selected curatorial
Millbrook School’s Warner Gallery features the work of established and emerging artists and — best of all — our students’ art. I served as the gallery’s director from 2018-2021; here’s a selection of exhibitions from that time.
Report Card | Guerrilla Girls | Fall 2019
In the year leading up to this exhibition, a group of students formed a committee to study the school’s ownership of a Chuck Close lithograph, following sexual misconduct allegations against the artist. The students asked and answered questions like “Is it possible to separate art from artist?” and “What are a school’s accessioning and curatorial obligations, compare with, for example, a museum?” Ultimately they recommended that the school retain the lithograph and present it alongside a new didactic to contextualize the work and accusations. Another of the committee’s recommendations was to bring the Guerrilla Girls’ work to Millbrook’s Warner Gallery.
Beautiful Boy | Lissa Rivera | Spring 2019
“So much of identity is constructed from looking at pictures.” - Lissa Rivera
Photographer Lissa Rivera’s images of her partner and muse, BJ Lillis, reference cinema, photo history, and color theory. Students attended an artist talk before the opening reception where Rivera and Lillis spoke about their working and personal relationship and about the ways that beauty defies traditional gender binaries.
Confluence | faculty exhibition | annually each summer
Black Lives Matter: Lynsey Weatherspoon, Raelyn Fines, Sahra Qaxiye, Darrel Hunter, Adrian White, Dee Dwyer, Sheila Pree Bright, and Jon Cherry. Fall 2020
The Black Lives Matter exhibition featured the work of eight Black photojournalists who covered the 2020 BLM protests. A team of eight students curated the work by Zoom in the summer leading up to the exhibition using the #hireblackphotographers resource and hashtag. The students prepared for this work by learning about the history of photojournalism, particularly civil rights photojournalism in the United States, and about journalistic ethics broadly, studying incidences of misleading images and articles on a variety of topics.
Super Natural | Vaughn Bell, Emma Steinkraus, and Ari Weinkle | Fall 2018
Millbrook School’s commitment to environmental sustainability and stewardship inspired the Super Natural show. Featured artists provided new perspectives for thinking about the natural world. Weinkle’s animations bring typography alive, each letter inspired by an animal’s fur or the slime of an imagined insect. Steinkraus’ Foraging Jacket provides guidance for navigating flora in the Midwest. Student members of Millbrook’s botany class curated Bell’s hanging terrariums, selecting plants to plant in each one.
Holbrook Made | student exhibition | annually each spring
Each gallery year culminates with an exhibition of student work in drawing, painting, photography, ceramics, and sculpture.
Postcard design by Ami Pourana