When it came time to select works for the first exhibition from the 9,000-piece Corcoran collection given to 国产小呦女in May 2018, the students were running the show.聽
Moves Like Walter: New Curators Open the Corcoran Legacy Collection, which runs through December 15 at the 国产小呦女Museum, features 87 paintings, photographs, and works on paper hand-picked by 18 grad students in the College of Arts and Sciences. The guest curators were enrolled in Jack Rasmussen鈥檚 spring course on curatorial practice.
鈥淭heir job was to put together an exhibition that means something,鈥 says Rasmussen, museum director and four-time CAS alumnus. 鈥淔or me, it was the idea of a young curator coming into a collection basically formed in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, and seeing what鈥檚 relevant today.鈥
The result is what the Washington Post called 鈥渁 coming-out party for the dormant [Corcoran] collection鈥濃攁 provocative and playful juxtaposition of old and new, traditional and radical. The exhibit explores five themes as diverse as the works themselves: race, gender, motherhood, abstraction, and nostalgia of place.
The inspiration behind the show is the late American curator Walter Hopps, who served as director of the Corcoran from 1970 to 1972. Hopps was known for being erratic, challenging鈥攁nd always late. Yet he brought a fiercely personal and imaginative perspective to his work鈥攐ne that the students embraced as they conceived, curated, and supervised installation of the exhibition.
The Corcoran Gallery of Art, one of the first private museums in the US, was established in 1869. After it was shuttered in 2014, the Corcoran鈥檚 19,493-piece collection鈥攊ncluding works by Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt, and Andy Warhol鈥攚as divided among the National Gallery of Art and 10 other Smithsonian museums, several DC universities, and the US Supreme Court. The gift, one of the largest free art distributions in American history, is a 鈥渙nce-in-a-lifetime opportunity,鈥 Rasmussen says.
Moves Like Walter is just the first of many opportunities for the public to enjoy AU鈥檚 masterful new collection.
鈥淲e hope that the exhibition will prompt viewers to take more risks, ask more questions, and love art feverishly,鈥 says art history student Abigail Swaringam, CAS/MA 鈥20.