College. Each academic year between 35 and 50 classes visit, integrating primary resources and visual materials into coursework. Most classes come for one or two structured sessions, but occasionally have longer term projects, including small exhibits mounted in the Library.
The Curatorial Seminar: Artists’ Books offered an opportunity to expand existing models for curricular involvement. Using the collection as a “laboratory” would further develop this curricular resource and the exhibition would focus attention on Special Collections. I welcomed the opportunity to collaborate with another campus curator. And I saw great value in working with highly motivated students to develop strategies for serving their interests within the Special Collections program.
As preparations for the seminar progressed, several challenges demanded attention. The discovery tool for finding artists’ books within the library collections was clearly inadequate. Up to that point, patrons had relied on OCLC generated catalog records from our on-line catalog and on pre-existing knowledge of the Artists’ Book Collection. Patrons seeking artists’ books on certain topics or using particular print processes were doomed to frustration, until they turned to the curator. I emerged as the essential guide to the collection. Recognizing this fact, I decided to improve my own knowledge by examining and reading all of the books in the Collection. It was a valuable process, reacquainting me with forgotten books and introducing me to others
It was time, however, to move beyond the human search engine and enable seminar students to discover books on their own! Grounded in knowledge of each object, I enriched an Access database with my own supplementary search terms. However, although we introduced this tool to the students early in the seminar, they rarely used it, preferring to discover books through browsing or personal recommendation. We had not yet created an effective discovery tool.
Providing student access to the collection also challenged usual Special Collections practices. Browsing was necessary to fulfill the course requirements. Yet the stack area housing Special Collections could not accommodate this activity. Fortunately, there is ample space in the classroom adjacent to Special Collections. To provide full access, we devised the solution of re-shelving the collection on four carts that were easily moved back and forth between the classroom and the secured stack area. A temporary new classification system simplified re-shelving items onto the carts after each class visit. Our artists’ books are classified and shelved using Library of Congress call numbers. The numbers are complicated and difficult to differentiate, causing errors in shelving. Our solution was to inventory the collection ahead of time and assign each book a simple numerical shelving designation from 1-495. The inventory process doubled as a security measure, ensuring that all of the books in the database were in the collection at the start of the term.
Finally, security and control issues stretched our usual practices and boundaries. Classes using Special Collections materials are always supervised by library staff. During the seminar, Special Collections staff attended only some of the class sessions, ceding some control. Control was also an issue in the exhibit, mounted in the Art Gallery across campus from the Gould Library. While book exhibits in the library are always housed in locked cases, this exhibition displayed objects both in cases and on open surfaces. “Do not touch” signs accompanied exposed books and gallery attendants monitored the exhibit during open hours.
Looking back on the experience it is clear that Special Collections realized all four major goals: increased use; students engaging actively with the collection; collaboration with another campus curator, and a raised profile on campus for the Artists’ Book Collection and Special Collections in general. Further benefits followed from the growing realization that the artists’ books, because they are art objects, require a level of attention different from more traditional Special Collections materials. Whereas standard library discovery tools rely on text to describe books and facilitate access, artists’ books, as visual objects, are best accessed through a combination of relevant search terms and images. Having witnessed the limited success of our non-visual Access database, Special Collections is now in the process of creating an improved discovery tool, using Content-DM software. In addition to exporting existing bibliographic information and search terms from on-line catalog records and the Access database, we are adding two images from each artists’ book. From now on, all new artists’ books will be carefully analyzed, read, photographed and entered into a visually enhanced discovery tool. We are also exploring ways to link this tool with our on-line catalog.
I believe that collaboration, at the heart of the students’ seminar work, was also the most valuable feature of my experience. As a curator, I was excited to work with the professional Art Gallery staff and to see many of our artists’ books exhibited beautifully in a gallery setting. My thinking about artists’ books in general and artists’ books at Carleton was expanded by interactions with Laurel and the seminar students. Their reactions to physical objects and thematic content confirmed some assumptions and challenged others. Students were, as expected, drawn to books with strong social and political messages. What the seminar showed me, however, was that students also valued books of a whimsical, poetic, or esoteric nature. Throughout the seminar, Laurel and the students made suggestions and posed questions that broadened my thinking about the purpose and future direction of the collection. Students pointed out a lack of sculptural books, for example. Although we had avoided such complicated objects because of storage issues, we are now filling that gap with new acquisitions.
Gabriel Perri Silberblatt, Carleton College student, class of 2011
As a junior enrolled in the curatorial seminar, I gauged the success of the class by how unlike it was from the rest of my undergraduate experience. The seminar stood out in two fundamental ways: it provided opportunities to work directly with art objects in the classroom as well as new productive challenges to my academic writing.
A unique physicality grounded in actual objects was perhaps the most edifying aspect of the course for me and for my peers. We students of art history had come to expectdepartmental seminars to be heavily laden with abstract ideas, theory and historical context. The curatorial seminar quickly developed into a refreshing counterweight to these classes.
From two summers working in museums, I am familiar with the advantages of what museum educators call “object-oriented learning.” The complex visual character of all kinds of art is engaged through long, careful, and first-hand contemplation. Every artwork, be it concrete or conceptual, has form; object-oriented learning addresses formal analysis to a degree that is simply not possible in a slide-based lecture. For example, the first time I sat down with a Caren Heft’s The Core of James Farmer, a book from our collection, I spent nearly an hour reading and re-reading its carefully printed pages. I touched its delicate blood-red deckled edge, and somberly admired the surgical-like stitching of its binding. With careful looking, the book slowly reveals the painful history of civil rights activist James L. Farmer and his Freedom Riders of the 1960s. Heft’s work beautifully captures the tragic tensions implicit in the march toward racial equality in America. The book’s powerful and subtle messages cannot be grasped from slide images, or from my cursory description here; they come only from careful observation and firsthand experience. These ways of looking were not just encouraged, but absolutely required by our curatorial seminar.
Directly engaging with objects for close formal analysis teaches us as much about what we see, as how we see. The course, therefore, laid bare how I make very subjective decisions about quality and effectiveness in a work of art. Charged with the daunting task of curating 50 artists’ books from a collection of over 450, class members were forced to deal with the material—visually, experientially, and intellectually. Having to justify or deny an object’s relevance to a thematic exhibition to a group of peers will remain one of the most difficult and meaningful experiences of my undergraduate career.