Mellon Faculty Seminar

Since Skidmore College seeks to realize an innovative model for a teaching museum, the college has sought ways to provide faculty with opportunities to develop their interests and expertise in using the museum in teaching and research. Established to support this effort, The Program in Object Exhibition and Knowledge, generously funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, offered faculty a structure in which to develop a working knowledge of the critical vocabulary of museums.

As faculty explored the pedagogical possibilities that arose from applying this vocabulary to their teaching and research, they refined their ability to use the museum as a site that provokes critical and engaged learning. This faculty involvement with the museum serves the college’s eventual goal of making museum exhibitions as integral to college learning as the library, the science laboratory and the studio.

At the core of the program was the faculty seminar, co-led by Fred Wilson and Skidmore Professor of Anthropology Susan Bender, and coordinated by Alison Barnes of Skidmore’s English Department. Over the three years of the program, twenty one faculty members from across the disciplines participated in the seminar.

Fred Wilson, the Luce Distinguished Visiting Fellow for the Program in Object Exhibition and Knowledge, was in residence at Skidmore College during the spring semesters of the program (2004-2006). In this role, Wilson served as a catalyst for faculty engagement with museums. Through the context of the faculty seminar, he provided insight into museum practices and provoked faculty to deepen their critical and creative responses to exhibitions. He encouraged faculty to develop their own ideas as seeds for future exhibitions and worked with them to find new ways to engage their students in assignments relating to the Tang exhibition program.

An internationally recognized artist whose work is ideally situated to support faculty inquiry into museum exhibitions and their pedagogical potentials, Wilson has taught and worked on numerous projects at colleges and universities. He first came to Skidmore College for his retrospective, Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1985-2000, which was on view at the Tang in 2002. Known for his installations that manipulate museum display strategies and collections to draw attention to biased ideologies embedded in the practices of museums and other cultural institutions, Wilson has an extensive exhibition record, which includes his landmark exhibition, Mining the Museum, at the Baltimore Historical Society and his representation for the United States in the 50th Venice Biennale. Wilson has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts and in 1999 he was chosen as a MacArthur Fellow.