Audio Transcript of Following the Thread Video
This video created by Levi Lewis and produced by the Exhibition Development Seminar documents the Elizabeth Talford Scott Community Initiative.
[Deyane Moses] Although these institutions have different missions, different goals, different collections, we all have a commonality that we love art and that we love the city of Baltimore and that we want to educate in terms of the arts. EDS gives you a lot of skills in terms of work, but also gives you the philosophies and the structure of how to curate exhibitions—whether that’s working in communities, selecting the pieces, as well as the foundations and the research that goes into creating an exhibition that speaks to the whole community or the whole person.
[Andrea Dixon] The Exhibition Development Seminar, EDS, is really the A to Z of understanding how to put together an exhibition.
[Deyane] I would define EDS, because I’ve gone through it before, as a very immersive hands-on experience. You really get to see what it’s like to be a curator at its most basic principles.
[Linda Day-Clark] Because I think curating is almost a work of art in itself, right? You have found this magic in these pieces, but now you have to figure out how to present them so that magic, you know, is felt by everyone else.
[Aleem Allison] EDS is an intense class. It’s not just a class, it’s a moment that teaches not just exhibition design, not just curatorial design, but the museum structure.
[Andrea] So as well as each of the students being a curator, they also take on roles. And it really varies from year to year, depending on the number of students. You know, there’s the marketing role, and the graphic design role, and project management, and if there’s enough students there’s programming, and there’s all the things that go into making a successful exhibition. And they’ll install it themselves. They understand what it takes. They understand all aspects of it. The agency that they’re given in the control over the process really empowers them. They are making the decisions. So they, you know, in a way are dealing with the consequences
[Deyane] Agency is really important in the class. You’re a student curator, not a student, but a student curator. They have the ability to work with the curators, suggest some pieces that should be in the exhibition and why, but mostly also the public programming. How will the public program talk to the community? How are we going to invite the community in? The students have agency over all of that.
[Aleem] As you do the research, as you think of colors and fonts, everything, you have to think about everybody who’s coming, everybody who you want to come, everybody who you think is going to come, right? We just rode down North Avenue. What about some of those people coming in here? Engaging the community is very important when it comes to art because there is a lot of art within a museum, outside of the museum, and there are a lot of people who don’t get to experience either one of those, either coming to the museum or the museum going out.
[Deyane] That’s something EDS and Curatorial Practice at MICA really stress is working within community and doing that equitably, authentically, what’s the word I’m looking for, organically.
[Melanie Hood-Wilson] So my associate Pat Halle and I were engaged by Maryland Institute College of Art to come in and to do some coaching and some consulting for this particular EDS course. We were asked to come in to do some work with the instructor, Deyane, and her students in how to begin to think about—just to begin to think about—how to make art spaces more inclusive, and then to work with the students to hopefully make the spaces, make the installations that they’re putting up all around Baltimore inclusive. And to keep those questions and those conversations in mind that we’re having with them along and about.
[Deyane] This year, the class accompanies undergraduate as well as graduate students from institutions all over the city. We have students from JHU, students from Morgan as well, in addition to MICA. So this year, we are creating eight different exhibitions and nine different public programs at nine different venues across the city, and they’re all going to be free and showcase at least one piece of Elizabeth Talford Scott’s in communication or in conversation with works around it in the places. They’re going to happen at Coppin State University at the Cryor Art Gallery, Maryland Institute College of Art Inside the Decker Gallery, at the Maryland Center for History and Culture, the Walters Art Museum, Hopkins’ George Peabody Library,
the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, the Peale Museum in partnership with Arts Every Day, Morgan State University’s James E. Lewis Museum of Art, and the Community Space at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
[Deyane] The community initiative was birthed from George Ciscle, who founded EDS, as well as the Curatorial Practice program here at MICA. The first exhibition that EDS had in the nineties was with Elizabeth Talford Scott’s work. And since then, EDS has worked with different institutions around the city. And so JHU, Morgan, Coppin, they were all one of those institutions—same thing as MCHC, Peale, the Reginald F. Lewis, and JELMA. They’ve all worked with EDS before. So what George wanted to do was have a retrospective of that exhibition with Elizabeth Talford Scott, but also a retrospective of the EDS partners.
