Currently on display at the Middlebury College Museum of Art is a new kind of exhibition, curated by Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Associate Curator of Ancient Art Pieter Broucke and his first-year seminar class, Greece vs Rome: The Eighteenth Century Quest for the Sources of Western Civilization.
For the first time, a group of students can be largely credited for the installation of an exhibit in the College’s museum.
“I managed the process, but the students did the work,” said Broucke, who could not be more proud of the class and of the exhibit. “I had to consciously not make decisions about certain things. I was a voice among theirs, and we really decided among things democratically.”
The idea for the seminar came to Broucke after he offered a first-year seminar in conjunction with an exhibition on the Royal Tombs of Ore.
“Working with an exhibition, with real objects as the main focus of the course, was an eye-opener. It was fun and academically very relevant. So I thought it would be great to curate — not just work with, but actually curate an exhibition with students,” Broucke explained.
The exhibition includes four volumes of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens, treasures of Middlebury’s Special Collections Library.
“We only needed to borrow a couple of pieces to make something possible here, so I made the proposal for the exhibition,” said Broucke, who compiled a large body of material before the seminar began that his students could choose from.
Students in the seminar were involved in each step of the process: selecting and organizing materials, formulating a “curatorial objective,” tackling the issue of how to put a debate in an exhibition and making proposals for the aesthetics of the installation.
The class aimed to depict the impassioned debate between the prominence of Greek and Roman artistic influences in 18th-century Rome by focusing on the work of a few key players in the discussion: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who defended Rome, and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett for the defense of Greece. In this context, the visuals of the exhibit become rhetorical devices and propaganda for both sides.
“We also wanted it to be about architecture,” adds Broucke, pointing to the design of the exhibit.
“That’s why you see these bold colors and blocks and we wanted a very contemporary letter type to dust off some of that 18th-century dust.”
Students were required to make group proposals for the layout of the materials after studying other exhibits in the museum and analyzing what worked well about them and what did not.
“Something I never thought about was the installation and design process of an exhibition,” says Carly Shumaker ’13, a student in the seminar.
“The designer must really understand the psychology of viewers in order to create an orderly layout that makes sense and flows.”
After meeting with a designer on multiple occasions and paying special attention to details such as the color scheme and font of the exhibition, the students’ vision puts a modern spin on an ancient topic, making it relevant even today.
“Piranesi is the first one to proactively argue for artistic freedom. That is very important,” says Broucke.
“We don’t need to imitate anybody. We have a responsibility to do our own thing as artists.”
The first-year seminar also included a student symposium that was open to the public, where Broucke’s students made 20-minute presentations on various related topics, including the process of printmaking and the biographies of the topic’s key players.
Frank Salmon, architectural historian and chair of the Department of History of Art at Cambridge University in England, gave a keynote lecture sponsored by the Museum of Art and Architecture, the Classics Department, the Rohatyn Center for International Affairs and Ross Commons.
“I wanted to get somebody to put this on a larger plane,” said Broucke,
“So I asked Frank Salmon to contextualize the exhibition within the history of architecture as well as within a broad cultural history.”
After the lecture, students from the seminar were invited to have dinner with Salmon at Ross Dining Hall.
After the phenomenal success of his first-year seminar class, Broucke hopes to continue incorporating the Museum of Art in future classes.
“The museum is here as a resource,” he said. “It can be used directly, not just to look at, but as a tool for teaching and learning.”
Curating the Classics: Students revive the Greece vs. Rome debate
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