For three faculty members in the Department of Fine Arts, curating exhibitions offers the opportunity to explore relationships between works of art, art and politics, history, and the environment.
Installation view of "(Ex)Urban Futures of the Recent Past" at Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin, January 18 - March 1, 2025. The exhibition of films and photographs by Gordon Matta-Clark was designed by David Hartt.
Earlier this year, artist and Associate Professor of Fine Arts David Hartt designed an exhibition of films and photographs by Gordon Matta-Clark, the famed American artist known for explorations of the built environment and urban decay who died in 1978. The exhibition was presented by Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin, which represents Matta-Clark’s estate in Europe and where Hartt's work has been the subject of group and solo exhibitions. The challenge, for Hartt, was how to present work that was “for lack of a better word, canonical,” in a new and interesting way. Drawing on his own interests as an artist and on the work of Reyner Banham, whose 1976 book Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past explores the mid-century trend for large-scale urban redevelopment, Hartt designed (Ex)Urban Futures of the Recent Past. He chose to present the work, largely curated by the gallery, in the context of the contemporary push toward exurban sprawl, an extension of the urban decline documented by Matta-Clark. Vinyl billboards enclose the show, much as they mark the outer limits of today’s cities.
“What would Matta-Clark think about the kind of endgame sprawl that we’re experiencing today?” Hartt asked himself.
David Hartt
For working artists like Hartt and other Weitzman faculty, curation and exhibition design present opportunities to think differently about how art is created and understood, and, importantly, to do so in partnership with other artists, patrons, and art viewers. They approach these practices with a range of formal and informal training and experience, and an interest in the relationships between different works of art, and between art and politics, history, and the environment.
“For me curating is about participating in a conversation,” says Kayla Romberger, a lecturer in fine arts and design at Weitzman and co-founder of Ulises, a bookshop and exhibition space in Philadelphia. “I see it as a creative act not unlike art making, but it tends to grow in dialogue with participants, including the public.”
Romberger earned a certificate in museum studies while working toward her MFA at the University of Michigan, and later worked at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Those experiences informed her work at Ulises, where Romberger and her other co-founders host four curatorial “seasons” a year, inviting artists to display work connected to a specified theme or framework. For the co-founders, the exercise is a way of thinking through how art can illuminate current events, and convene or create different publics. A recent season was centered on “Commodities.” One of the exhibiting artists, Candice Lin, produced “a broth soda that pets as well as humans might drink,” with cans displayed in a pyramid at Ulises.
“A foundational element to curating is you might have this sort of framework, and then you do really cede the platform over to the artist. It really is about supporting the ideas of the artist,” Romberger says. “Providing the framework allows a lot of play and texture.”
Another artist who presented work at Ulises in recent years was Ken Lum, the Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor at Weitzman. Despite working in his teenage years as a sign-maker for the Vancouver Public Library, Lum says his interest in fine art came relatively late, during his final year in college as a chemistry major. Some of his earliest projects had a curatorial strain. He wrote to prominent conceptual artists—Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner, Daniel Buren—who he’d only recently learned about, and presented their work at a small storefront in Vancouver.
“I just saw curation as a way of trying to know more about the whole system of art,” Lum says. “I’m interested in the constellation of art—the cosmology.”
Installation view of Ken Lum: Klump! Philadelphia, August 30 – November 24, 2024, shot for Commodities, Ulises, Philadelphia (Photo Constance Mensch)
In 2005, Lum was among the organizers of the show Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1945, along with Zhang Shengtian and Joanne Birnie Danzker, in selecting works of Chinese modernist artists and documentation of the cultural context. Finding documents and pictures to contextualize the works was a challenge, Lum says: “It was like total detective work.” Later, Lum was co-curator, with Paul Farber, a senior research scholar at Weitzman, of Monument Lab, a public art exhibition in Philadelphia. This year Lum is co-curating The Quest for Truth in the Idea of the Garden: China Garden Cultural Contemporary Art International Tour Exhibition at the Charles Addams Fine Art Gallery at Penn through June 8.
Later this year, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh will open Black Photojournalism, an exhibition of photographs from the end of WWII to the mid-1980s designed by David Hartt. Reviewing the material for the show led Hartt to turn to the idea of the library as an organizing principle for the exhibition. He designed furniture and displays with the intention of inviting people to spend time poring over the pictures. “It treats the viewer as a researcher,” he says. Like other exhibition design and curation projects, Hartt says it’s a matter of an artist bringing something of their own to the effort, and giving something up.
“It’s about suppressing the usual artist’s tendency, which is about putting forth a clear message or set of ideas, and rather stepping back and thinking more broadly about how to accommodate this work—how to care for it,” he says.
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