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Last spring a group of students began looking for advice on installing a formal art exhibition. They were art majors, mostly juniors, and wanted instruction on the nuts and bolts of how to show their work. In the past many had lobbed specific questions to Silas Cook, assistant curator and preparator of Reed's Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, who has been working with art as an independent fabricator and consultant for more than 20 years. Now they came to him with a more deliberate request. Would he teach them how to install a show? Cook agreed, and the informal seminar began. He and the dozen or so students met two evenings a month throughout the semester. They began with discussions about the conceptual decisions needed before in-stalling a show. From then on the seminar was broken down into workshops where students were introduced and encouraged to execute such museum practices as frame building, mat cutting, and 3-D installation techniques; they also talked about more theoretical questions of conservation and archival object handling. One entire two-evening segment focused on the art of lighting, using the current gallery exhibition to practice what they had discussed. |
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