Student Stories

A Crowd-pleasing Final Focus

by Sherri Kimmel

July 1, 2009

Art-history seniors gathered in elegant black for the March 4 opening.

One of the more interesting rites of spring at Dickinson has nothing to do with birds or flowers—but all to do with art. For art-history majors the season marks the culmination of their education as they present the spring exhibition and accompanying catalog that highlights the essays they spent the fall semester writing.

In The Trout Gallery this March, 12 students in the Art Historical Methods Seminar debuted their curatorial project Through the Lens: Studies in Photography. Seminar leader Phillip Earenfight, associate professor of art history and director of The Trout Gallery, chose photography as the focus, because the gallery had developed a “substantial collection of photos that would form the basis for a strong show.”

The students began the process in the fall by reviewing the more than 400 images in the gallery’s photo collection and winnowing them down to 64 images to be exhibited. Each student chose a photographer or theme on which to focus. Kristen Rudy ’09, an art history and German double major, was drawn to contemporary photographer Kristin Capp originally for what Rudy admits were “superficial reasons. We share a first name.”

As she became better acquainted with Capp’s black-and-white images of members of the Hutterite sect, she became more engrossed in the project. “The people Capp photographs look like they’re from a different age—the ’30s or ’40s. But I looked again, and it’s the 1990s.”           

The senior seminar for art-history majors, Rudy says, is a “hidden secret at Dickinson. Not many schools do this. It changed my outlook on the whole field of art history. I had thought of curating as boring. Not now.

“The course changed a lot of things for me,” she adds. “I thought I wanted to do things on the business side of art—dealing and appraisals. After the course, I fell in love with the process of dealing with a catalog and an exhibit. We picked the vinyl text for the exhibit walls, the cover image and fonts for the catalog and the exhibit title. It was difficult but the most rewarding class I had at Dickinson.”

She’s following up her newfound career ambition by attending Smith College’s summer institute in art and museum studies with an eye toward graduate school in fall 2010.

Besides her emphasis in art history, the curatorial experience also changed Rudy’s outlook on photography. “I have a better appreciation for photography as an art form. Photos were a good fit for our project. They’re a crowd pleaser.”

Read Phillip Earenfight’s essay on The Trout Gallery’s photo collection and Kristen Rudy ’09’s on photographer Kristin Capp here.