This fall was a very active and exciting time for us here in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History. In September we opened our new student gallery, Classroom 102. Located on the ground floor of the art building, Classroom 102 affords our students hands-on experience with the myriad aspects of organizing and installing exhibitions. The students presented a variety of graduate and undergraduate shows that changed every two weeks; these included the 1st Annual Undergraduate Juried Show, which was juried by several graduate art history and fine art students; Conversations, a collaborative effort between the MA and MFA students; and Inspiration, though, is contagious and multiform, curated by Jeffrey Anderson, Professor of Art History, and Bibi Obler, Assistant Professor of Art History and the newest member of our faculty.

Thom Brown, FAAH Chair, recently sat down with Bibi Obler to discuss her experience as co-curator of the exhibition.

T.B.: I thought it might be interesting to pair you with a senior faculty member—Jeff Anderson—to organize an exhibition of your choosing in our new student gallery, Classroom 102. How did you decide on a theme or topic?
B.O.: We didn’t have any particular theme when we started. We knew we wanted to feature a range of student work, but that was all. We went upstairs and explored the studios—so we were mainly exposed to what the MFA students were doing; talked a little to the students, especially Teresa Sites, who’s in charge of the Gallery Committee this year; and very quickly a theme, or set of themes, began to emerge, given the art that we were seeing. Several of the students were working with the idea of games. Several were making constructions of some kind. And several were working with grids. There were not enough examples of any one trend to organize a show around, say, games alone. Instead, we became interested in the way these strands of commonality made visible the communal aspect of studio practice at GW. Just from looking at the work, you could see how Steve Ioli, for example, might have been looking at Sarah Koss’s use of string when he started working with string in quite different ways, or vice versa—a suspicion confirmed when we started talking to the students. We wanted to highlight these sorts of interactions in the exhibition.

T.B.: How did you choose the work for the show?
B.O.: The funny thing is that we had a sense of what would go into the show when we made our first tour of the studios, but by the time the show was about to go up, a lot of that work had changed, or wasn’t yet ready, or had just been featured in the previous exhibition. And some new work had appeared that fit with our concept. Sarah’s “Something Something Laocoon,” which ended up being the centerpiece of the exhibition, related to some wall drawings she had only recently started experimenting with in her studio. We were so excited about them that we suggested she do whatever she wanted with the entire front wall.

T.B.: Did the two of you divide duties such as studio visits, the selection of works, and/or the layout of the exhibition?
B.O.: We pretty much did everything together. Jeff was able to go to some of the crits, which I couldn’t go to, but otherwise we figured out the works and layout together.

T.B.: Was there anything in this process that surprised you?
B.O.: Not surprise per se. I was impressed with how helpful the students were: Steve and Patrick McDonough are incredibly patient and thorough installers; Teresa was great with graphic design; Chanan Delivuk was wonderfully enthusiastic about and effective in turning the reception into a performance piece about veganism. I was worried that the show wouldn’t come together well visually and thrilled when everything was hung and painted and looked good.

T.B.: What was the reaction of the students?
B.O.: I could be imagining things, but I had this vague sense that when we started, the students were a bit skeptical. They’re so excited about the new gallery and have so many ideas for exhibitions that they want to put on. I think they might have been slightly resentful that we were taking over the space for two weeks. But I think that, as we started to have more intensive interactions with them about the work that was going into the show, they came to appreciate the slightly different perspective that Jeff and I, as art historians, bring to contemporary art.

T.B.: Would you be willing to do this again next year? What would you do differently?
B.O.: Absolutely—I can’t wait. I think we’ll try to do it slightly later in the year, when there is more work to choose from. And of course the exhibition will be entirely different because there will be new students and new art.

To see images from this and other exhibitions, please visit our website at:
http://www.gwu.edu/~art/Gallery/classroom102site.htm

In other news, the department recently sponsored two day-trips. The first trip was to Manhattan, where students visited a number of museums and galleries. Anne Goodyear, an assistant curator at the National Portrait Gallery who taught a graduate seminar on Marcel Duchamp for us in the fall, organized the second trip, to Philadelphia. The students spent the afternoon with Michael Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who discussed the Duchamp works in the collection, as well as his role as co-curator of the U.S. Pavilion at the upcoming Venice Biennale.

Zan Dumbadze, Assistant Professor of Art History, and Dean Kessmann, Associate Professor of Photography, traveled to Florida recently to meet with GW alumni at Basel Miami Beach, an international contemporary art fair. Zan gave several private tours during which he introduced a wide variety of works on view; later, both Zan and Dean discussed their work and presented an overview of the department’s scholarly and creative activities.

Two of our art history professors recently attended international conferences. Phil Jacks, Associate Professor of Art History, represented the United States at the international conference Giorgio Vasari e la sua epoca. Phil chaired a session that presented three talks by Italian scholars. David Bjelajac, Professor of Art History, delivered a paper titled Freemasonry and the Alchemy of John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark at the conference The Expression of Freemasonry, which took place at the International School of Hague in the Netherlands.

Finally, we would like to congratulate Siobhan Rigg, Assistant Professor of New Media, and Mary Coble, Professorial Lecturer, both of whom received individual, unrestricted grants of $5,000 from the DC Commission on Arts and Humanities.

We look forward to a busy spring 2009. Heading the list of events in the new semester is our participation in the Inaugural Parade. Throughout the fall, Turker Ozdogan, Professor of Ceramics, assisted with the design and construction of GW’s inaugural float. He worked with GW’s Student Association, the School of Engineering, and a number of students from the department preparing the float for the inauguration on January 20th, 2009. This activity caps a successful 2008 and sets the stage for an even more active year as our students, faculty, staff and alumni continue to expand the department’s horizons both within the nation’s capital and beyond.

Please visit our website at www.gwu.edu/~art for further information about upcoming events, exhibitions, and other news.