Museum’s Student Picks Offers Chance to be Curator for a Day

For aspiring curators, or just lovers of art, a chance for deep engagement in the process of displaying great works exists in Student Picks, a Museum of Art program that invites students to organize their own one-day exhibition.

Student Picks, now in its sixth year, awards the role of one-day curator to students through a lottery.  To be considered for the program, students may write their names on ballots and drop them in boxes placed in Neilson Library, Hillyer Library, Young Library, the Museum of Art lobby, and in the lower level of the Campus Center. Six Student Picks winners will be chosen the following week by drawing names out of the boxes. Two alternates will also be chosen.

The deadline to enter this year’s lottery is Friday, Sept. 20.

On the first Friday of each month following the drawing, a winning student will organize her own exhibition using works from the museum’s Cunningham Center for Prints, Drawings and Photographs. The collection contains more than 18,000 original works on paper, including pieces by Paul Cézanne, Käthe Kollwitz and Cindy Sherman.

“You don’t need any experience with art to have your own Student Picks show,” says Maggie Kurkoski ’12, curatorial fellow in the Cunningham Center. “We love working with students from all departments, from chemistry to religion to the study of women and gender.”

Kurkoski will assist winners in putting together their exhibitions, helping with choosing works to display, writing labels and mounting the pieces.

Meanwhile, this year’s first Student Picks exhibition, curated by Mina Zahin ’15, a lottery winner from last year, will be displayed on Friday, Oct. 4, from noon to 4 p.m. in the Cunningham Center on the second floor of the museum. Student Picks shows curated by winners of the September 20 lottery drawings are scheduled November 4, December 6, February 7, March 7 and April 4.

The Unmade Bed (1957), by Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976), a piece chosen by Kendyll Gage-Ripa ’12 for her Student Picks exhibition, titled “Who Is She, Really?”