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This semester, students played the roles of both art historians and curators in the Museums in Theory and Practice course taught by Judith Oliver, professor of art and art history and Medieval and Renaissance studies. The culmination of the class is What Museums Collect: From the Cabinet of Curiosities to Modern Curatorial Challenges, an exhibition that opens Thursday, May 10, in 51�Թ���’s Picker Art Gallery.

The students were responsible for conducting research, creating gallery labels, and installing the art, as part of Oliver’s ambitious assignment that took the class outside the lecture hall and into a museum of their own creation.

Photo by Mark Williams

Oliver first asked students to write term papers addressing current challenges that museums face. Their topics — which included the looting of antiquities, the detection of forgeries, objects of religious veneration, and offensive art — became the themes for their individual exhibitions.

Working closely with Sarisha Guarneiri, the Picker gallery’s registrar, students chose objects that aesthetically embodied the focus of their research. They selected pieces ranging from 1930s photography to Indian ironwork sculpture to Australian aboriginal bark paintings.

Students hung the colorful and eclectic pieces themselves, showing off objects in their collections in regal glass cases. Based on their research, they wrote professional wall labels to accompany the art.

Megan Reinhart ’12, an art history major, wrote her senior thesis on the detection of forgeries as a modern museum challenge. “Mine focused on how artwork may not always be what it seems,” Reinhart explained. Her collection includes paintings that might be forgeries, but, as she wrote in her labels, the art world cannot be certain if the pieces are actually fakes.

Brooke Weinstein ’12 created her own “Cabinet of Curiosities,” symbolic of the assortment of exotic items collected by the Italian Medici family, which art historians now view as the first museum. Weinstein’s cabinet featured items like stuffed birds in flight from the biology department’s Natural History Museum of the Chenango Valley and gems borrowed from the geology department’s Robert M. Linsley Museum.

Oliver said she “hoped the exhibition would give [her students] a sense of all the many practical elements that go into creating an exhibition, as well as a taste of how interesting life is behind the scenes and the many ethical challenges museums face.”

Grace Goodwin ’13 said she “learned that there is so much behind an art exhibition — much more than meets the eye.” Goodwin added, “It’s not as simple as just hanging paintings on the wall.”

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The opening reception for What Museums Collect is Wednesday, May 9, 5–7 p.m. in the Picker Art Gallery and is open to the public. Located in the Charles A. Dana Arts Center on Lally Lane, the gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday 1–5 p.m.