The white walls surrounding any gallery or museum space alway seem so innocent: they create an isolated and quiet space, detached from our living reality, that allows an immersive experience of the artworks on display without the intrusion of external influences. But museums and galleries are in fact institutions; they are bound up with various aspects of their organization and actively playing social roles. Walking into a museum space, we walk into a physical manifestation of an ideological system, with its own activities and representing the values of a specific group. These spaces and all the activities happening within, therefore, constitute a specific context in which artworks are read.
William Villalongo, Float like a Butterfly, Sting like a Bee, 2020, Acrylic, drinking gourds, beads, velvet flock, glitter flock, cut velour paper, pigment print, mounted on hardboard 
Wendy Red Star, The Last Thanks, 2006, Archival pigment print 
Johannah Herr, Redaction Order 13769, Page 4, 2019, Vinyl on archival inkjet
The current exhibition Learning , Unlearning, Relearning: Mediating on America’s Past and Present is curated by students from Art 348 Challenging Collecting and Exhibition Practices, instructed by Dr. Rosaline Kyo, Assistant Professor of Art and Chinese Studies, and Lia Newman, Director & Curator of the Van Every/Smith Galleries. This seminar focuses on art collection practices of public and private institutions in the United States and other countries to unpack how museum collection frameworks, methods, and systems of categorization stem from colonialist modes of oppression relying heavily on biases of gender, race, and economics. Students examined what is lacking in Van Every/Smith Galleries’ current collection in areas such as artist demographics and artwork mediums, and found a prominent underrepresentation of female artists and racial and ethnic minority groups, including Native Americans, Asians and Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, and African Americans. After a semester-long discussion, artist and artwork searching, and eventually visiting galleries and artist in New York, students, with the support of our generous donor, acquired three artworks for Van Every/Smith Galleries’ permanent collection: Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee (2020) by William Villalongo, The Last Thanks (2006) by Wendy Red Star, and Redaction Order 13769, Page 4 (2019) by Johanna Herr. Check out the video below for student reflections on Art 348.
The exhibition Learning , Unlearning, Relearning: Mediating on America’s Past and Present, now on display in the E. Craig Wall Jr Academic Center, places the newly acquired artworks in conversation with the collections at the Van Every/Smith Galleries. All of these artists provide critical reflections on the representation of their cultural identities in the form of art. In their artworks we recognize familiar items that are often taken for granted, a sumptuous dinner table overflowing with the joy of Thanksgiving, a boxing helmet, or constellations. The artists repurpose these social iconographies born out of specific contexts of colonialism and capitalism into objects with agency. They are like mirrors, speaking different stories when approached from different perspectives. Together, they compose a narrative that underlies American cultural hegemony, in other words everything we are experiencing now, but also what remains highly un-noticed. The exhibition encourages students to “learn” and “relearn” the elements of our cultural memories, to reflect upon our own individualities, and thereby “unlearn” the forceful assimilation into a singular narrative.
Learning , Unlearning, Relearning: Mediating on America’s Past and Present will be on view in the E. Craig Wall Jr Academic Center for the duration of 2022 fall semester. Stay tuned for more blog posts introducing the new artworks.
– Yunyue Zhang ‘23