On a December 2006 afternoon, light shone through the gallery’s glass-paned entryway and landed on a sun-dappled collection of contemporary sculptures at the unveiling of Louis Kahn’s latest New Haven building. The Yale University Art Gallery staff took the Kahn opening as an opportunity to celebrate the YUAG’s close involvement with Yale students, choosing a group of seven to put together the sculpture exhibit for the new space’s lobby. “We weren’t thinking of it as one project for a larger program at that point,” said Pamela Franks, the YUAG’s Deputy Director for Exhibitions, Programming, and Education. But eight years later, the plans have changed.
Today, the program is thriving: Hand-picked groups of students start with an empty gallery floor and, over the course of a year, work through every aspect of developing an exhibition in collaboration with museum staff in each department. Each project is unique, but the general trajectory involves choosing the works of art, explaining the argument the exhibit puts forth, writing chat labels and wall text, designing the installation, arranging objects in the space, publishing brochures, organizing talks and programming, and publicizing the event. In the first half of the 2014-2015 semester alone, four student-curated exhibits have already opened at the YUAG.
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Odd Volumes
I headed into the YUAG looking to escape a cold New Haven drizzle and hundreds of pages of reading. But after warming my hands in the elevator, I found myself surrounded on all sides with my Sunday afternoon nightmare: endless books.
To my left, bright orange fungus envelops sheets shaped like tree bark, and tall blades of grass extended from beds of dirt in Plexiglass pages. To my right, a dead turtle, shell cracked and decaying, was pressed into a paper grave like some morbid reptilian flower. Repurposed novels lined the edges of a center table, shredded and cut and soaked and painted.
I’d stumbled upon Yale’s new counterculture library — Odd Volumes.
A baseball bat plastered with the writings of Sigmund Freud is mounted on the wall; tiny texts molded into pebbles sit in a shallow glass case; burned books hang from the ceiling on a meat hook; singed Encyclopedias lean against each other, their spines brown and charred. Pages of Mark Twain’s Mississippi Writings flutter, a tiny fan whirring to turn the pages. Lucky for me, in this odd library: Books aren’t meant to be read. They’re meant to be seen.
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A week later, I looked up from the l-shaped couch in the YUAG’s lobby and recognized Sinclaire Marber, MC ’15, by the side of her face. “I’m the one sleeping on the pillow,” she admitted, and I remembered: Upstairs, the exhibit features a photo of her lying on a book shaped cushion. She and the other student curators of Odd Volumes are all featured in photographs depicting their interaction with the pieces. One wears a red skirt made out of the fairytale Wizard of Jeanz; another holds an axe covered in articles on postmodern art criticism. Marber is in her third year as a gallery guide at the YUAG, but this is the first time she’s been part of her own tour, snuggled between pages six and seven of Daniel Gantes’s zzzbook.
Marber applied and interviewed a year ago to be a part of the student team charged with developing the exhibit, which now displays about 100 of Allan Chasanoff’s 300 contributions of “Book Art” to the YUAG. Chasanoff, DC ’61, a renowned art collector, became fascinated in the 1990s with the rise of the digital age and the changing landscape of publication. Together with Doug Beube, an artist who deals with books as his primary medium, he began collecting pieces by artists who were responding to the growing obsolescence of printed publication and engaging with its decline. “Delving into this collection has highlighted how the written word and the visual experience both intersect with and inform knowledge,” Franks said. “The visual objects [incite] a visceral experience.”
Franks was the lead curatorial mentor to the eclectic mix of six students who collaborated on Odd Volumes, including History of Art majors like Marber, an English and African American Studies PhD, Ashley James, and an MFA candidate for Fine Arts and Sculpture, Andrew Hawkes. The team met every Friday at the West Campus Center for Conservation and Preservation, where Allan Chasanoff’s collection resided. They would go through 15 or 20 pieces each week, researching artists, developing a thesis upon which to base the exhibit, forming connections with each other and with the art.
Marber was drawn to a small red copy of Great Works of Art and What Makes Them Great. It’s open to a passage and portrait of Manet’s 1863 portrait of Olympia, who reclines, breasts exposed, above the caption “Portrait of a vulgar demi-mondaine.” A hole carved into the center of the book holds a golden egg, nestled between Olympia’s splayed legs. Marber notes how the artist Lisa Waters subverts the male-dominated gaze of traditional Eurocentric, Western art: a female artist reclaiming the male artist’s depiction of Olympia’s nude body.
Hawkes gravitated to a destroyed bible found in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: Terri Garland’s Square Bible, which is stiff, caked in mud. “There was such a power to this book when I first saw it,” he said. “All this history is imbued into the book—the contents weren’t telling us the story, it was all in the context.” The artist’s only intervention was to find it.
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Odd volumes takes these book forms and reshapes their context again and again. Artists suffuse their works with a singular theme, upon which collectors such as Chasanoff impose their own interpretations. The students discovered that curation is often about embracing the freedom to reconfigure and present these meanings in new, sometimes dissident ways.
In a talk at the exhibit’s opening, Chasanoff explained how before the dawn of the digital age, he felt trapped in a “bound world” where books were objects of idolatry. He sees the sculptural books he collects as symbols of freedom and expression, books repurposed to liberate the contents from their suffocating spines. “I love books,” he said. “But once you have 4000 of them you don’t have to handle them as if they’re going to disappear.”
James and the other students recognized this as Chasanoff’s main thesis, but James said that “rather than put forth one argument as to what book art is, which is going to fail no matter what, we took a holistic approach to how people are connecting and interacting with books.” Because of their generational differences, students viewed the books more as sculptures than as symbols, bridging the gap between the realm of books and the realm of art.
