Does This Look Like Art To You?

Posted by April Oswald on December 22nd 2010 | 0 Comments

Tags: museum

Nina Katchadourian, Untitled, 2007

In our two most recent meetings, students in the Exploring Museum Careers High School Partnership Program have been seeing a variety of objects from the museum’s collection. In addition to discussing objects in the galleries, the museum curators are also showing the students objects in collection storage. I can’t speak for the students, but I hope they are excited about delving beneath the surface of the museum, seeing paintings hanging together on racks, decorative arts furniture tucked into stalls with label cards hanging off like toe tags, and sculpture lifted off the shelf and then carefully unwrapped for viewing.

In collection storage with Curator, Mary Murray, discussing Katchadourian's Salt and Pepper Shakers

It is sometimes difficult for those of us who work in the museum to see what we do, and especially, to see the objects, in a new way. The exhibition that the students build each year through the Exploring Museum Careers Program helps us to do this. Speaking for myself, I am happiest when a student can stop me in my tracks – sometimes in an essay, or a discussion, maybe while working on the graphics, or even while laying out the exhibition – and make me really see something differently – to see it as they do.

In the gallery with Museum Director and Chief Curator, Paul Schweizer, discussing Bradley Walker Tomlin's No. 11, c. 1949

A couple days ago, I was talking with the art teacher of one of the students in the program. She had asked her student about the program, and one thing he mentioned was that he was learning what it is about an object that makes it a work of art, when it’s not apparent at first glance.

I wondered if it was these objects by Nina Katchadourian that he had in mind. They are surprising. They aren’t really salt and pepper shakers, but snow globes. As she showed them to the students, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Mary Murray frequently shook them, so the students could enjoy the effect. Maybe seeing these objects alongside several 19th-century paintings prompted this student to wonder about how strange the snow globe salt and pepper shakers are by comparison with the traditional still life paintings. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Working with the students helps to remind me to think about things being shaken up.

Katchadourian's Salt and Pepper Shaker Snow Globes shaken

For more information go to Exploring Museum Careers Program