Student Voices: Art History MA Students Indira A. Abiskaroon
Curatorial Research Assistant on Mary Corse: A Survey in Light
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time with the New York Public Library’s wealth of microforms, as well as corresponding with institutions and galleries we believed exhibited Corse’s work in the past, with the hope of discovering exhibition documentation and archival materials. These findings contributed to research for Conaty’s essay and a chronology by Lang. The publication also includes essays by artist David Reed, SFMOMA curator Robin Clark, DIA associate curator Alexis Lowry, and LACMA director Michael Govan. In all, this exhibition catalogue promises indepth insight into Corse’s practice over the past fifty years, and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to contribute to the project. (The exhibition is open June 8-November 25, 2018 at Whitney Museum of American Art.)
The Institute of Fine Arts Annual 2017 - 2018
Samantha Rowe
Contributing to Benezit Dictionary of Artists
B
etween October 2017 and April 2018, I had the distinct pleasure of working as the curatorial research assistant on the Whitney’s exhibition Mary Corse: A Survey in Light. When told during my interview that I may be conducting research for a then-unnamed artist’s first solo museum survey, I was immediately excited, and intrigued. It wasn’t until I began to read about Corse that I realized how significant a moment in art history this show would be. Corse’s career began in the 1960s, and her work, through which she harnessed light in truly innovative ways, was a regular fixture in critical exhibitions throughout the past five decades (such as the Getty’s 2011 Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in LA Painting and Sculpture, 1950–1970). That her work has only now become the subject of a solo museum exhibition, and that I would have a chance to see what that entailed, was a tremendous, inexplicable feeling. During these months, I worked closely with Kim Conaty, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints, and curatorial assistant Melinda Lang—both Institute alumnae—to support research for the exhibition catalogue and to help produce the most comprehensive exhibition history and bibliography for the artist to date. On my part, this involved a significant amount of
G
ender disparity in the arts is a prevalent issue that persists with each generation. The study titled, An Asymmetrical Portrait: Exploring Gendered Income Inequality in the Arts explores gender inequality and determines that across the arts professions women make approximately $20,000 less than men per year (Danielle J. Lindemann, Carly A. Rush and Steven J. Tepper, “An Asymmetrical Portrait: Exploring Gendered Income Inequality in the Arts,” Social Currents 3, no. 4 (2016), 332–348.) Simply put, the battle for women is far from over. The goal of the Benezit Dictionary of Artists’ 2018 commission is to confront this issue of gender disparity and provide a resolution to alter the course of what has historically been a maledominated field. The Benezit Dictionary of Artists is a comprehensive reference collection of artists’ biographies. In 2010, Oxford University Press acquired the title and worked to develop it alongside Grove Art Online.