Authors: Erin Peters (Joint Lecturer and Assistant Curator, HAA) and Liz Park (Associate Curator, Carnegie Int’l)
We are thrilled to announce an immersive course designed to bring students inside the Carnegie Museum of Art to learn first-hand about its highly anticipated exhibition – the 57th edition of the Carnegie International. The course develops from a multi-year collaboration of Pitt’s museum studies faculty and the International’s curatorial team. Erin Peters, Joint Lecturer and Assistant Curator, HAA, and Liz Park, Associate Curator, Carnegie Int’l, will develop and co-teach the course over the fall 2018 and spring 2019 semesters as an iteration of HAA 1021: Inside the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.
A major international survey of contemporary art, the upcoming Carnegie International will run from October 2018 through March 2019. Nearly spanning the academic year, the exhibition provides an ideal case study of current museum and curatorial practices. Our two-semester course will introduce general museum studies topics as well as focus on the multi-layered process of curating and interpreting a contemporary art exhibition through the International. The exhibition itself will be the classroom and the textbook for the course – students will engage different topics each week on the floor in the galleries. Our sessions will involve in-depth discussions of the artworks and their settings with guest speakers. The weekly topic will be determined by the exhibition and the featured artworks.
We are particularly excited about the participatory feature of the course that has the students conducting group field research in the museum, interacting with the visitors in a reciprocal learning process designed to augment the experience of both the students and audiences. In addition to other course assignments, field journals will chart our progress by chronicling the students’ weekly research shifts in the galleries and changes in their understanding over the span of the course. In order to attain a fuller understanding of the International as a curatorial project, the students will be encouraged to attend related programs leading up to and throughout the run of the exhibition.
To learn about what is already under way for the 57th edition of the Carnegie International, visit the website here