The John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage will host its first annual Public Humanities Lab from Feb. 20 to March 20. The new iniative will transform the Carriage House Gallery of the Nightengale-Brown House into a venue for student-curated exhibitions, installations and pop-up experiences.
The Public Humanities Lab was devised by an eight-member graduate student committee headed by Marisa Brown, the assistant director of programs聽 at the center. The student curators are all graduate students completing a degree in Public Humanities.
The Lab aims to give Public Humanities students an opportunity to develop hands-on curatorial experience, Brown said. 鈥淎 lot of our students go on to work in museums and galleries and places where they do exhibition work. ... (The Lab) is a nice way to give the students a chance to curate their own exhibitions in a gallery, not work as assistants on an exhibition or do it as part of a class project,鈥� she added.
The idea for the Public Humanities Lab 鈥渃ame out of a discussion about wanting to showcase student projects and think more about student work-in-progress,鈥� said Bryn Pernot GS, a member of the committee and co-curator of聽 the program鈥檚 first scheduled exhibition.
The experiential exhibition curated by Pernot and Alyson Myer GS, 鈥淓scape the Haffenreffer: Behind the Scenes,鈥� showed from Feb. 20 to 22 and was an escape-room prototype centered around ideas about anthropology and archaeology in practice. The Lab offered Pernot and Myers an 鈥渙pportunity to test out the narrative elements of the game鈥� before its finished product comes to the Haffenreffer Museum this spring.
In designing the exhibition, 鈥渢he fun part (was) thinking about how to gamify education while also being aware of the ethics and particular questions that are facing anthropology museums,鈥� Pernot added.
This week鈥檚 exhibition, entitled 鈥淢onument-Worthy: Personal Memory Markers,鈥� challenges commonly held ideas about monuments, memory and meaning. The installation was curated by Hannah Mooney GS and Molly Pailet GS, two first-years in the Public Humanities program who are interested in pursuing careers in public history and museum education.
鈥淭here are all these monuments and memorials everywhere that people just walk by, or interact with, and are these places all meaningful? Maybe not,鈥� Mooney said. 鈥淪o what are actual meaningful things for people?鈥�
This question drove the curation of the exhibit鈥檚 content. The artwork was supplied by Brown undergraduates, graduate students, Rhode Island School of Design students, some community members 鈥� including an artist-in-residence at AS220 鈥� and friends of the curators from as far away as Denver. Each 鈥渕onument鈥� has a distinct character and voice.
鈥淪ome are broad to the human experience, others are important to (the artists) and their personal experiences,鈥� Pailet said. One work, called 鈥淎 Monument to Capitalism,鈥� features United Airlines鈥� MileagePlus air awards card and an iPhone in adjacent bejeweled temples. 鈥淭he glow from our iPhone鈥檚 apps illuminates our lives in the way that churches鈥� stained glass once did鈥� begins the monuments鈥� accompanying statement. Another work, a 鈥淢onument to Wellness,鈥� features a bouquet of flowers inside of a biohazard waste container, functioning as a monument to 鈥渢he spiritual death鈥� that the artist experienced on the day of her diagnosis with Crohn鈥檚 disease. Furthermore, two works addressed the Charlottesville incident.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a great thing the gallery is open to the public 鈥� not just the Brown community 鈥� and a lot of the things that the students are working on are really timely, interesting and provocative,鈥� Brown said. 鈥淲e didn鈥檛 know quite what we were going to get, or what the programs would look like, but I was just really excited when we put it all together. The gallery features 鈥渟uch a diversity of points of view and kinds of projects,鈥� he said.
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