On a Sunday in November, half a dozen students, guided by an expert in the field of costume installation, are at work in the basement of the Fleming Museum. Their task sounds simple: put clothes on a dress form, make a hat look as it would if someone were wearing it. But how do you accomplish this when the clothing size doesn’t match the size of the mannequin? And most importantly, without permanently altering or damaging what could be an invaluable piece of the collection? This is a slice of the work of museum staff, and this semester two classes of UVM students learned all about the job as they collaborated on the creation of an exhibit, to debut in fall 2015 at the Fleming.
The museum has long worked with classes to curate exhibitions, but this semester’s effort had a twist. For the first time, two classes from different UVM departments collaborated in tandem with the Fleming on the project.
The interdisciplinary effort, led by Professors Jennifer Dickinson, anthropology, and Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, art history, in partnership with Fleming staff, was this fall’s recipient of the College of Arts and Sciences’ competitive grant program, Enhancing Excellence through Interdisciplinary Experiential Engagement (EEIEE). The program, begun in 2012, seeks to increase the range of UVM classes that expose students to multiple disciplines in an integrated fashion and include “real-world” learning experiences in the process.
This effort has “real-world” experience in spades. Through group projects, students were exposed to and responsible for all facets of museum exhibit creation. Given a central theme to explore — sex, gender and sexuality — students worked with their peers across both classes to select objects, research and write descriptions, design the layout, create an online exhibit and develop interactive and educational materials as well as a PR and outreach plan.
While each seminar class met separately, all students engaged in virtual discussions as part of course assignments. Mixing membership in each of the groups further exposed students to the thought process, approach and language of the other class. Art history students had to understand museum work from an anthropological perspective and vice versa.
Dickinson, who taught the 2013 Honors College seminar that curated “EAT: The Social Life of Food” says that partnering with art history has created a new kind of student exhibition at the Fleming. “The differences in perspective,” she says, “have created a really interesting exhibit. There’s art curated from an art perspective, whereas previously, there was art curated from an ethnographic perspective.”
Beyond the development of the class itself, the EEIEE grant funding allowed Di Dio and Dickinson to offer their students enrichment opportunities — like the master class with the costume installation expert. It will also provide money for a faculty workshop held in partnership with the Fleming on object-based pedagogy so that the experience of working with the museum’s 25,000 objects might filter into even more classes across the university.
Real-world work
The pressure of that real work — and an impending public show — pushed students to rise to the challenge. “I respect the Fleming,” says senior Alyson Atherton. “I want to put my best foot forward.” That was clear this week when students presented to their professors and Fleming staff their groups' deliverables, including a three-dimensional, virtual model of their recommendation for exhibit arrangement as well as an audio tour aimed at orienting children to the tricky topic of sex and gender.
Students were not only given the chance to do the work themselves, the courses introduced them weekly — either in person or via Skype — to professionals at work in the field today. Both Dickinson and Di Dio invited these guest speakers to talk about the scope of their jobs and also the path they took in arriving at them. Students heard from museum workers from Burlington to Boston and beyond, many of them UVM alumni.
Given that the Department of Labor has predicted a 16 percent rise in demand for museum workers between 2010 and 2020, these career spotlights offered valuable insights for students, who now have a taste for this work, as they chart their path post-college. It also helped ease creeping anxiety among the juniors and seniors in the upper-level classes.
Senior anthropology and studio art double major Nicole Bull’s take-away: “No one’s path is straight and narrow, which is really nice to hear.”
And in the world of museum work, Dickinson and Di Dio note that both art and objects are often part of collections, making the interdisciplinary nature of the courses a crucial background for the students.
“It’s irresponsible for us not to give some sort of professional training and skills to these students as they go out into a very tough but burgeoning market,” Di Dio says. “There are a lot of jobs out there, but there’s a lot of competition, and they finally can claim some experience now that they’ve had this class.”