[Deyane] EDS is a six credit course. It takes place over the fall and the spring semester. It’s a yearlong commitment. We meet for three hours and it’s flexible based on students needs. But we’re trying to promote a hybrid model where students are working online for a brief bit of time with myself, with each other and our graduate teaching assistant, and then in the afternoon they’re able to work with their community partners and their mentors. And so the mentors have made themselves accessible to the students, mostly on Fridays but other times throughout the week, to work with them, to talk with them about their plans and expectations for the exhibition, and also how things work in their museum because every institution is different. And the beauty about EDS this year is that the different venues all have a degree of difficulty, I would say. Some community partners have their exhibition all planned out; they know some things that they want to do, the pieces that they’ve already chosen. Other venues were able to start from scratch. So depending on how much a student might want to learn or what some different experiences they might have in these institutions, they might have chose one versus the other. What we tried to do this semester was give students the opportunity to see all the venues, understand what we’re doing, and then select what venues they might want, or community partners they might want to work with based on the skills that they want to learn. So some people want to work with children, so they went to the Peale. Some people wanted to work with acquisitions and learn the interior process of acquiring things, so they came to MCHC, who is purchasing “Abstract #1” of Elizabeth Talford Scott.
[Joseph Taylor] I think I was set on the Reginald F. Lewis since the venue crawl, actually. I guess just being in the space, like seeing how oriented it was towards, like, furthering Black voices and making space for Black artists made me feel really inclined to just, like, be here.
[Elijah Ramos] It’s been very good. It’s been a lot of taking notes and being able to transfer that energy into the artwork. We have to have thorough information and use that in a creative context.
[Simeng True] I hope to gain some responsibility, being able to, like, keep a plan and enforce it, and help Reginald F. Lewis to start the exhibition and be like, “Yeah, I was part of that, I did that.”
[Andrea] It’s energizing, working with the students, because they bring a different perspective. We’re very routine, we’ve been doing this a long time, so we don’t necessarily have that fresh perspective.
[Maddie Hazouri] Collaboration has been so key—which is not really something you can be taught, it’s something you have to experience many times over with many different people.
[Deyane] Collaboration is, I think, what makes EDS unique. We get to go behind the scenes as undergraduate and grad students and work closely within the collections and with curators. We have that one-on-one time with them. A lot of people may not have that, but we have that accessibility here.
[Andrea] You know, just reaching out to other large organizations can be a little daunting. Once they’ve done it, then they’ll have the confidence moving forward to do it again.
[Deyane] I think that what makes EDS special this year especially is being able to provide this access to other institutions and other students outside of MICA. Having the accessibility in EDS is important because I didn’t have that accessibility growing up. I didn’t have that until I got to MICA. But having this experience while you’re in class and while you’re in school, it just further can progress your career: having the connections with people, learning about these different systems or different processes that, once you know, put you ahead of your peers. And I feel as though that EDS really can help you understand that—like that’s on the job learning, things you can’t learn in the book. A lot of schools have museum programs and different things like that, but not necessarily the connections that they need to have to allow students this access so that they can progress the careers once they’re out of school. What it symbolizes for me that we’re able to add institutions in that we’ve worked with in the past, symbolizes to me a family, a support system. And so for us to come together on this same platform, to think about Elizabeth Talford Scott’s work and the many different conversations that we can have in our institutions is a beautiful thing, because we’re all different. And so to see what the students come up with, what the institutions have planned, and what their expectations are is going to be a beautiful thing to see when all this comes together, because I don’t know what we’re going to create. It shows inclusivity, it shows diversity, and it shows support for the arts, for EDS, and that they believe in this mission that we’ve been working for and working towards in terms of curatorial practice.
[Deyane] I hope the students learn more than just putting together exhibitions, to be honest with you. I feel like, to me that’s almost the easy part. To put together exhibitions you have, you can make the checklist, you can figure out what to do. But in terms of, like, really building the relationships, talking and communicating with people, their wants, their needs, and then interpreting that information to visually represent to people, that’s the difficult part. Getting all these voices in, learning from your peers, those are the things I want the students to really get out of it—it’s community, and it’s sharing, and it’s working in all these different ideas together. I think that’s the part for me, the collaborative work, that I really hope students get out of it. We often need to get out and we need to get out and work collaboratively.
[Andrea] It’s really wild because the Exhibition Development Seminar, all the different shows that have happened, although it’s the same program, they feel vastly different. The exhibitions stand on their own.
[Deyane] This is a tall order that we’re doing right now. It seems impossible, I’m not gonna lie to you. This seems impossible, that we could do this many exhibitions and public programs in a very short amount of time. But working with the group of people that we’re working with this year, the students as well as the community partners, have shown nothing but top-tier professionalism, and everyone is really pushing forward in making this work, and I know that we can do it. We have different ideas, we have different goals in what we’re doing, but what we’re doing is a beautiful thing. And I think this is an historic thing. I hope everyone in the class knows that this is like an historic collaboration where nine institutions are getting on the same page for one mission. I don’t know if I’ve seen that. But this is a beautiful thing that, at least for a few months, we’ll all be celebrating Elizabeth Talford Scott and her amazing work, what she’s done over the years. The students might not realize it now, but I think once this is over, we’ll all see just how impactful this class is going to be on our lives after it’s over.