Exhibition proposal (due Wednesday, Sept. 21, to your professor).

Your ongoing project in this class is to work in a small group to stage an online exhibition. Completing this project will help you understand some of the elements that go into museum work.

For the first stage of this project you will each write a brief proposal to the Co-Directors of the Museum - Drs. Lara Blanchard and Michael Tinkler. They will choose a number of exhibitions for the Museum to stage this year – probably six to eight of them. Imagine that you are competing for limited resources! No museum budget – not even the Getty – can afford to show everything it would like! There are constraints of wall-space, insurance for works on loan, transportation expenses, and costs of cleaning and mounting works (usually absorbed by the exhibition budget rather than the institution owning the work).

Since you are mounting a digital exhibition you are freed from those constraints. However, you are subject to the constraints of time and your research skills. So teamwork will be essential – and the Co-Directors need to choose the ideas that seem most workable to us. In the real world a museum director might say to a curator, "I understand how important the Mona Lisa is to making your exhibition make sense, but the Louvre just won't loan it out!" Instead, we have to help you make decisions about what you can learn about in 10 weeks.

You need to come up with an idea, a theme, an approach to art making or art viewing, a genre of art, a type of building – something around which to center your team's efforts. Brainstorm with each other. Go online and look at the websites of museums. (Note: Professor Blanchard has a link to museum websites under Links.) Think of museums you've visited.

Then create a good title for your show (this is a place Writing Colleagues might help!). Write a brief explanation of how you think this exhibition might be mounted in at least THREE ROOMS of the imaginary museum, each room conveying a different part of the idea. At this point, you do not need to have a list of works of art or architecture that you would like to include, although a basic idea of what you would like to include would be helpful.

We will be using these proposals to form groups for the exhibition projects. We imagine that the groups will typically (but not necessarily) include students from both sections.

Your proposal is due to the Co-Directors on Wednesday, September 21. (Note, no preliminary submission to a Writing Colleague is required – we are not grading these as pieces of writing. We are simply grading on the quality and practicality of the idea.)