Students, faculty, community members and artists gathered for the opening of ‘Peeling Forward: Ken Lum, Kristen, Neville Taylor, and Kaitlin Pomerantz.’
This art exhibit, which took place on April 16, showcased the work of three Philadelphia-area artists. It was the final product of the Haverford visual studies class ‘Theory and practice of exhibitions: objects, images, texts, events.’
Students enrolled in the class had the opportunity to work with the three chosen artists to curate an exhibition with a common theme, which the students had to identify. The theme, according to the exhibition’s description on the Haverford website, reads: “What if decay were the new growth? Peeling back, the new way forward? The works of Ken Lum, Kristen Neville Taylor, and Kaitlin Pomerantz unravel nature, labor, and human impact, reassembling it in the process. Working across various mediums—blown glass, paint on panel, dollar bills, photography, graffiti, and nets studded with vegetables—they dissect our frayed social order to imagine a wilder world.”
John Muse, assistant professor of visual studies, director of the visual studies program, and director of the Visual Culture, Arts, and Media Center (VCAM), designed the course with real-world stakes in mind.
When asked what his intention behind the course and exhibit, he responded, “to put students in a relatively high-stakes position with serious artists, with serious careers, to introduce them to artists and that strange really raw situation of a studio visit, to teach them what it is that curators really do when they’re both looking for work but also developing relationships with artists, and all with the intention of less than a month from getting from a studio visit to an opening like this one.”
He further commented on the challenges of coordinating engagement between students and artists, saying, “[there were] lots of arguments about whether we’re focusing on three artists together or whether there are overlaps in their ambitions, we discovered those overlaps, hence this focus on ecology and decay and the richness of what it might be to peel forward rather than back, to make something new.”
Class preparation for the exhibition included visiting the artists’ studios, interfacing with the artists, learning how to hang paintings, and other skills useful for curatorial work. Samantha Kopkowski, BMC ‘25, was one of the student ‘curators’ in the class. She spoke to the Bi-Co News about her experience.
“For a group project of this scale, it was pretty stressful. I think a lot of people said that and I agree, but it ultimately came together pretty painlessly and it was a great experience. And I do feel like I made my own little unique mark on it, and I feel like probably everybody else feels the same. I feel like there was a degree of creative control.”
While the exhibition may have been student-curated, it certainly felt like a professionally-curated space. The three artists each brought in several pieces of their work to display in the Haverford co-op, which included paintings, blown glass, a large stitched net, and a piece of video art. The installations all prompted visitors to engage with complex questions of ecological decay, material waste, and the potential for regeneration.
The most visually striking of the art pieces was entitled ‘…to fault a net for having holes.’ Made from sewn-together plastic nets used to store fruit, the piece measured more than several feet in height and width.
According to the piece’s museum label, the “installation, with its accompanying prints, asks viewers to consider the scale of their own discards, idly thrown away, but never as far as they think.”
In total, twelve students made up the curatorial team: Blanca Berger Sollod, Sofia Bolanos, Julia Browning, Sally Crandall, Mary-Grace Culbertson, Lucy Frank, Xintong Han, Helena He, Samantha Kopkowski, Vita Meng, Jadyn Patrick, and Leyla Richter-Munger.
“We had to basically figure it out, and I think that was a very valuable experience,” Kopkowski stated. Each student curator brought their own perspectives to the show, and contributed to a collective experience that was as much about learning to navigate the specifics of shared vision as it was about aesthetics.
