Virtual Exhibition and Curatorial Essay Instructions Curatorial Essay Guidelines 1. In this Curatorial Essay you will pull together or 'curate' an exhibition of eight to ten (8-10) works of art by one (1) Canadian artist from the list below. These artists' works of art can be found in the CCCA database (Canadian Centre For Contemporary Art) at: http://ccca.concordia.ca/start.html?languagePref=en& Please look at ALL these artists before choosing which one you will curate. Kim Adams Wanda Koop Edward Byrtynsky Shary Boyle Evergon Max Streicher Joyce Wieland Agnes Martin Geoffrey James Jin-Me Yoon Rebecca Belmore Pudlo Pudlat For instructions on how to use the CCCA website to search, click on “How to Use CCCA” available under “Resources for Assignments” on the course homepage. 2. As one might find if one visited a real life gallery, art exhibitions are usually accompanied by an exhibition catalogue that discusses at length the work in it. For your virtual exhibition, you must choose eight to ten (8-10) images by one artist. THIS IS NOT TO BE A CHRONOLOGICAL SURVEY OF THE ARTIST'S WORK nor is it to be a biography. Instead, ALL IMAGES SHOULD BE THEMATICALLY RELATED. (However, they need not be visually related.) Your job is to 'tie them together' with your curatorial essay by finding an 'umbrella' theme that allows you to discuss all the works. Discuss the theme; discuss how the works fit into or are examples of the theme. After selecting the work to include in your virtual exhibition, you - the curator - will then write a catalogue essay the purpose of which is to unfold the work in terms of the artist's intentions and ideas based on the research you have done abut the artist and her/his work. *The essay MUST be 2000 words. This does not include the REQUIRED bibliography and footnotes. You MUST include a bibliography of sources you consult for your essay. *Please use Chicago Style formatting for this essay. See numerous sources on the web for information about how to do this. Here is one such website: https://www.bibme.org/chicago. • You must insert images and image hyperlinks to all the images you discuss within the body of the text. Usually, any single image should be inserted only once per essay when you first mention that work of art. You can refer numerous times to that image, but need only hyperlink to it when referring to it again. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A good place to begin this assignment is from a position of appreciation of the artist's work. That is, it is important to choose an artist from the list above whose work you somehow respond to or are curious about, for whatever reason. That is, while you must respond to the images, you must more importantly respond to the artist's ideas as well. It is those ideas you are to write about. You must always remember that the images the artist has created throughout his/her career are 'evidence' of the ideas and issues the artist is interested in. Your role here is as curator: you are selecting and choosing from among numerous works of art. The imaginary exhibition you create will not be a chronological career 'survey' of an artist's whole body of work, nor will it include a biography of the artist, nor an analysis of the work in formal aesthetic terms. Instead your essay will look at the artist's work thematically through one of the topics discussed in Lesson 3 and/ or in Sayre Chpts. 21-27 which are: The Problem of Representation; Mass Media; Consumer Culture; Class, Power and Politics; Place; Postmodernism; Spirituality; Life, Death and the Body; Gender and/or Sexuality; Sex and Desire; Language; Identity/Subjectivity; Ethnicity; Cultural and Personal History; History and/or Time; Science and Technology; the Environment; Art as Social Practice [Please note that beauty is not included as a theme in this list. Beauty is, rather, a condition, an ideal, etc.. Please do not deviate from the above list of themes.] Of particular importance are the kinds of questions found in the 'Take A Closer Look' assignment: they will help you think about what the artist is trying to say and what the work means. Remember however, that this assignment is NOT in any way a repetition of the 'Take a Closer Look' Assignment. The catalogue essay must stipulate which thematic lens(es) you are examining the artist's work through. It will address and analyze that work in terms of the issues it raises relative to those themes, all the while understanding that the artist's work embodies his or her ideas. This will require some thoughtfulness on your part deciding not only which is the best thematic lens through which to view the particular artist's work, but also which are the most appropriate images to choose in order to discuss that theme. You will refer to the images you have chosen in order to 'make your points' about the ideas you discuss. That is, DO RESEARCH TO FIND OUT WHAT THE ARTIST'S WORK IS ABOUT, CHOSE ONE OF THE THEMES IDENTIFIED IN THE LIST ABOVE BASED ON THAT RESEARCH AND THEN CHOSE WORKS BY THE ARTIST THAT BEST EXPOSE THOSE THEMES. WRITE ABOUT THE THEME AS AN IDEA ITSELF, ABOUT THE ARTIST'S WORK AS AN EXPLORATION OF THAT THEME AND ABOUT HOW THE ARTIST PERSONALIZES THAT THEME (not necessarily in that order). You can not rely solely on the textbook and the online lessons to fulfill this assignment. There already exists a body of analytical, interpretive and critical writing on all of the artists named in the list above. It is REQUIRED that the student will do appropriate external research around their subject, referring to books, essays, articles, criticism, previous exhibition catalogues on the