Students collaborate, build new University art exhibit

Imagine the risk.

“Eight months before an opening, we have a title, and that’s all,” Drew Armstrong said. 

But the gamble paid off, and fourteen students put together a new exhibition that is on display at the University Art Gallery, part of the Frick Fine Arts building. 

In an experimental architecture course last spring, nine graduate and five undergraduate students discovered how different disciplines use visualization and images to communicate knowledge through the creation of their own art installations. 

The class — co-taught by Armstrong, director of architectural studies, and Josh Ellenbogen, director of graduate studies for the Department of History of Art and Architecture — was called “Configuring Disciplines: Representation in the Arts  and Sciences.” 

In class, the students constructed artistic installations for an exhibit that opened at the University Art Gallery on Sept. 4 and will run until Oct. 5. According to Armstrong, roughly 100 people attended the exhibit’s opening night.

“It wasn’t a traditional art history class in the sense that we weren’t really focusing on artists or on a certain period or movement,” said Annika Johnson, a third year graduate student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture.

Armstrong said he and Ellenbogen tried to encourage the students to think critically about an artist’s decisions and motives.

Armstrong and Isabelle Chartier, curator of the University Art Gallery, applied for and received a $16,000 grant from the Central Development Research Fund, a University reserve available for scholarship or research.

“The funding source that was available made it possible to imagine something at this scale because it is a fairly expensive undertaking that goes beyond our usual budget,” Armstrong said.

The major costs covered by the grant money included: wages for professional art installers, carpenters and conservation specialists; building the 25-foot-long case for the timeline; building the plexiglass “hoods” for at least six cases; printing and mounting the text and image boards and framing all of the original items hung on the walls. Armstrong said $16,000 was still a low amount for a project that he considered to be so complex.

While the students created their art and figured out how the pieces would be laid out in the exhibit, they worked closely with Chartier. They learned how to handle pieces of art, make labels for exhibitions, install pieces, adjust lighting and create a flow through the gallery. 

The students picked the topics for their exhibits halfway through the course and continued working through the summer. 

“It’s a quick turnaround for an exhibition,” Johnson said. “This has taken a lot of collective effort.”

The students didn’t create art per se, but they showcased pieces that held importance to them. 

Meghan Hipple, a Brackenridge Undergraduate Research Fellow and a junior majoring in history of art and architecture, focused on depictions of the human body in architectural structures.

Meanwhile, Johnson analyzed the works of science writer Fritz Kahn and his imagery of the man as an industrial palace as well as the prints by George Catlin that documented American Indians and their lifestyle before it was encroached upon by European civilization.

According to Johnson, the exhibit is like a collaborative visual thesis. 

“Hopefully the exhibit is set up so that it can spark discussions across disciplines,” Johnson said. “Everything is so intentionally placed to enhance the viewer’s experience.”

Hipple said she wants visitors to the exhibit to see what a research project in the Department of History of Art and Architecture can be like. 

“Maybe they’ll think a little differently about the formation of knowledge and visual representations of things that we easily look at but don’t ever really think more about,” Hipple said.

Extra contributions came from partner institutions such as the Pitt ULS, the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation and the Carnegie Museum of Art, which provided additional framing and huge amounts of scanning. 

“I very much hope that this lays the foundation for similar kinds of collaborative projects and collaborative teaching,” Ellenbogen said.