Susan Jahoda and Nathan Ford - Picturing Northampton - Exhibitions

The Inherent Quality of the Object, 2004
Digital video projection (looped 2:35 minutes); digital video displayed on monitors at the Smith College Museum of Art and public sites in Northampton (16 minutes); and six objects from New Guinea, gifts to the Smith College Museum of Art from Frances Peregrine Palmer, (class of 1966)

Susan Jahoda
& Nathan Ford

When invited to participate in the exhibition Picturing Northampton, we thought it worthwhile to think about how the museum itself functions as a “picturing” device for the communities of Northampton.

The Inherent Quality of the Object began when we discovered eighty-two items from colonial New Guinea in the museum’s collection, donated by Smith alumna Frances Peregrine Palmer. Ms. Palmer traveled to New Guinea shortly after graduating in 1966 and gave her collection to the museum twenty years later. Curious about the histories of these objects, we invited her to be interviewed, and then began an on-going exploration and selective documentation of the gift within its institutional framework. We also conducted an interview with Suzannah Fabing, director and chief curator of the museum since 1992.

Central to the project are questions concerning how institutions define cultural “importance” through either explicit or implicit value systems. Does what a museum collects, categorizes, archives and displays reveal intentional and unintentional myth-making processes? And if so, what roles do these processes play in shaping audiences.

As a multiple-site work, installed at the museum as well as in public spaces in Northampton, The Inherent Quality of the Object attempts to rethink the traditional interplay between museum and audience.

Biographies

Susan Jahoda
Born in Bolton, England, 1952. Lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Susan Jahoda is an interdisciplinary artist, art editor for Re-thinking Marxism, and Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She received a B.F.A. from the Visual Studies Workshop (New York) and an M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work includes performance, installation, images/texts, and photography. She has been the recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been exhibited and published widely in both Europe and North America.

Nathan Ford
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, 1971. Lives in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

Nathan Ford is a film/video maker who has lived in the Northampton area for most of his life. He graduated from Hampshire College in 1998 and is a candidate for an M.F.A. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he is concentrating in experimental documentary filmmaking. Ford also teaches Video Production and Documentary Filmmaking at Bay Path College. His films have been recognized locally and internationally, screening at the Northampton Film Festival and receiving a Director’s Citation at the Black Mariah Film Festival. Recent work includes white male, 30-35, which was exhibited at the University of Massachusetts’s Student Union Gallery in March of 2004.