Chasanoff grudgingly admits how happy he is with the students’ work. “If I would have graded them, they picked 90% of what I would have picked,” he says.
“That’s an A-,” Marber said, laughing.
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Many things placed here and there
Dorothy and Herbert Vogel’s tiny Upper East Side apartment held one bedroom, two people, eight cats, and twenty turtles. By the 1960s, it also held almost 5,000 works of art. When the National Gallery learned of the couple’s massive collection, they convinced the Vogels to donate half to their Washington, DC museum archives. The other 2,500 works were distributed throughout the country in a national gift campaign: Fifty Works for Fifty States. Connecticut’s 50 ended up at Yale, and by 2013 they were placed in the hands of six student curators.
“A lot of collections focus on the couple because they’re so compelling,” Emma Sokoloff, TC ’13, said of the other states’ interpretations of the Vogel collection. A History of Art major, Sokoloff, whose sister is one of the managing editors of this newspaper, was one of the six graduates and undergraduates who developed Many Things Placed Here and There, an exhibit featuring the YUAG’s Vogel acquisitions in conversation with around 50 other pieces from the permanent collection. “We had to strike a balance between giving the works the attention they deserve and telling [the Vogels’] story.”
This story centers around the lives of the Vogels as eccentric forces in the Manhattan visual arts community, tracking their weekends in the downtown studios of now-famous artists including Sol Lewitt, Chuck Close, and Richard Tuttle. The childless couple subsisted for most of their lives on Dorothy’s salary as a Brooklyn librarian, setting aside Herbert’s postal worker checks to feed their addiction to collecting. They plastered their walls, stuffed their mattresses, and stacked their coffee tables with hundreds of paintings, drawings, and objects. Eventually, they just ran out of space.
“Intimacy was a common thread throughout the collection,” Sokoloff said, describing small-scale paper illustrations, birthday cards, sketched self-portraits, and soft line drawings created by removing the threads from a paper’s fabric. “Their closeness with the artists was reflected in works they were attracted to: they ended up collecting works that were close and personal to the artists themselves.”
Franks finds this sense of intimacy inherent to the process of curation, as well as collection. “Art is part of our culture, and it should be something we have in common,” she said. “It’s something we connect with each other over and through.” “Molleen guided our cadence,” said Sokoloff, referring to Molleen Theodore, lead curatorial mentor on the Vogel exhibit and Assistant Curator of Programs at the YUAG. Still, ultimately students were given near complete liberty in shaping what was produced “They invariably come up with compelling ideas on their own,” Theodore said. “There’s an innovation and openness and kind of evolution in the way work gets done.”
“We dive into the show together, help each other see art through different eyes,” said Franks, having directed five student curatorial teams over the years. “This is my favorite program. I love it.”
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Photography at Yale
As I headed to the YUAG’s central elevator, my eyes locked with an older blonde woman dressed in all white, clutching an oversized purse and standing in front of a chipping white wall. She’s Anonymous, the subject of a photograph by Katy Grannan, ART ’99, wordlessly beckoning me into the small corner room on the gallery’s fourth floor. The space is filled with the curatorial work of Maggie Neil, ES ’14, whose senior thesis explored the history of Yale’s Photography program and whose exhibit, Photography at Yale, features works produced by Yale students since the program’s inception in 1979. Couples lay in varying states of undress on rumpled sheets; black-and-white children wade through the Eno River in North Carolina; a voyeur stares through the open window of a Manhattan apartment.
“There’s a visual logic, a narrative,” Neil said of the exhibit. Neil’s personal narrative took a different trajectory than that of other student curation projects. After working in Prints, Drawings, and Photographs for two years, Neil received the A. Conger Goodyear Fine Arts Award, which granted her the chance to collaborate with Joshua Chuang, then the Associate Curator of Photography and Digital Media at the YUAG. Neil was given access to the Gallery’s entire photo collection, and she ultimately decided to work individually with Chuang (instead of a group of students) to choose 24 works she found particularly striking. “Pam [Franks] was really into it,” Neil said, but “Jock [Reynolds] gave me some of the harshest criticism I’ve ever received in my life.”
Reynolds is known for being extremely adamant in encouraging student involvement in the gallery, offering young people the same responsibilities as adults and pushing them to deliver professional work. This vision is the impetus behind each student curation project at the YUAG, regardless of format. “Honestly, in that hour, I feel like I learned to curate,” Neil said. “He taught me so much about the importance of visual connections, not just theoretical ones. [Curation] really is an art.”
Neil will be in southern China through most of the exhibit’s run, from October through January, teaching writing and American history at Sun Yat-sen University, but she is returning in December to deliver a talk. “It feels kind of weird for me now to be so far away from it,” she said over a late-night Skype. “It had a huge impact.”
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We often talk about existing in a “Yale bubble”: living in gothic castles, rushing to extra-curriculars, operating in some bizarre alternate universe perpendicular to reality. In this student world, “things kind of end up feeling like a game,” Neil says. In college, you’re in a student world, writing papers and delivering presentations and producing work for an audience of one professor, usually. Curating an art exhibit at a professional gallery is different. There’s a discrete goal, a tangible result, and a broad audience: at the end of the process, hundreds of people will be immersed in the gallery you’ve spent months working to perfect.
Though curating at the YUAG is more of an extra-extra-curricular, it’s still a program operating within the college structure. Since the program’s inception, The Yale Center for British Art began a student curation program modeled after the YUAG’s, offering students the same high level of authorship and access. For many aspiring curators, this is the most agency they’ll have over an exhibit of this magnitude for a long time—most entry-level museum jobs are purely administrative.
“It was one of the most important things I did at Yale,” Neil says. “Being given real responsibilities feels so empowering.”
–Photographs by Chris Melamed