My Winter 2018 curatorial seminar course engaged a group of bright and self-motivated undergraduate students and graduate students in the ongoing reinstallation of the suite of South Asian Galleries at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). In addition to learning about the long history of exhibiting South Asian art in Detroit in particular, and in Europe and North America at large, my students helped selected artworks that might be displayed in the museum’s galleries, conferred with specialists on their condition, proposed provisional object groupings, gauged public interest in them through focus group testing, and learnt to write interpretive labels.
To enable my students understand critical issues surrounding the caring for and exhibiting South Asian artworks at leading museums in Europe and North America today, I invited Dr. Anna Slaczka, Curator of Asian Art at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam to visit Ann Arbor in March 2018 and speak my class. While the History of Art Department covered most costs associated with her visit, a CRLT grant also played an important role in making this Dr. Slaczka’s visit to Ann Arbor possible.