Text and photos by Miyls Bleu Hill
First year graduate students Cara Gidden, Miyls Hill, Dyanne Horgan, and Aftan spent an exciting and informative day outside the classroom at the Met Museum accompanied by MFA Design Director and Research Methods professor Atif Akin.
The class/trip consisted of tours developed by each student following two and half weeks of research, we were tasked to attend and observe the Met Museum and formulate a curation of what was inside informed by our interests.
From learning about the lack of expansive southern art at the museum and reconstruction period From Dyanne to Cara taking us down a rabbit hole that began with the Medieval arts section looking at various depictions of Jesus and ended with learning about J. Pierpont Morgan and his infamous legacy tied to the Metropolitan Museum.
The merit of the exercise was in allowing each student to think critically and use research based thinking, for example Aftan’s guide explored how gender is classified and identified in artifacts at the Met. Drawing on Judith Butler’s essay ‘Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification’, he took us on a tour to examine how bodily features, artistic conventions and museum documentation shape the classification of figures, particularly those artifacts whose gender identification are uncertain, contradictory or difficult to establish.
Through the guide we explored ways gender can become legible through systems of classification, and the limitations of categories that are revealed when we encounter objects that have been difficult to fully understand or identify.
My guide was inspired by Beatriz Colomina’s “Split Wall” essay, Walter Benjamin, Power, Taste, and Archways. The tour was a bit unconventional since it didn’t necessarily focus on objects within the museum but the space of the museum itself as an architectural body of power, after my tour I held an activity for all of us to think of the different ways of entering the space and the interiority of museums.
The practice of curation was an exciting skill to sharpen, and each student benefited from the practice of investigation, research, and developing alternative ways of seeing.
