The University Museum of Contemporary Art’s (UMCA) annual Curatorial Fellowship provides selected graduate students from the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and the Department of Art at UMass Amherst the opportunity to produce an exhibition at the UMCA. The year-long program gives graduate students an in-depth experience of curatorial practice, from grant writing and budgeting to conceptualizing and realizing an art exhibition at the end of the spring semester. Students create an exhibition essay, educational programming, a public talk, marketing strategies, press releases, and social media.
The Curatorial Fellowship is designed to deepen students’ understanding of the intellectual and practical tasks of curation in a museum setting. It has provided students with hands-on experience and highly valuable skills in the job market.
Past exhibitions include:
- Word and Image (2006)
- What Is Love (2007)
- The Unexpected Encounters of Looking Again (2008)
- The Minox and The Bog Shot: Andy Warhol (2009)
- The Domestic Sphere Goes Pop (2012)
- Shaping the View (2013)
- Fractured: The Modern Nude (2014)
- Body Politic: The Anatomy of the Grotesque (2015)
- The Eyes Are For Asking (2016)
- Color in Containment (2018)
- 5 Takes on African Art (2018)
- What's So Funny? How Humor Makes Us Think (2019)
- Artifacts at the End of a Decade (2021)
- We Gotta Get Out of This Place—Transportive Art (2022)
Students are selected in the spring semester prior to the start of the fellowship at the beginning of the following academic year.
More information regarding the UMCA Curatorial Fellowship
Other collaborations with UMCA include:
Portraits, Power and Persuasion: Chuck Close Photographs and Roman Portraiture, an online exhibit produced by Professor Laetitia La Follette and her students Michael Pratt and Kimberly Cabrera, developing out of Professor La Follette's Spring 2015 seminar on Roman portraiture.
Emulation and Repetition in 19th c. Art, an online exhibition produced by Professor Cakmak and students in her course on 19th-century art.
The Art of Collecting: Contemporary Prints from the Risa Gerrig Collection, a 2014 exhibition produced by UMass undergraduate students.
A digital wunderkammer accompanying 10,000 Wonderful Things: A Conversation with the University Collection, also produced by undergraduate students.