Near at Hand: Faculty Exhibitions as High-Impact Practice

With the goal of collaboration among art history and studio art faculty, and The Trout Gallery, the Art Museum of Dickinson College, senior art history students co-curated an exhibition titled Near at Hand featuring work by studio art professors in dialogue with select art objects from the museum’s permanent collection. Over the course of a semester, the students met with the faculty artists in their on-campus studios, taking advantage of the “nearness” of where the faculty work and teach. As the students learned about the artists’ practices and engaged in sustained discussion to analyze, contextualize, and situate their work in a larger art-historical discourse, they also were charged with another curatorial challenge. From 12,000 objects in The Trout Gallery collection, the students selected works of art and artifacts that resonated materially, thematically, or stylistically with the faculty work on display. The exhibition demonstrated successful model for how scholarship, teaching, and museum practices in art and art history overlap at a small liberal arts college. The curatorial experience not only provided new contexts for objects in the collections that had never been displayed, but also offered a new, student-centered approach to the expectations for a typically routine faculty exhibition. In addition to curating an exhibition with bodies of work by four artists alongside twelve objects from the collection, students wrote catalogue essays and delivered public talks alongside the art professors. This presentation, by faculty in art and art history, outlines the challenges and outcomes of this collaborative exhibition.