Classes

Classes will meet in the Brown Fine Arts Center at Smith College, a state-of-the-art facility that reopened in spring 2003 after a major renovation and expansion. Classes will utilize a variety of pedagogic means to enliven and enrich the learning experience. There will be two principal instructors, two teaching assistants, and several guest lecturers.

Sessions will take place five days a week, with occasional evening offerings as well. Summer Institute students will have the use of Smith’s libraries, image collections, technological resources, and other facilities.

Museum Visits

By visiting a range of different kinds of art museums and meeting with members of their professional staffs, participants will come to understand how museums carry out their responsibilities. They will also learn how differences in their missions and primary audiences may result in very different institutions. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, MassMoCA, and the Yale Center for British Art, for example, have much in common but also have significantly different goals, strengths, and challenges.

Northampton is located in the Connecticut River Valley of Central Massachusetts, an area rich in museums, many of them affiliated with the Five Colleges. It is well positioned for an easy day trip to museums in Williamstown, Worcester, Hartford or New Haven. A four-day trip to New York City and a two-day trip to the Boston area will include visits to an auction house, art galleries, and a conservation laboratory, to help students understand how museums build and care for their collections.

At each site, the class will meet with a member of the professional staff, who will introduce them to the particular issues with which he or she is presently concerned. The institutions to be visited, and the individuals to be consulted, will be chosen as the time for the program draws closer, so that current issues will be sure to be addressed.

The first “site visit” will be a detailed two-day exploration of the Smith College Museum of Art. By understanding how a smaller museum is organized and what its staff roles, budget and governance are, students will establish an intellectual framework for visiting other institutions.

Subsequent site visits will be chosen on the basis of interesting developments and instructive comparisons. The list will vary from year to year, but in general at least two museums of each type will be included. Some possible candidates for visits are listed below.

• College and university museums (RISD, Yale, Smith, Williams)
• Encyclopedic urban museums (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Worcester Art Museum; Wadsworth Atheneum)
• Museums based on private collections (Gardner, Frick, Clark Art Institute)
• Culturally-specific museums (Whitney, Asia Society Gallery, Yale Center for British Art, El Museo del Barrio)
• Community museums (Fitchburg, Newark)
• Contemporary art museums/kunsthallen (MASS MoCA, Dia:Beacon,
  PS1, DeCordova, ICA Boston)

At each museum, students will meet with one or more staff members around a topic of interest. For example, an exhibition designer might take students through an exhibition in preparation; someone supervising a museum expansion project might walk them through the architectural planning process and/or the site itself; an operations director might discuss crowd-control issues around a blockbuster show; a curator might explain the process of making a particular acquisition or deciding how to present the permanent collection; a conservator might show students the inner workings of a lab; a director might talk about handling a controversy, modifying governance structures, or devising a long-range plan; a marketing director might explain a new campaign or image make-over; an editor might take the class through the stages of producing a catalogue.

In New York, students will visit an auction house (and if possible an auction in progress), galleries of different sorts, one or more private collectors, and perhaps an artist’s studio or a production workshop, to gain an understanding of how art makes its way into museums.

At each site, students will be asked to consider several questions that have been circulated in advance. Oral reports and class discussion will amplify each trip.

Travel will be by Smith College van. Overnight accommodations will be arranged in New York and Boston.

Over the course of the Summer Institute, students will be exposed to a variety of individuals doing interesting work in the art world, who become potential role models. They will also gain a more nuanced understanding of the types of issues museums confront every day than they could obtain solely from reading or lecture presentations.

Work in the Museum

The Smith College Museum of Art is widely recognized as one of the leading college museums in the country. Its collection of nearly 25,000 works spans several millennia of history and many continents. The museum is particularly noted for its strong holdings of European and American art of the 19th and 20th centuries and for the depth and quality of its collections of prints, drawings, and photographs. Its highly professional staff is committed to undergraduate education. Students will be introduced to all aspects of their work.

Hands-on assignments in the Smith College Museum are an important aspect of the SIAMS program. Students will conduct research on works from the collection, then plan and mount an exhibition in one of the museum’s galleries. They will learn how to write scholarly catalogue entries, didactic materials for a general audience, and marketing materials designed to draw visitors in—very different modes of conveying information about art. They will confront the ethical dilemmas surrounding the acquisition of antiquities or the sale of works from the collection. They will learn how conservators and curators tell originals from fakes, how educators work with different age groups, and how funding is found to make it all happen.