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Students Anticipate Kohl Gallery Start-up
Donald McColl envisions the Kohl Art Gallery as a teaching gallery for students like Colleen Kearins '09, who was recently accepted to two top graduate programs in art history. Photo: Melissa Grimes-Guy
A workman welds a door hinge. Photo: Melissa Grimes-GuyWhat does it take to operate an art museum? Students in Donald McColl's museum studies course are considering the complexities of the modern museum exhibition—from the practicalities of physical space to defining the educational mission—using as a case study the Kohl Art Gallery. The space in Gibson Center for the Arts opens with an exhibition of 19th-century masterpieces in October 2009.
The Kohl Art Gallery, named in recognition of benefactors Ben and Judy Kohl, is just a shell of drywall and concrete in early March, but McColl, the Underwood Professor of Art and Art History and the gallery's director, is already imagining the opening exhibition. A private collector has offered to lend several landscape paintings for the inaugural show.
In anticipation of the opening, McColl devised a course to give students some historical context of museums and collecting, to help them understand the roles of museum professionals, and to discuss the practical issues and ethical considerations surrounding the collection, conservation and exhibition of visual art.
In addition to exploring major metropolitan museums, McColl's students have also met with museum professionals on campus. Bill Johnston, associate director and chief curator of 19th century art at the Walters Art Museum, and his wife, Sona, a senior curator of painting and sculpture at the Baltimore Museum of Art, toured the gallery space with McColl's class in February.
McColl is working with Colleen Kearins '09, the College's first Kohl Gallery intern, to plan and mount the exhibition, which McColl says reflects "one of the greatest statements of faith I've ever made." McColl and his students have less than nine months to pull off a feat that most would take five years to do.
"The most exciting thing about this show is that our students and our art history graduates are involved," he says. "This is a collection never before seen in public. We are researching every picture as if it has never been studied before."
The exhibition is tentatively entitled Second Nature: Masterpieces of Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting. Says McColl, "I want the exhibition to say something important about art and science, about art and nature, about the history of art, about aesthetics, about why traditional landscape painting is still such a powerful form of art today."
McColl also has plans for what will follow. In addition to loaned exhibitions, the Kohl Gallery will also host the Annual Student Art Show and other student-curated shows.