Job description
Woodruff Arts Center employees play an integral role in creating and supporting great art and education initiatives at the nation’s third largest arts center. Comprised of three Art Partners—Alliance Theatre, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and High Museum of Art—there’s a role for everyone at The Woodruff.
Reports to:
Curator, Folk and Self-Taught Art
FLSA:
United States of America (Exempt)
Employment Status:
Temporary/Part time
Position Summary: Through a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the High Museum of Art is pleased to offer a paid part-time research position with the Folk and Self-Taught Art Department serving the 2024 exhibition Patterns in Abstraction and related LINK publication on the museum’s growing collection of Black quilts. Through a focused exhibition and more expansive digital publication, Patterns in Abstraction interrogates how quilts made by African American women challenge histories of abstract art that have historically privileged Euro and Euro American, male painters and sculptors. A corresponding publication through LINK, the Museum’s new platform for online engagement, will offer multimedia and interactive content related to these quilts, while presenting the museum’s African American quilts holdings in their entirety. The research assistant responsibilities will include:
Secondary research:
- Create and master a bibliography of quilt scholarship which will shape the longform essays we publish on LINK as well as an interactive timeline of the reception history of Black quilts in American museums.
- Create and master bibliography of exhibitions and books that have positioned marginalized artists and art forms as adjacent to modernism, including the Whitney’s Abstract Design in American Quilts (1971) MoMA’s exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art (1984), LACMA’s Parallel Visions (1992) and Centre Pompidou’s Magiciens de la Terre (1989) and evaluate more recent exhibitions like the Guggenheim’s Hilma af Klint retrospective (2019) which seem to go farther than proposing adjacencies, actually revising narratives of modernism to be more broadly inclusive of practitioners beyond the Paris, London, New York, etc. networks most credited with advancing languages of abstraction. As is implied by this direction, a goal of this project is to assess how Black quilters may fit into these expanding narratives.
- As the assistant develops these bodies of research, they will be responsible for arranging and monthly meetings with curator Jentleson to review progress and revelations.
Primary research:
- Community based research with living quilters, primarily in Atlanta and Gees Bend, conducting interviews and gathering oral histories. Jentleson will be the lead on these interviews but the backup of the research assistant will be crucial for preparation as well as structuring follow up and new directions that the interviews will engender.
- Archival research at sites like the Wilson Libraries of UNC Chapel Hill, which is the repository for the Souls Grown Deep Archive (which includes material on Gees Bend quilters) and identification of other relevant archives
- Correspondence, collaboration, and potential archival research with scholars and curators working with major quilt collections across the country
- Convening assistance and participation: In 2023 the museum will hold a convening in Atlanta of quilters, curators, and quilt historians centered around the question, “How can quilts made by African American women change how we tell the story of abstraction?”. The research assistant will assist the curator and programs staff in the planning of this convening, participate in it, and help coordinate how the ideas and writings that come out of it can shape the LINK publication and exhibition didactics.
Duration: This assistantship is termed for a full year.
COVID Vaccination Information
Effective as of October 1, 2021, The Woodruff Arts Center requires that all employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of employment, subject to accommodation. If you are hired, we will require you to prove that you have received the COVID-19 vaccine or have a valid documented religious or medical reason not to be vaccinated. This paragraph informs you of the company's expectations before you begin work at The Woodruff Arts Center and you should not reveal information about your COVID-19 vaccination status prior to receiving an offer of employment.
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