artist and even by the artist. You must quote from these in the body of your essay to reinforce your argument or ideas about the artist an his/her themes. This does not mean that your essay is only quotations. The majority of words are your own; the quotes are simply to reinforce your overview. You must include a bibliography of all the external works you researched at the end of the essay. What you need to be clear on is that this assignment is not to be your personal interpretation of the works of art but an analysis or overview of the body of work you have chosen as seen and interpreted through the eyes of the artist and critics. All reference material MUST be academic in nature or voice: high school level encyclopedias, etc. are not acceptable reference materials nor are articles found on the internet written by non-art amateurs rather than by serious curators, serious critics, serious art commentators or recognized art galleries. Try to avoid Wikipedia references, although that site is a good way get an initial grasp on topics on which you then will do further, more in depth, research. At the end of each Wiki article is in fact a list of references that might be valuable to you. You MUST have at least THREE legitimate external references including neither the text (which you can quote) nor the online lessons (which you can not quote). As well, the Sayre text for this course, 'A World of Art', includes a section titled "The Creative Process" in each chapter. These excellent essays should function as THE MODEL for writing the catalogue essay component of this assignment. It is advised that students also go online and research exhibition catalogues from various art museums as these can provide another model for how to put an exhibition together and how to write about the work in it. You might even visit a library or gallery to examine actual exhibition catalogues. When discussing a particular work of art in the essay, it is important that you include an example of it directly in the body of the essay. This can be done by copying and pasting an image of it from CCCA when you first mention or discuss it. After this, create a hyperlink to the CCCA image of the work when mentioning it again. How to use CCCA is one of the links included on the course main page. **A Library Support page has been set up to assist you in looking for online library books, articles and resources, and a recorded Library Orientation with a Librarian is also available to familiarize you with the library resources. Check the course homepage for more details. THE ONLINE U OF R EBRARY ARTICLES ARCHIVE IS A VERY VALUABLE RESOURCE. If you need help with that, please contact a research librarian or the Fine Arts librarian. THIS ASSIGNMENT IS OPEN FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE COURSE UNTIL ITS DUE DATE. I suggest you begin work on this at the very beginning of this course as I take this major assignment seriously and suggest you do as well. THIS ASSIGNMENT CAN BE FOUND AT THE TOP OF THE HOMEPAGE VIA THE 'ASSIGNMENTS' ICON. **Please give your essay a title page that includes title, author and date of writing. For example: Leonardo da Vinci: Science and Aesthetics, Joe Student, ID# 123456789, Art 100 Online, December 4, 2013 ▼ FAQs REGARDING VIRTUAL EXHIBITION AND CURATORIAL ESSAY 1. QUESTION: Can I use images other than those found at CCCA? ANSWER: NO. The images available for you to reproduce can be found only at CCCA. This is a copyright issue as we cannot legally use someone's image without permission. When putting this course together four years ago we sought and received permission from CCCA to use whatever image we wanted as long as they were for this project exclusively and would not be used in any other way. You cannot use other images found on the net without written permission - with the exception of CCCA, and that, only in the context of this course. Again, this is a copyright issue. The exception to this (and it is still a 'grey' area) is the use of images found on Wiki-commons. Here is how to use the images on the artist's individual main page at CCCA: go 'Timeline Image View.' Click on the image to enlarge it and then copy and paste it into the body of your essay where you want it to be placed. Where to paste it? Insert the image into the body of the essay only where you FIRST discuss it. This is the way I do it in the online lessons and how it is done in academic writing generally. Include immediately below the image (in what is known as the 'cutline') the important information about the image. The acceptable order for this information is: artist name, title of work (in Italics), year, materials used, country created in. So, fnd that image on the net and hyperlink to this external image in the body of your essay. Include all the same relevant data regarding the image. 2. QUESTION: Where do I put my images? ANSWER: Insert the image into the body of the essay only where you FIRST discuss it. This is the way I do it in the online lessons and how it is done in academic writing generally. Henceforth, only include hyperlinks when referring to an image already pasted into the body of your essay. 3. QUESTION : What else do I include? ANSWER: A .) Create a single space below the cutline and in brackets insert a hyperlink to the image - in case something goes wrong and the image is not visible to me or does not hold its place. B) Include footnotes and a Bibliography. 