It’s the day before the opening of Danny Giles’ exhibition at the University of Washington’s Jacob Lawrence Gallery, and everything is running on schedule. For the past three weeks, Giles has been working here in residency, creating a new series of works on paper. Now the Chicago-based artist is showing UW sophomore Serena Lantz how to hang his unframed work at eye level using a self-designed system of pins and carefully crafted paper hinges.
Behind every exhibition’s public face is a team of professionals who work long hours to put it all together. At the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, this team includes undergraduate and graduate students who are gaining valuable hands-on experience through the School of Art + Art History + Design’s curatorial internship program.
Learning by doing
Lantz is earning a B.A. in studio art with a concentration in 3D4M, the University’s interdisciplinary designation for three-dimensional art. This quarter, after spending a year as a curatorial intern, they are moving into a paid position as the gallery lead, working closely with gallery director Emily Zimmerman on several aspects of day-to-day operations.
“We generally have around 15 interns,” says Lantz, who grew up on Seattle’s Eastside. “We have positions in social media, graphic design — I like to think it’s a system where you choose what you want to learn.”
One of Lantz’s favorite aspects of gallery work is the way it encourages conversations with visitors. “If you’re a studio artist, it’s important to be able to communicate with other creative people about art,” they say. “It’s also given me a lot of opportunities to reflect about the gallery not only as a physical space, but also as a social space in the context of artists and representation.”
Other responsibilities involve handling the art itself. “We encourage interns to be part of the install and deinstall process,” says Lantz. “This is a core part of the experience, because you’re able to interact with the work on a personal level — meet the artist and have discussions with them.”
Art handling is also an opportunity to gain practical skills, Lantz adds: “‘How do I patch a hole in a wall? How do I paint?’ Even if they don’t decide to go into curatorial work, the experience of working in a gallery is invaluable to people who are considering art as a profession.”
Knowledge into practice
The Jacob Lawrence Gallery’s assistant curator, art history master’s candidate Juan Franco, will have the chance to put this functional knowledge to use over the summer by curating “Lugar del Trabajo,” an exhibition at the gallery by New York–based artists Angélica Maria Millán Lozano and Camilo Godoy that will serve as Franco’s thesis practicum project.
In the meantime, Franco has been assisting Zimmerman with “The Practice and Science of Drawing a Sharp White Background,” the current exhibition by Giles, whose work interrogates currents of white supremacy running through Eurocentric art history curricula. Giles is this year’s recipient of the Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency, a program established in 2015 to help carry forward the values of the former UW professor for whom the gallery is named.
“In honoring Jacob Lawrence’s legacy, the gallery has a mission to support those things that were important to Lawrence: education, social justice and experimentation,” says Zimmerman, who became the gallery’s director in 2017. “Supporting the creation of new artwork that is in dialogue with the inequities embedded in our social, political and economic realities is crucial as a tool for seeing our world anew.”
“The Practice and Science of Drawing a Sharp White Background”
Advocating for the arts
When you support the Friends of the Jacob Lawrence Gallery fund, you can help students like Serena Lantz and Juan Franco gain the experience they need to pursue careers in the arts.
Living a legacy
This mission resonates strongly with both Lantz and Franco, who share an interest in issues of identity and tradition in the context of cultural production. “To me, the legacy of Jacob Lawrence is at the intersection of arts and social justice,” says Franco. “Talking about history from a particular viewpoint and also advocating for it, making it visual to experience — the gallery is a place where all these histories come together.”
Zimmerman says that she would like the students who work for the gallery to take away an understanding of the care at the core of curatorial practice. “This means not only looking after the physical safety of artworks, but also one’s responsibility to the artist, the audience, colleagues and community,” she says.
These are far-reaching lessons that students will carry with them into the future. “Working at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery encourages me to consider artistic work and practice as both personal expression and political, societal act,” says Lantz. “I’m proud of everything we do to establish and solidify the connection between arts and social justice.”