Wooster Today

The Deep Learning Initiative

By Ingrid Li '19

In Ms. Carlson's DLI: Art and the Making of Meaning, students integrate Art History and Museum Studies into their final project----curating their own exhibition based on their interests.

Throughout this year-long course, DLI students participated in two amazing projects with local museums. Partnering with the Katonah Museum, students designed activities related to Islamic traditions (textile, calligraphy, and geometric patterning). In The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, students rearranged artist Anissa Mack's exhibition Junk Kaleidoscope with fellow museum members.

By doing Art History research, talking to museum curators, and visiting an artist's studio in Brooklyn, students attained first-hand information about how to curate an exhibition. After exploring themes of religion, power, and protest, students came up with different themes for their own virtual exhibitions. Students would conduct research on individual works and put them on a google site.

Many of the exhibitions focus on identities and expressions, ranging from race to sexuality and gender. Sunny Liu's '18 exhibition demonstrates a shift from the female body as object to the body as a symbol of identity and power. On the other hand, Hannah Price '18 focused on the representation of the LGBTQ community. Her exhibition includes works from the 1980's to present, from all over the world. Some of these artists bring a public and proud eye to the intimacies and personalities of an often invisible community.

Caylynn Maldonado's '18 exhibition is of Latino artists who portray a duality of identity in their work--the Latino seen from outside and inside the culture. Similarly, Ingrid Li '19 extends from the concept of otherness and collected works that reflect the impact of power in our relationship with other people. Yingkai Xiong '19 chooses to talk about the unique light and space movement and provide examples of how these artists change our perceptions of space and how we see the world around us.

During the curating process, students refresh their understanding of how art reflects social reality. Sunny Liu said that during her research she found out that females are still objectified and censored in many ways even though the feminist movement has been going for decades. During the process of writing an exhibition catalog, Yingkai Xiong researched deeper into the California Light and Space movement and found more inspiring artists.

Check out some students' websites:

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