who recruited two Nobel Prize winners for the advisory group that helped winnow a list of 150 molecules down to the 10 ulti- mately featured, including penicillin, DNA, and DDT. Models were built with care—they were “correct and elegant,” says the chemist—and then surrounded by provocative artworks and ob- jects from pantyhose to Tupperware to gasoline ads that gave context to their impact. And the show’s impact was tremendous. At Skidmore it was visited and used by 97 classes, ranging from anthropology and business to math and women’s studies. After Skidmore, it toured to the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, which partnered in presenting the exhibition, as well as to the College of Wooster and Grinnell College. In visits, it was second only to the Tang’s 2002 From Pop to Now blockbuster from the legendary Sonnabend collection, and its on- line feature still comes up in the first 100 hits (out of some 50 million) in a Google search on “molecules.”


Art historian Lisa Aronson has been active with the museum from the beginning. Her most recent project was co-curating this year’s Environment and Object • Recent Afri can Art. She involved her students at every step and credits the Tang staff with great organi - zation of details and openness to “anything new, creative, and fun.” Faculty curators so far have come from anthropology, chemistry, English, physics, studio art, and art history, and Weber says, “We think about how to reach out to more departments all the time.” Two of the newest recruits: government professor Beau Breslin, work- ing on a show about constitutional rights for 2012–13, and economist Mehmet Odekon, developing an exhibit on class slated for 2013–14. Clearly, creative interdisciplinary faculty are attracted to what Bender calls “the pedagogical inventive- ness that the Tang encourages.” The museum regularly spon- sors seminars for faculty, bringing them into the think tank where faculty-museum collaborations germinate. As a veteran of such collaborations, Bender says she has ma-


tured “from a consumer of museum exhibitions to an engaged critic” probing how each show “has a thesis, just like a piece of text. It may be explicit, it may not be, but that’s the backbone of the exhibit, what the curators want you to come away with.”


Tang as classroom


Faculty from virtually all Skidmore departments have brought their classes to the collections and galleries. In just the first few weeks of last semester, there were more than a dozen—such as Alison Barnes and her “Writing in the Tang,” Heather Hurst ’97 with “Mesoamerican Archaeology,” and Leslie Ferst ’76 with “Advanced Ceramics”—as well as visits by an art class from SUNY-Albany and fourth-year architecture students from Rens- selaer Polytechnic Institute.


“I LIKE TO TALK ABOUT THE TANG AS


‘SKIDMORE MADE VISIBLE.’ SKIDMORE IS ALWAYS RE-INVENTING ITSELF. AND WHAT HAPPENS AT THE TANG? SOMETHING IS ALWAYS NEW.”


Museum staff are particularly keen on con- necting with Skidmore’s first-year students in their interdisciplinary Scribner Seminars. Eng- lish professor Michelle Rhee designed this fall’s Eye Rhymes exhibition to serve as a classroom space for her Scribner Seminar “Ways of See- ing: Image, Text, Illumination.” Rhee was ask- ing her students to explore “how the linguistic and the pictorial vie for the viewer’s atten- tion.” The show itself had been developed in collaborative research with Caitlin Allen ’12, who created a response to A Humument: A


Treated Victorian Novel by Tom Phillips. Phillips had drawn, painted, and collaged over the book’s pages, leaving intriguing snippets of text visible through his art. Allen artfully altered an- other book, “to get a sense of the process and be a better guide” for the rest of the class.


Allen says, “One of my favorite pages is the ‘and’ page in the display case. While working on the other side of that page, I used a marker that bled through. Frustrated, I covered the re- verse side completely with white gesso.” But as the gesso dried, she scraped off some, revealing the word “and.” She says, “I love this page, because it is about the happy mistakes that come from trusting your instincts.”


1. CURATOR IAN BERRY (AT LEFT) TALKS SHOP AT THE 2006 MUSEUM CONFERENCE ON CAMPUS. 2. JEAN SHIN’S PILL-BOTTLE ART COM- MENTS ON PHARMACEUTICAL “MOLECULES THAT MATTER.” 3. FROM POP TO NOW, DRAWN FROM THE FAMED SONNABEND COLLECTION


1. 14 SCOPE WINTER 2011 2.


PHIL SCALIA


PHIL SCALIA


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