What the Young Curators Learned

Seven high school students enrolled in the Montclair Art Museum's Young Curators Program did something they had never done before: conceive themes for an art show, invite artists to submit work, view and discuss the (many) submissions, choose which to accept, organize and hang the pictures, host the reception and answer questions at a closing day gallery talk. So how'd they do?

I think they did darn well, and not just because two of my photographs were chosen. I chatted them during the gallery talk the day the exhibit closed—Saturday, May 11. Here is some of what I learned about what they learned:

~~The six girls and a boy, Lucas (I remember his name because he was the only one), are high school juniors or seniors (and one sophomore) enrolled in public or private schools in the Essex County area. They’re interested in art but age-appropriately uncertain about what they want to do with their lives. Shy at first, they opened up, the girls often giggling as they spoke.

~~All said they signed up so they could go behind the curtain, as it were, to see how a museum operates, how shows are put together. They came up with three separate, simultaneous themes, one for each of the three rooms in the Pierro Gallery at the Baird Center for the Arts in South Orange, where she show was hung.

~~The three themes, which amounted to three separate shows, were WAKE UP (about dreams), QUALMS and ODDITIES. Artists were allowed to submit to all three. I did. Two of my submissions for Oddities made the cut. Makes sense, if you know my work, though I thought Qualms was in my wheelhouse as well.

~~The biggest shock, they said, was seeing the accepted works in the flesh. Consider: They had looked at hundreds of submitted paintings and photographs, each viewed on a computer screen on which all the images were the same size.

"When the actual pieces came in, the scale threw us off," one of the girls said. "Some were very small and others were huge. They were so different, some of them, from the way they looked on the screen. Some of the colors looked different. It was a whole new thing."

~~The next challenge was figuring out how to hang each show. That meant plotting the dimensions of the walls of each room. (The three rooms of the Pierro Gallery vary in size; and two have windows, one doesn’t). Then seeing how the sizes of the art works worked in different locations, from different vantage points.

~~Asha Ganpat, the Montclair Art Museum’s coordinator of the Young Curators Program, but effectively their teacher and guide, was as hands-off as possible, but had strict rules to follow for hanging.

"You had to hang every piece at eye level," said one of the girls. I think she said 59 inches, but that was not measured from the top of the piece but from some predetermined point within it. "Then there is a set distance between each piece, except you allow a little more space in the corners, so they don’t look cramped."

They all agreed that hanging the show was the most challenging part of the whole process.

~~They said they enjoyed meeting the artists and seeing how the actual people aligned with or differed from what they expected based on the individual works. I would like to have heard them expand on that theme, but it didn’t happen.

In the photos, the Young Curators, from left, are:

Maria-Elena Alberto
Jamie Mitrovic
Skye Volmar
Camillia Chan
Cynthia Huasipoma
Lucas Cuatrecasas
Isabel Kam

Two other YC’s—Isabel Kim and Maria Pansulla—were unwell Saturday and could not make the talk.

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