Open Classroom Gallery: Concentrated Power

ON VIEW:  12:00pm – 5:00pm every Wednesday – Friday through July 9;
starting July 14, hours are 12:00pm – 5:00pm every Wednesday – Sunday

Barbara Ségal’s Dash (1994), a life-sized marble mimicry of a laundry detergent bottle, showcases the artist’s technical mastery while also playing with high and low imagery and material in the late twentieth century.

This canny, elegantly crafted work reaches broadly to the history of sculpture, the politics of mass media, appropriation, and gender politics.

Organized by the curatorial cohort of Art History’s Exhibition course (2020-2021), Concentrated Power offers multiple ways of engaging with a single work in the Neuberger Museum’s permanent collection.

Concentrated Power is organized by Rebecca E. M. Ribeiro​, Veronica Murphy, Meg Byron, and Shunyo Aizawa Morgan — the curatorial cohort of Purchase College’s Art History Exhibition course (2020-2021).  The project will be on view in the Open Classroom Gallery from March 24 – September 12, 2021.

The Museum + Curatorial Studies (M+) track within the Art History MA program centers the Neuberger Museum of Art in a pedagogical model that systematically programs connections between Art History, the School of Art + Design, and the Neuberger. M+ students work with the Neuberger’s collection, producing original research, exhibitions, and public programming. They do so with an eye to learning how an arts institution functions—training in skills that will prepare them for careers in the field—and also to rethinking the social role of the arts, tying the values of humanistic learning and critical thinking to the importance of engaged citizenship. In concert with Art History faculty and the Neuberger staff, every M+ cohort will imagine what it means to make a Museum Wide Open.

IMAGE: Barbara Ségal, Dash, 1994, Marble, 13 x 9 x 4 1/2”, Collection Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York. Gift of the artist.  Artwork: © Barbara Ségal. Photo by Jim Frank.