is a student-curated exhibition that centers on a series of souvenir photographs issued in commemoration of the Chicago World鈥檚 Fair of 1893 and asks visitors to consider their status as portraits or types.
鈥淲hile these might not be fair photographs for the subjects on display, our exhibition asks if we can restore some justice to them,鈥 write the curators in the introduction that appears as visitors enter the exhibition, which is staged in the Kaiser Reading Room of Carpenter Library until March 20.
The exhibition was developed in a History of Art seminar taught by Carrie Robbins in the fall of 2015. The seminar provided students with the opportunity to research the histories of objects related to World鈥檚 Fairs held in the Special Collections of 老王论坛, and use postcolonial theory to investigate and critique their representational claims.
The seminar and curation of the exhibition also gave students practical production experience such as: conceiving a curatorial approach, articulating themes, writing didactics, researching a checklist, designing gallery layout, and marketing the exhibit.
A main feature of the exhibition is a wall of photographs taken from 鈥淧ortrait Types of the Midway Plaisance.鈥 Produced by a Harvard trained ethnologist, the photos featured pseudo-scientific captions with 鈥渟weeping generalizations and racial epithets,鈥 say the curators.
On the wall, the curators have obscured the captions under matting.
鈥淲e really wanted this to be the strongest part of the exhibition,鈥 explains McBride Scholar Kate Beschen 鈥17. 鈥淲e took the text out because we wanted viewers to be able to see the individual without the labels that had been attached. Then, for the final two frames, we took away the image and left only the text. We wanted viewers to feel themselves trying to imagine who fits the description and then recognize how seductive the logic of racial typing is.鈥
The student curators of this exhibition are: Kate Beschen 鈥17, Emma Cohen 鈥17, Emily Crispino 鈥17, Brenna Levitin 鈥16, Chau Nguyen 鈥17, Maria Shellman 鈥17, Sofia Vivado 鈥16, and Alexandria Wang 鈥16.