4. QUESTION: What examples of curatorial essays are available so that I know what to do? ANSWER: A) The structure of the essay should, as I have indicated in the instructions for this assignment found at the bottom of the homepage, follow the examples set by Sayre in the textbook under 'The Critical Process' and "The Creative Process.' B) You will note in these that most of the questions I asked you in the Take A Closer Look project are addressed in these. In a sense then, this essay is an expanded version of the Take A Closer Look but does not focus on a single image. It is a broader and more extensive look and should be deeper, more well thought out and considered, and one supported by thorough research into the subject. As the major assignment for this course, it is expected to reflect the amount of work you should expect to put into this kind of assignment. C) ALTHOUGH NOT CONFORMING TO THE REQUIREMENTS OF THIS ASSIGNMENT (too short, no images included, no bibliography, etc.), EXAMPLES OF WELL- WRITTEN EXHIBITION ESSAYS CAN BE FOUND AT: i http://aliciaeler.com/home/2013/05/08/essay-kathy-halpers-exhibition-tmi-information-packerschopf-gallery/ iI. http://exhibits.haverford.edu/whiteboys/essay/ ii. the CCCA web site itself. 5. QUESTION: What should I NOT do? ANSWER: A) This essay is not a biography, so do not write one and insert images will-nilly. Use the bio- data only if it is important (for example, in the text on pages 54-55 we see Gomez-Pena and Coco Fusco's ethnic background dealt with as this has everything to do with their work). B) I am not sure a simply going through the artist's work chronologically is satisfactory either. This essay is to address the artist's work thematically as is stated in the instructions. I outline many themes there and it is up to you to decide which thematic the artist's work falls into. The essays in the textbook deploy an extensive thematic overview of the artist's body of work and use the images, no matter when the artist created them, as references to the statements the writer is making. That is, like quotes from the writer Margaret Atwood in an essay you might write in English 100 about the themes in her work, the images you chose here are to be understood as examples or evidence from her body of artworks that verify what you are saying about it. We can assume the same themes are running through both her literary works and her artworks. (I am not aware of Atwood making any art, but use the idea of her artworks to make the point...) C.) Do not reproduce your images again in the essay more than that original first instance. You can discuss it and use the title but there is no need to reproduce again. D.) Do not reproduce your images again in the bibliography but do include all hyperlink information. 6. QUESTION: What SHOULD I do? ANSWER: Your job is to tie the images you have chosen together into one thematic package. In this regard, you can use quotes from the artist, from critics, from curators, from the artist, etc.to help you express the themes. These experts have much to say often that will help you think about the artist's work. You must quote and thus you must identify the words of others as quotes and cite them appropriately. See Sayre on how to cite. 7. QUESTION: Should I describe the work of art. ANSWER: This is not necessary as you have inserted the image. However, you can use description to assist you in your discussion of a particular work but only if it is necessary to your discussion of it. But be careful: if your essay is only descriptive and you avoid addressing the thematics in the work, your grade will suffer. That is, do not rely on description to 'pad' your essay. Only describe if it helps our understanding of the meaning of the work. For example, one can hardly discuss Michelangelo's DAVID without mentioning that he is larger than life size (scale) and seems to be standing with all his weight on one leg, his other hip thrust outward. This suggests he is almost resting, or thinking as he gathers his mental and physical strength, before springing into his attack of the giant Goliath. As well, sometimes it is necessary to briefly discuss the formal elements of art and the principles of design operating in a particular work of art as a way of analyzing its themes. As an additional example, you can barely discuss the themes of Van Gogh without discussing how he uses texture and colour or Degas without discussing balance and how he divides the picture planes. However, do not rely on this approach if the elements and principles have little to do with revealing the themes of the work. Moreover, as much as this essay is not a biography or a chronology, do not think of this essay as a formal analysis. You will not receive more than basic marks if any of these comprise the majority of your essay. 8.QUESTION: How should I write about art? ANSWER: First of all, try to find some pleasure in the writing; do not look at this assignment as a struggle or task but an journey into the work and mind of an artist. Try not to use flowery language. Do not use colloquialisms or cliches or even art cliches in your writing. Instead, use academic language. That is, write in the manner of the Sayre textbook, using appropriate art vocabulary. In this regard, this essay is to be understood as a formal essay, not a tweet. Use formal grammar. Do not use words you are unsure of as this might confuse you. Use the vocabulary you have learned throughout this course though. That vocabulary is grounded in visual art, although it crosses many conceptual boundaries from the formal to the social. Please do not leave this assignment until the last moment. Write and then re-write, and re- write again. Remember this is academic work: seek accuracy in terms of what the artist's work is about and clarity in the way you discuss it.