In an effort to explore the indigenous arts scene on campus, The News-Letter has decided to profile the previously unexamined student artists who have successfully showcased their works in the D.C.-metro area. "Portrait of an Artist" will spotlight students who have contributed to the Hopkins arts scene. The piece will be written by the student him-or-herself in order to preserve the artistic integrity of the work as well as to highlight the artistic process.
Sofia Iatarola is a junior Art History major in the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences who, as part of a class taught here at Hopkins, had the chance to put together an exibhibit last spring called Print by Print: Series from Dürer to Lichtenstein. The exhibit is on display now at The Baltimore Museum of Art.
Print by Print: Series from Dürer to Lichtenstein, the Baltimore Museum of Art's new exhibition uniquely features what most art museum exhibitions do not — objects exclusively from their own collection, as well as help from eleven curators, ten of them students from Hopkins and MICA.
I, along with seven other classmates from Homewood, Ali Good, Christie Young-Smith, JuWon Park, Michele Ly, Hayley Plack, Cassandra McClure, Meaghan Lavin and two students from MICA, Jennifer Tam and Nicholas Simko, enrolled in the Spring 2011 course, Paper Museums: Exhibiting Prints at the BMA. Throughout the course, my fellow classmates and I would report once a week to the staff entrance of the BMA.
Every week our teacher Rena Hoisington, Associate Curator and Department Head of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, would escort us through the galleries, a couple of doors that required swipe cards and the BMA library into the study room, whose annex housed more than 65,000 prints.
After taking Intro to European Art History my freshman year, I became familiar with all of two, maybe even three, prints. During our first lesson, Professor Hoisington showed us the highlights of their collection, which included the only prints I've learned about — Albrecht Dürer's "Apocalypse" and Giovanni Piranesi's "Imaginary Prisons."
Immediately impressive in that two of the world's most famous prints were feet before my eyes, the most unique part of this class and the exhibition is the simple fact that the BMA had the complete series, as these prints, previously isolated whether in art history lectures or other exhibitions, were meant to be viewed.
Each week our class would convene and present a short talk and mock museum label for an assigned series, going century by century. Additionally, we would visit the study room outside of class for "one-on-one" time with our series. These visits, the true meat of the class, meant being able to examine the series beyond using magnifying glasses to spot all of the details in elaborate series like Robert van Audenaurde's "The Triumph of Caesar."
During these visits, we talked indispensably with our professor and the rest of the department, gaining insight with these series that is otherwise hard to come by (a lesson learned after numerous failed Google searches).
Throughout the visits and presentations, we brainstormed how we could organize these prints thematically and began to prepare ourselves for the daunting task of picking the final series by making mental notes of our favorites (Milton's Paradise Lost series).
The course was also supplemented with meetings among the other departments and perhaps, most memorably, the artist and MICA teacher Trudi Ludwig Johnson, who demonstrated to us the various types of print making and for example, how hard it is to carve a copper plate with a mere metal point tool (collectively, I recall we engraved a line, maybe).
We also became familiar with the other side of being a museum curator — deriving budgets and coordinating with other departments like Education, Installation and Conservation.
A thematically organized exhibit, our Professor decided, was the best way to show the strengths of the collection independent of time period or artist. The exhibition, ranging from the 15th century to present-day includes the works of artists I have not only read about in my textbooks (Dürer, Duchamp, Picasso, Lissitzky) but also ones alive and working today such as Andrew Raftery, Daniel Heyman. During one of our final classes, we sat in the study room and listed each of the series and their according themes we wanted in the exhibit.
Literally, print by print, we decided of what the show would consist, with surprisingly little disagreement and a great deal of variety.
Even then, a number of questions remained. For example, where would we hang each series? What color would the walls be? We met with other department heads to learn about the factors that contribute to, for example, framing and mounting the collection (an aesthetic skill, I learned, best developed by museum staff and HGTV fans).
After finalizing the series, we outlined the program of events coinciding with the opening, including lectures and panels. Though the semester was coming to an end (a few students, Plack, Simko and Tam would stay on the project throughout the summer and develop the interactive components of the exhibition), and despite all of our meetings, it remained a challenge for me to envision the final product—again, another skill best developed by curators.
After numerous updates throughout the summer, each of us received an invitation from the BMA for the opening of Print by Print with a full list of member events.
After previewing the exhibit with our professor, we had another opportunity to serve as student curators for the donor/member events and answer questions.
The most thrilling part of standing in the space was observing how everyone else moved through the gallery, examining each of the series from the ones that looked like paintings like Lépic's "Views from the Banks of the Escaut" to Duchamp's spinning "Twelve Rotoreliefs."
Only after moving through the space on my own did I realize, nearly inadvertently, the show consisted of a huge variety, representing all of the techniques, centuries we learned about and even our personal favorites.
