News of the Collegespring2007

Gallery Director Receives Getty and Allen Grants

Stephanie Snyder ’91, the John and Anne Hauberg Curator and Director of Reed’s Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, recently received two prestigious curatorial awards: a Getty fellowship to support her research, as well as a Paul G. Allen grant to fund an upcoming Cooley Gallery exhibition to be produced in collaboration with Portland-based writer Matthew Stadler.

The Curatorial Research Fellowship, awarded by the Getty Foundation of California, will allow Snyder to pursue three months of research on Daniel Spoerri (born Daniel Feinstein, 1930). Spoerri is a Romanian-born Swiss artist known for his tableaux pieges, or “snare paintings,” made by fixing objects —on tables or in drawers—into permanent place exactly as the artist finds them.

Snyder, who has, for two years, been conducting research on Spoerri’s role in the development of non-commercial, community-based, experiential art practices of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, is planning an exhibition of Spoerri’s work at the Cooley Gallery. Established in 2000, the Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship program supports the professional scholarly development of curators by providing them with funds to undertake short-term research or study projects that advance the understanding of art and art history.

“Receiving support from the Getty will allow me to conduct collections and library research in New York City; Vienna, Austria; Cologne, Germany; and Bern, Switzerland,” says Snyder. “I will also be able to spend time with Mr. Spoerri at his home outside Lucerne. In addition to the tremendous honor of being selected, the Getty fellowship will give me some uninterrupted time to conduct research, resulting in a more significant contribution to the field of art history.”

The Cooley exhibition will be accompanied by a scholarly publication and symposium, to be convened in collaboration with Reed’s art history and studio art departments, that will bring Mr. Spoerri and a small group of artists, curators, and art historians to Reed to examine ideas and practices from Spoerri’s oeuvre.

Snyder’s $15,000 grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, meanwhile, will fund Suddenly, an exhibition that will explore the changing nature of the built environment—urban, suburban, rural, and natural—when considered in relation to the concept of Zwischenstadt, or “in-between city.” Borrowed from German urban historian Thomas Sieverts, the term refers to the totality of the built environment as an entity shaped by forces indifferent to distinctions of city center and suburb.

The pieces in Suddenly will be presented in a variety of spaces and forms that reflect the evolving, multivalent nature of space in the Zwischenstadt. The visual art exhibitions, curated by Stephanie Snyder, will be based at the Cooley Gallery, but will potentially extend to other spaces, such as an Asian shopping mall in Vancouver, British Columbia; a disused farmhouse at a commercial thoroughfare in Sherwood, Oregon; an industrial park at the edge of downtown Seattle; or an empty storefront in Philomath, Oregon. The publications, edited by Matthew Stadler, will include a book of fiction and non-fiction, as well as broadsides, flyers, and shopping circulars.