The Campus Art Museum - Samuel H. Kress Foundation

focusing on people who have followed the stars and the ways in which events on
earth have corresponded with the stars.
Exhibitions Curated or Assisted by Faculty and/or Students
Faculty from various disciplines are sometimes called upon to provide advice and
assistance in specific exhibitions. For example, one campus art museum worked
with several professors in optics to incorporate an optic lens demonstration into an
exhibition showing how, as museum staff described, the “old masters used lenses as
a device to help visualize.” Museum staff also seek out partners to develop special
exhibitions. For instance, the Snite collaborated with the Latin Studies program to
create an exhibition on migration that “brought in classes and even people from
Chicago.” The University of Arizona Museum of Art (UAMA) provides an inspiring
example of working with students in a non-art discipline to develop and curate
a show. This exhibition, called The Aesthetic Code: Unraveling the Secrets of Art,
drew on skills and knowledge from both mathematics and art, as described by the
curator:
I wanted to do an exhibition on math and art…. I thought it would be really
interesting and we could talk about the golden ratio and fractals and all this
stuff that honestly I didn’t personally understand when I first started… I called
up the person who is in charge of the listserv in the math department and I
said…, “Put in there that I’m looking for math students who are interested in
art to come and mathematically analyze works in our collection so we can
see what we’ve got.” And so I got these three students…. We were definitely the
blind leading the blind at first. We didn’t know what we would find and …after
a while we sort of trained our own eyes and got really good at seeing them
right away, which pieces would have relationships that we could utilize and
talk about. It evolved because we started with the hardest parts, we started
with golden ratio and color and optics and fractals. We started at the high
level and one day I had this epiphany because I was having trouble pulling it
all together, “oh, we have to start with line”…. So that was really fun and they
really enjoyed it.
The exhibit explored mathematic and design principles that artists have
used over the centuries. Combing through the works from the museum’s collection,
the three students and the curator chose art appropriate for demonstrating line
to tessellations. The text accompanying each work of art was written in a way
to explain the concepts to someone not necessarily familiar with either art or
math. As a result of the exhibition, with assistance of the curator of education,
130 teachers in a local school district program learned how to use the exhibition
concepts and catalogue as a tool for teaching science and math (UAMA Annual
Report 2011, 4). A mathematics professor commented on the value of the project for
university classes as well:
What [the curator] did worked so well and she could do the same with
engineering, with biology…. I’ve told all my students to come to the exhibit. I
Museum Exhibitions and their Integration into Classes and Research
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