An internship at the ready: the prequel

An year and a half ago, I had the chance to visit the Museum of geometric and MADI art in Dallas as part of our Museum Studies seminar. What an interesting, unusual space and a peculiar story of its founding - around a concept of art rather than a geographic area, time period or medium. While geometric art is a well known concept, MADI is an abbreviation referring to art "off the wall and out of the frame" - a non-representational artistic movement that started in the 1940s in Uruguay and spread around the world afterwards. Many artists have been based in France and Italy, where the movement founder eventually lived.

Because of that connection and through the museum director, I learned that the museum in my "hometown" in Italy has an extensive collection of MADI art and even a significant part of the archive of the movement is located in its library. She also connected me with an artist who lived in the area and who would have a solo exhibition at the MADI museum in Dallas. I volunteered to curate that exhibition and - long story short - it is happening in a month, in October! So, my internship will consist of a project at the Museum this semester around that exhibition.

My expectations for the internship are really colored by my previous experience with both the museum and the artists. It is very difficult to create a program around a medium that has purely aesthetic principles and rejects any national and cultural grounding, is not representational and rejects emotional goals. However, through my relationship with the two Italian artists who will be part of the exhibition and many meetings and catalogues from previous exhibitions, I am taking the challenge to devise an educational program based on it.

Work by Reale Franco Frangi, 2017, which will be part of the two-person exhibition at the MADI museum in October 2018

There are several possibilities for this project, besides the curatorial work (which, if you are curious, is very nitty-gritty! Nothing fancy, but a lot of email writing, art courier shipping calling, catalogues reading, press release writing, gallerist meeting and other that I would rather spare you hearing.) The most exciting part of it is the selection of the works to be exhibited and the work with the artists in this respect, but this is another topic.

So:
It would be interesting to take the opportunity of the visit of these Italian artists and create a series of activities for the Italian language programs in area universities.

Also, since I have been interested in self-guided activities that include the sense of touch, I would like to design one around it. However, it may be a challenge, since independent visitors to the museum are very few and they don't get much to explore it on their own.

Lastly, it would be great to design a children's book based on either the exhibition or the permanent collection, which could be actually published through one of the on-demand printing platforms.

Really, really lastly: I am not the first UNT intern at the MADI museum. If you look back through this blog, you will see two previous MA students who worked there last summer (2017). I remember that they couldn't finish the project that they started - which was research on the labels - and were sad because of that. I may try to reprise their work and finish it.

Since I have previously talked about the curatorial/educational gap that exists today in museums, you may ask how I reconcile the two. In fact, one of the interesting challenges in this is to walk the walk based on the talk that I have been previously talked. I have the unique opportunity to be both a curator and educator for this project. Let's see how it will work out!