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Bobby was the creator and writer for the catalogue based of the works of Threading A Legacy. The catalogue features with works in the exhibit photographed with titles. There is a foreword written about Susan and the exhibit. There is also an index about Susan’s history as an educator, artist and her academic life.

The catalogue can be purchased for $40.00 using the following link (case sensitive):
http://blur.by/1xDyX1w

This week the Exhibitions class was deinstalling the Threading a Legacy exhibit. The class worked collectively to take town all of the work and rewrap the work in bubble wrap and bags for protection and labeled for Susan. Once all of the work was taken down and wrapped, the nails used to hang the work needed to be unscrewed from the wall. The labels for all the work, along with the vinyl and fabric were all removed from the walls of the gallery. Once the nails were removed from the wall, some students started to fill in the holes where the nails were with spackle and patch up the wall. Once the spackle dried, the walls were painted over with white to match the rest of the gallery walls. The podium that was painted clay red for the exhibit was painted back to the gallery white. Susan came to MassArt to pick up her work and load into her car.

After deinstall was finished and cleaned up. Beth met with the class and we talked about the experience and feedback of the exhibit, and then about our final project. Beth read some responses from the guest book to the class. There were some beautiful responses writhed from Susan’s family, MassArt faculty, and friends. Beth also read an email from Susan that talked about all of the opportunities and responses that she personally received. Susan had been asked by the fibers department at MassArt to give a lecture or come to the reviews. Susan had several church groups that wanted to visit the gallery. There was also the offer of writing a review from a well known local reviewer about the exhibit. The overall theme of this talk was that the show was a major success and clearly touched many people in the greater Boston area. There were so many positive reactions to the show and many people that wanted to become involved with Susan and her work.

Gallery Activity with The Paige Academy

Classroom Activity with The Paige Academy

The Gallery Activity with Mission Hill School

The Classroom Activity with The Mission Hill School

The class talked about the opening that occured the night before and its success.  One of the interesting things brought up in class was about the diversity and variety of people that attended the show. There were many different people from different aspects of Susan’s life. The overwhelming feeling of the show was that the attendees were all very impressed and responded well to her work.

Some things that the class noticed about the opening was that there were some amazing and unpredictable moments. For example, the musicians were hired to play for an hour and they ended up playing the full two hours and even past the official end time of the opening. Susan’s friend Paula sang a few songs for the opening including “Brown Baby”. Paula is a spiritual singer and had the exhibitions class participate in her rendition of “Brown Baby” by adding in vocals on “Black Lives Matter”.

Ms. McRath introduced some of the students to some visitors from a fellowship that took people from different professions all over the world to come to different universities. There was a woman from Croatia and a man from Niger. The man from Niger talked about his experience in his education field and traveling to Boston to talk at Bunker Hill Community College. He talked a little about the program and how there were many universities across the U.S. that participated in hosting people in the fellowship.

Aside from Susan’s friends and family, there was a variety of MassArt educators who came to the opening. Ken Strickland, the vice president at MassArt came to the opening. Faculty from the 3D, ceramics and Art Education department all came to see the show.

The next portion of class was dedicated to talking about the public programming activities that will occur the following week. The exhibitions class will be hosting two schools to participate in a gallery activity related to the exhibit on Susan Thompson. The first school is Paige Academy where Brother Joe Cook will be bringing 16 of the students between the ages of 6 and 10. The Mission Hill Elementary School will also be brining 18 students ages 11 and 12.

http://paigeacademy.org/node/9

The class brainstormed about public programming that branched off from Brian’s original idea. The original idea being making a family crest or a family flag using colors and symbols and family history.

Some of the other ideas:

• rust was brought up because of Susan’s rust paitnings, but we worried about using iron and the risk with children
• we talked about cyanotype and pictures to be taken of the students
• photo transfers and citrisol so that they could bedazzle their own portraits like in precious memories

Then the class talked some trouble shooting about that photo transfers don’t always have a secure and stable success rate and with the younger students, it might not work. The fabric or card stock printing might be too time consuming for the class to take and print portraits and also get the rest of the project done. Symbols were considered being too commercial when working with younger children. It might run the risk of students copying examples or if there were pre-made shapes, that the symbols are too literal or it could be taken somewhere else. Meanings of symbols to children are different than with adults.

The class decided to continue with the flag, or quilting or crest idea. There will be two activities as the two classes will be separated into two groups. One of the activities will be in the gallery. Susan will talk about her work in the gallery and the students will have a chance to walk through and explore the exhibit. The gallery activity will include somewhat of a scavenger hunt. The idea is to engage the students in looking for symbols, similarities, themes, common images and to look closely at Susan’s work. A discussion will then be led about the findings from the students.

