Curatorial Seminars

Trouble in Paradise: The Art of Polynesian Warfare (Prof. G. Shaw)

Tapping into the rich collections of the University Museum, this course explores the arts of warfare in Polynesia. Clubs were the most effective weapons, and because clubs were so important, the Polynesians developed them into objects both of deadly effectiveness and also great beauty. While focusing primarily on creating an exhibition of the clubs, a variety of material and visual culture objects from the Pacific will be studied in order to provide context. Thanks to the generous donation from the Halpern-Rogath Family, this class affords students a unique opportunity to create an exhibit for the museum in one semester. The course includes research trips to London and Hawaii.

Whimsical Works: The Playful Design of Charles and Ray Eames (Prof. G. Marcus)

Whimsical Works: The Playful Designs of Charles and Ray Eames Featuring toys, children’s furniture, and quirky films, along with photographs chronicling their history and creation, this exhibition focuses on the famous husband and wife design team’s serious approach to playful things. Charles and Ray Eames are best known for the molded plywood and plastic furniture they introduced to America in the 1940s. Organized in cooperation with the Eames office by students in the Halpern-Rogath Curatorial Seminar supported by Penn’s Department of Art History.

The Painter-Etcher (Prof. M. Cole)

Prints by Dürer, Parmigianino, Brueghel, Barocci, Rubens, Rembrandt, Boucher, and a host of other master painters are currently featured “The Early Modern Painter-Etcher,” an exhibition on view at the Arthur Ross Gallery. The exhibition was curated by Michael Cole and by Madeleine Viljoen, in collaboration with Larry Silver and a number of current and former Penn students. The exhibition surveys etchings from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries by more than sixty European artists who, while not professional printmakers, took up the challenge of making works on paper. It highlights “experimental” sheets, in some cases featuring the single printed work a famous painter made. The loaned objects come from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, The Baltimore Museum of Art, and eleven other major public and private collections. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, prepared in part during a spring 2006 Halpern-Rogath Curatorial Seminar that Profs. Cole and Silver led. The book, published by Penn State University Press, includes contributions by all the members of that class, as well as other distinguished print scholars from the United States and Canada

Issues of Contemporary Art and the Art of Curating (2004-05), )Prof. K. Beckman)

A curatorial seminar coordinated with the Institute of Contemporary Art, taught by Professor Karen Beckman

Drawings from the Ashmolean Museum (2004), (Prof. S. Sidlauskas)

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has a large, distinguished collection of drawings, with particularly strong holdings in 19th- and 20th-century works, including masterpieces by Millet, Degas, Cézanne, Corot, Morisot, Rodin, as well as prized examples of German Nazarene and English Pre-Raphaelite art. Students in this class researched the Ashmolean collection -- spending a week in Oxford -- and drew upon their research to develop an exhibition of some of the museum's most fascinating works. The exhibition was held at the Arthur Ross Gallery of the University of Pennsylvania. The students published a catalogue, organized by Prof. Susan Sidlauskas (Penn) and Dr. Jon Whiteley (Oxford), and developed an accompanying website.