Luce Grant

Since Skidmore College seeks to realize an innovative model for a teaching museum, the college has sought ways to provide faculty with opportunities to develop their interests and expertise in using the museum in teaching and research. Established to support this effort, The Program in Object Exhibition and Knowledge, generously funded by the Henry R. Luce Foundation, offered faculty a structure in which to develop a working knowledge of the critical vocabulary of museums.

As faculty explored the pedagogical possibilities that arose from applying this vocabulary to their teaching and research, they refined their ability to use the museum as a site that provokes critical and engaged learning. This faculty involvement with the museum serves the college’s eventual goal of making museum exhibitions as integral to college learning as the library, the science laboratory and the studio.

At the core of the program was the faculty seminar, co-led by Fred Wilson and Susan Bender, and coordinated by Alison Barnes. Over the three years of the program, twenty one faculty members from across the disciplines participated in the seminar.

The first year of the seminar focused on object exhibition and the practice of reading context driven meanings of objects. Faculty participants considered how they might explore ideas central to their teaching and scholarship through planning exhibits and engaging in interdisciplinary exchanges about objects and object exhibition.

In the second year of the seminar, faculty participants developed their critical abilities to read and interpret museum exhibitions through a series of museum visits and reading-based discussions. The syllabus for the seminar included visits to the National Museum of the American Indian, Mass MoCA, and the Olana State Historical Site.

The third year of the seminar centered on comparing art and science museums through an analysis of exhibition strategies, narratives, and institutional goals. This involved an active application of the critical vocabulary faculty participants developed in the second year. The syllabus for the seminar included visits to the Exploratorium, the de Young Museum, and SF MoMA, along with discussions that focused on the conceptualization of the Tang exhibition, Molecules that Matter, organized by seminar participants, Ray Giguere, Professor of Chemistry, and John Weber, Dayton Director of the Tang Museum.

Faculty participants from all three years of the seminar attended the College Museum: A Collision of Disciplines, A Laboratory of Perception conference. Throughout the three years of the seminar, participants read and responded to works written by many of the conference presenters.

Fred Wilson, the Luce Distinguished Visiting Fellow for the Program in Object Exhibition and Knowledge, was in residence at Skidmore College during the spring semesters of the program (2004-2006). In this role, Wilson served as a catalyst for faculty engagement with museums. Through the context of the faculty seminar, he provided insight into museum practices and provoked faculty to deepen their critical and creative responses to exhibitions. He encouraged faculty to develop their own ideas as seeds for future exhibitions and worked with them to find new ways to engage their students in assignments relating to the Tang exhibition program.

An internationally recognized artist whose work is ideally situated to support faculty inquiry into museum exhibitions and their pedagogical potentials, Wilson has taught and worked on numerous projects at colleges and universities. He first came to Skidmore College for his retrospective, Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1985-2000, which was on view at the Tang in 2002. Known for his installations that manipulate museum display strategies and collections to draw attention to biased ideologies embedded in the practices of museums and other cultural institutions, Wilson has an extensive exhibition record, which includes his landmark exhibition, Mining the Museum, at the Baltimore Historical Society and his representation for the United States in the 50th Venice Biennale. Wilson has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts and in 1999 he was chosen as a MacArthur Fellow.

PDF: Download and print syllabi Luce_Seminar_Syllabi.pdf