ARTH 103: Museums, Galleries, Curators

The Samek Art Museum is fortunate to possess a large and varied collection of works of art on paper, comprising prints, drawings, and photographs. These works were mostly acquired by the museum in the 1960s and 1970s as donations from generous alumni or by purchase. The Samek’s collection is actively used in teaching and research by faculty and students at Bucknell University, as was the case here. During Spring semester 2020 a group of students enrolled in my course Museums, Galleries, Curators embarked on an exhibition project as part of the course’s educational objectives. Having chosen artworks from the collection, students studied the artists who created them and the themes they depict. Students consulted the art historical scholarship about each work and researched the historical context in which these works were made and which they reflect. We also focused on the importance of the artworks within each artist’s oeuvre. The criteria of selection from the Samek’s collection were highly subjective; each student chose two works that she or he was most interested in learning about. Despite the subjectivity of our choices of artworks, the resulting exhibition nonetheless shows prints and photographs that span nearly the entire history of printmaking during six centuries in Western Europe and photography in Europe and the United States, extending from an early woodcut of 1511 by the great German printmaker Albrecht Dürer to a print by the contemporary New York artist Kiki Smith. The periods of greatest innovation and the greatest masters in the history of Western printmaking are well represented by characteristic works. For example, the woodcut by Dürer and the etching by Rembrandt displayed here are considered to be among the finest works ever created in these mediums. Professor Christiane Andersson ARTH 103 in Spring 2020