The classroom activity will be to make the flags. Katie and Bobby will work on creating examples of the work for next week. Leane and Bryan worked on the ideas for the projects and looked through books about African symbols. Marissa and Henry worked on the activity for the gallery. Rachel O. and Rachel H. are in charge of getting the material for the classroom activity.

On Sunday, Brian and Henry started the install process. They started with organizing the layout of the gallery space. They lined the floor with the work in correspondence where they would be hung on the wall. They also patched up the wall to make it white and cover up holes from previous work.

The pedestal and ancestry wall were also both painted by in the clay red so that it would be ready for install Monday by Brian and Henry. Touch up painting was done Monday morning by Marissa and Leane.

On Monday morning, Leane and Rachel O. set up the centerline on the wall. They wall was prepped with tape as a guideline of where the work will go. The centerline helped so that all the work would be easier to hang with a measurement where to center the works.

Bobby and Katie worked on scraping up old paint from the floor and tidying up the floor.
Brian, Henry, Leane, Rachel H., Bobby and Katie worked on hanging the work for the show. Throughout the day there were a few changes made to the gallery. Some of the work got rearranged in the room during install. Katie put up the labels that Leane made. Rachel H. organized the packaging that was protecting the work so that they could be used during de-install.

Rachel O. worked on the gift for Susan and Marissa worked on the wall text of the ancestry for the exhibit. Rachel O. is also working on prepping the food for the opening on Thursday with Katie. Bobby finished the catalogues and the rest of the writing for the exhibit.

This past week, the class worked hard in their respective areas and a lot of progress was made as it gets closer to the opening.

Bobby made progress on the catalogues and has ordered three of them to get to the school.

The post cards were finished and Rachel O. ordered them and those are also in the mail to the school.

Leane and Rachel H. picked up the guest book for guests to sign during the opening and duration of the gallery. They also went to Home Depot to have the clay red paint mixed in the store.

Leane also worked on managing the budget for the class and was keeping track of all the purchases. She added a document to the drive that had a description of the items we need to buy for the exhibit along with the prices and a checklist.

Rachel H. and Marissa worked on the documentation team through loading more to the google docs and maintaining the blog.

Henry began to investigate fabric printing that will need to be done on the day of install.

Brian started a document on the drive about his process working on the public programming part of the exhibit. He started be working on the instructions and the material list. The project will be to create a family crest or flag. This goes a long well with the common theme of ancestry in Susan’s work.

Katie worked on the invitations for the exhibit that she will be sending to the contact list that she has been working on. The invitation includes the image of the postcard.

This week Bobby, Henry and Bryan did a lot of work on finalizing the curation process. Henry and Bryan picked up the work from Susan’s house and brought it back to MassArt. This week Henry and Bobby photographed all of the work for the catalogue of the show.

The pieces that the curation team have picked are a retrospective of Susan’s quilting work. Many of the pieces that were picked were from her studio and her home. The work that has been chosen shows a variety of themes and techniques that Susan has worked with over the years.

Class 3/19

During our schedule class time we continue to meet and update eachother on our progress within our tasks.

Leane had contacted Susan about the title of the show for approval and the image that will be used for the postcard. Susan approved the title “Threading a Legacy: The Work of Susan Thompson”. Susan also responded with approval for the image and told us the title of the piece was “Woman Uplifting the World”.

Beth picked up the work from Susan. The piece had been put onto a stretcher to be hung and finalized for the show and postcard.
Katie and Rachel H. went to photograph the piece that will be used for the postcard.

The rest of the class discussed the budget for the exhibit. Within the budget, we have to allocate enough money to cover expenses in making the catalogue, postcards, printed photographs and gallery text, and in buying paint, and food.

The class then talked about the set up of the gallery and made some final decisions on the aesthetics. We decided on the location of the vinyl text should be inside the gallery and we may need to invest in a power sander to fix the walls.

We then had a in depth conversation about the type face for all of the wall text. We decided to make the title two lines in Bodoni. The alignment will be squared off so the text on each line matches corner to corner. This makes the top line a larger font size than the bottom line. The conversation included talk about the type of text whether it should be semibold or regular. We spent time in illustrator looking at a variety of typeface options and aesthetic options.

Next we talked about the next steps that needed to be taken over the week and looked at the calendar for deadlines.

The post card has to be made and printed. Bobby needs to look into the vinyl for the walls of the gallery. Henry and Brian will be gathering Susan’s work that will be shown. Digital images for the catalogue need to be given to Bobby as well. Katie will continue to work on the contact list.

Bobby worked on the writing for the show, which included some of the catalogue drafts and opening reception.