Friction Helps Educate through Experience

Kevin Murphy and class at WCMAKevin Murphy and his students are untangling what he calls “a knotty problem” in his class at the Williams College Museum of Art. In “Experimental and Experiential Approaches to Curating American Vernacular Art,” WCMA’s Eugénie Prendergast Curator of American Art is reconsidering the role of folk art in museums. His answer to the problem is currently on exhibit in “Material Friction: Americana and American Art.” But Murphy’s vision won’t be the last word in how WCMA exhibits folk art. His students will approach the same knotty problem when they rehang the entire exhibition this fall.

Material Friction brings together folk art—art made by craftspeople with little or no academic training—alongside fine art. It’s an unusual way to approach the material, which Murphy says many museums exhibit separately, in a room he calls “a folk art ghetto.” While Murphy has a room like that at WCMA today, in other rooms, he has created tension by hanging folk and fine art side by side. For example, a mid-19th century log scale—used to determine how much lumber a certain number of felled trees would produce—hangs near a Hudson River School painting, asking visitors to consider not just the beauty of rural America but also how the logging industry affected that landscape.

The folk art is on loan from the collection of Karin and Jonathan Fielding ’64. The fine art comes from WCMA’s permanent collection and addresses similar themes as the items on loan. Five art history graduate students and four undergraduates are working in small groups using a half-inch scale model of the museum and miniatures of works from both of these collections to try out their ideas of the rehang.

“There are endless possibilities for the show,” says Aurora J. Brown ’16, a studio art major who works part-time at WCMA. “Every visitor learns differently, so we are trying to create an experience that will be understandable and enjoyable to as many people as possible.” After each group presents their ideas for the rehang, all three groups will collaborate to curate the second iteration of Material Friction.

Murphy explains that the process of curating always involves collaboration. “I want to give students a taste for that type of work,” he says. According to graduate student Elliot Krasnopoler, there’s a learning curve: “On one hand, I always have someone else to bounce ideas off of, but when we don’t all agree on the re-hang, someone has to compromise.”

Art department chair Stefanie Solum says this class is a wonderful addition to the art curriculum, giving students the chance to work together and make those compromises as they re-envision the exhibition. “It’s a unique opportunity for students to experience one curator’s vision and then do the work of reinterpreting the same material,” she says. “I’m very excited to see the results.”

Murphy’s exhibition is open now; the rehang will be on view from the middle of November through January 25, 2015.