We Tried This: The Magic of 33 Undergraduates Writing Exhibition Labels for What’s in a Spell? Love Magic, Healing, and Punishment in the Early Modern Hispanic World

By Hannah Wirta Kinney

Overview

The Allen Memorial Art Museum’s new strategic plan focuses on expanding the voices and perspectives that contribute to our interpretation. As the campus museum of Oberlin College, students and faculty are key to this. Over the course of a year, I worked with Ana Marìa Dìaz Burgos, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies, to plan and co-curate a bilingual exhibition of 25 artworks with 33 students in two upper-level courses that explores spellcasting in the early modern Hispanic world and its continuing resonance today. Through the process we experimented with how all the writing and translating of interpretative materials –by students without art historical training– could be achieved within a semester. Academically, the project allowed students to engage with course content and refine their writing skills, but we also saw that it connected them to each other, the museum, and the local community.

Structure of the project

The professor was the recipient of a museum grant that encourages faculty members to revise a course to include prolonged engagement with museum collections through an exhibition. During her five-day residence at the museum, we created the checklist and developed scaffolded assignments that would result in final English labels that students then translated into Spanish. In one course, each student wrote the label for one object. Four class sessions were dedicated to brainstorming and peer-review. Each was organized to have different groups collaborate and consider multiple groupings of objects and exhibition subthemes. Between these class sessions, students submitted three drafts of the labels that were commented on by the professor, me, and the museum’s editor. Students in the other course were given first drafts of labels written by the professor  and me that they revised based on their own observations and small group discussions during three class periods.

In both classes, we spent the first two sessions in the museum’s study room looking closely at the artworks without any contextual information. Our goal was to encourage students to notice visual elements that seemed significant or beguiling without being swayed by previous analysis. This was particularly important because many students were self-conscious about their lack of art historical background. To help them focus on visual details as the entry points for their labels, we provided images that they could annotate with their observations and use to physically map connections between works. Before beginning to write or revise a label, students were given curatorial research to put into conversation with course readings and independent research. We found that not providing typical museum context early on and emphasizing how important their diverse disciplinary perspectives were allowed the students to develop unique interpretations.

What did we learn? 

Students had a wide range of prior experiences with museums, making them a productive focus group. Though familiar with key concepts and vocabulary related to this topic, students quickly flagged phrases and concepts that the professor and I used in our labels that would potentially alienate non-specialists. Collaboratively revising labels also showed students the breadth of potential interpretations visitors could bring to the works. Because the AMAM has few objects from colonial Latin America, the checklist consisted primarily of European prints that represented the European cultural anxieties about deception and transformation that were further amplified in its colonies. This meant that in addition to weighing competing contemporary perspectives, students also had to balance historical ones. One student remarked that drawing together this multiplicity of points of view across time and space made her change her “perceptions and definitions of words.” 

As they became more critical consumers of museum content through these vibrant discussions, students questioned how the static words of a label could engage viewers. Interpreters often face this challenge, but it underscored for me that the students hadn’t felt the museum’s labels were dynamic before nor had they expected them to be. In an end of semester reflection, one student wrote about how she had always been perplexed why museums “didn’t speak” to her. Through the class she realized that what had been missing was “the opportunity to interact with art in a different way than to look at it.” She equated the sense of excitement that came from writing labels to when her dance class came to the museum to mimic the shapes of artworks through their bodies. Being transformed from a passive viewer to an active interpreter gave the museum new relevance.

This happened for others, reshaping not only their relationship with the museum but also the broader community in Northeast Ohio. This, for me, was particularly important because Oberlin students often lack an understanding of the diversity of the local community. Spending the semester experimenting with how to communicate with the public in both English and Spanish gave them a heightened sense of place. One student noted that “our participation in the development of this exhibition transformed this project into something of a community.” Working on the exhibition was a powerful opportunity for this student specifically because it connected her with those beyond the college and enabled her to “use information learned in class to do things that would (and will) influence other people’s lives.”

What do we take forward?

What’s in a Spell? opened in late August, immediately drawing interest from other faculty who want to develop public-facing assignments and projects. For them, I’ve revised the schedule of peer-review sessions to include an additional class period in which students would comment on all the labels and not just those most closely related to their own. 

When an exhibition is finally installed, the pristine labels hung, and the programs underway, all the drafts, notes, and debates can seem to disappear. But what this project showed me was that process, rather than the product, was transformative. So often students work alone. Becoming truly dependent upon 32 others to be successful and thinking deeply about people you will only engage with through words gave them a new sense of themselves in relation to others. This project was a reminder that though complicated and slow, bringing many voices together to make meaning allows us, as museum professionals, to truly share the magic of what we do with our audiences.