Pedagogy Through Photography: Daisy Zhang, ’11

Today’s blog post is by Daisy Zhang, ’11 who curated the exhibition “Pedagogy Through Photography: Photographs by Clarence Kennedy“, which is currently on view in the Sculpture Court, on the 3rd floor of the Jewett Arts Center. Stop by and see the exhibition!

“The process of putting together my exhibition: Pedagogy through Photography: Photographs by Clarence Kennedy, has been an exciting and fun learning experience.  Kennedy was a photographer in the 1920s and 1930s who took photographs of Italian Renaissance sculpture for pedagogical purposes. Wellesley has many of his photographs and three complete bound folios as well.When I first started this project, I did not know anything about Kennedy or how to turn my work into an exhibit, and I especially did not know how much work that would involve.  As a senior art history major, the idea of curating an exhibit has always been on my mind but I did not think that it would be possible to do while I was at school and therefore, this has been very educational.  I did most of my research over the summer and went to places like the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and the Harvard Fine Arts Library.  I also compiled some photographs from our own Wellesley Archives to include in the exhibit as well.  Through doing this, I learned a tremendous amount about Clarence Kennedy but the difficult part of putting his works together into a show was probably the most daunting part.  I started this by writing first drafts of my three main labels for the show.  One was about Kennedy’s technique, the other about his life, and the third about the teaching of art and art history at Wellesley.  While these labels were being edited, I picked the photographs that I was going to use in the exhibit and wrote “tombstone” labels for those, which is just the name of the artist, title, year and any other information.

Once the labels were completed, they needed to be printed out but before that, I hung up the photographs in the Sculpture Court in their right organization.  This involved grouping them and making sure they were even with the floor and each other.  However, apart from just hanging up the photographs, I also needed a frame and a glass case for some other objects.  The glass case was meant for the ledger that recorded the art department purchases of Kennedy’s work along with a bound folio whereas the frame was meant to show how students learned form these images.  These two objects were the finishing part of my exhibit and the last to be completed.  Currently, everything is hung up and in their respective spots and it is very rewarding to see my finished work.  Kennedy’s photographs were meant to be seen by students everyday and it’s nice to see, that even though these photographs are no longer used, they can still be shown to students.”-Daisy Zhang, ’11