This week, JustArts spoke with Sarah McCarty ’15 and Sofia Retta ’15, Rose Art Museum interns and the curators of Disrupted Spaces in the Farber Mezzanine.

justArts: Can you tell us a little about the curation process of the exhibit in Farber?

Sarah McCarty: We started our internship at the beginning of the academic year and we were given this collection to work with in October. We started working with it— it’s about 15 works donated by the alum Carrie Schwartz class of 1987, it’s an ongoing donation, so its growing over time, but right now we were working with about 15 pieces of all different media. There was video, sculpture, painting and photography. And we decided to focus on photographs and chose these five works and then, from there, started collaborating with the library staff, meeting extensively with facilities, the rest of the Rose professional staff, faculty, student employees of the rose that are involved with programming. (From a curator’s perspective) there is so much that went into it, I don’t know if there is something you want us to focus on.

JA: How did you get involved in the Rose Art Museum and this project specifically?

SR: So we both started working at the Rose sophomore year. We are both seniors now, and we both started in the same position as gallery guards in the galleries, and then we became head guards after a semester or two, so we were involved kind of hands-on in the actual galleries, which was nice…It was kind of welcoming people to the museum and knowing as much as we could about the exhibitions in case visitors had questions, and really watching how people interact with the artwork in the museum and making sure that the artwork is protected and that nothing goes wrong, so that was really both of our first experiences here. I’ve also been a gallery guide, so I’ve given tours of the museum exhibitions and everything, I don’t really do that anymore, but I did for a couple years, and I’ve also been on the student committee for Rose Art Museum SCRAM… We both happened to get the internships this year, we applied. It’s a really great opportunity to be behind the scenes at the Rose after being involved in other aspects. To be back here and really interacting with the staff members more and getting a better idea of what goes on to make every exhibition happen from research and contacting the artists to picking paint colors and stuff like that, which is what we did for our exhibit as well.

JA: Can you discuss how you decided to arrange the exhibit?

SM: I think we started with logistics, to be honest. There’s not a ton of spaces in the library that would offer that amount of wall space… They had designed Farber Mez with this intention of potentially collaborating with Fine Arts and the Rose to have shows in that space.

SR: There’s a lot of works of art hanging in the library and in other administrative buildings around campus that actually belong to the Rose, part of like a big loan collection. But the library really wanted something that was an intentionally curated, organized exhibition, every cohesive and everything, and in that space there isn’t a lot of work hanging up there as opposed to other spaces in the library, and there’s kind of more wall space and a lot of natural light and things like that, so the library had that had that Farber Mezzanine in mind already.

SM: When we looked at the space, those walls…the walls on either side of you, we liked that versus some of the other walls because we wanted it to be really cohesive, all in one space. Kind of immediately when you enter the space you realize oh this is an actual exhibition happening here, not just that there’s more walls full of art from the Rose. And so then we started to think about the sizes, how many works we were including…

SR: How much wall space we wanted to use. The problem with curating something in a space that’s not a gallery is that you have a lot of obstacles, like fire safety equipment and lighting, there’s study rooms out there, outlets, the 3D printers and furniture. We spent a lot of time thinking about which walls we could use and which works could fit on that, so we had to go into storage and measure all of the works, get dimensions for everything, even before we had decided which works we were using just so we had in mind physically of how much space we had.

SM: And then once we had all the dimensions and looked at all the works and sort of narrowed it down to pretty much this. We had a couple more in mind. Then we started to think about the conceptual themes that we were talking about through the works and how they would relate to each other both visually and conceptually and how we wanted that to be exhibited, and that’s kind of how we came up with the final layout.

JA: Do you have favorite pieces or a favorite piece?

SM: That’s a hard question. There’s only five and they are all really incredible works. They are all incredible in different ways even though they are asking similar questions a lot of the time.

SR: I would say "Trace IV" by Ori Gersht would probably be my favorite if I had to absolutely choose one. I hate to choose one, but that was kind of our leading point when we were thinking about the themes and kind of underlying questions that we saw all of these photographs were raising, so that was kind of our starting point. It’s very abstract. It really looks like a painting and not really like a photograph, and so in that way it’s kind of a little bit disrupting our expectations of what a photograph is because it looks so painterly. It’s very mesmerizing actually.

SM: It’s printed on aluminum. So, in terms of surface quality, it’s like totally mesmerizing. That’s really the right word.

SR: It doesn’t look like a photograph, but it is. That was a nice kind of starting point for us to be thinking about what we wanted to talk about in this exhibit, and it’s just such a beautiful work to see in person.

SM: It’s much larger in person. I definitely recommend going to see it. I also really love the Weems. The Gersht is also really my favorite. Its kind of how we started with everything. We knew we wanted to include that work. Before even we knew it was a photo show, we were like the Gersht, we have to have this, it’s the piece.

JA: What is one thing that you would want a viewer to take away?

SR: I think one kind of general thing, and this isn’t really specific to our exhibit but just to the idea of having an exhibit in the library. I hope that people who wouldn’t necessarily come to the Rose or aren’t necessarily as familiar with going to art exhibitions can really enjoy looking at it…The fact that it is quite small scale, we had to make all of our accompanying text in this very accessible language. I’m hoping that people who wouldn’t necessarily go and look at an exhibit, if they go and stumble into it in the library, they’ll be like oh, maybe I should spend a few minutes looking at this. I hope it will draw in a broader audience, especially since its such an active student space up there, right above Starbucks, and it’s a very social student study area, people study up there but they also just hang out. I think just in general, I would hope that an art exhibit up there would kind of capture peoples attention who might not necessarily be as motivated to actually come to the Rose.

SM: I think we’re hoping, too, that it recontextualizes what contemporary art can be and how people can interact with it because it is such a social space. I think we’re hoping, and I think Carrie Schwartz’s hope in donating these works specifically with the intention to be shown in student spaces, not the museum, is what it is to live with contemporary art, to causally encounter it and not have these rules of how you are supposed to act in a museum and just kind of see it, and maybe it sparks a conversation with your friends while you’re studying. We had the library purchase several books that are also in the space—maybe you spend more time with the reading nook or maybe you just enjoy it visually. We’re hoping that it can spark a conversation with people who haven’t necessarily spent as much time with contemporary art or haven’t had a chance to come to the Rose. Then maybe that conversation will continue—there’s more collaboration with the Rose and other student spaces or the library in the future.