Carissa Kolcun ’25 and John Murphy the Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings

This summer I assisted John Murphy with preparing materials for a fall intensive class and curating the fall spotlight exhibition on the Women’s Studio Workshop. While both projects divided my time, many of the materials overlapped allowing for cross-thought on how the content could engage each other within a class framework.

The Women’s Studio Workshop (WSW) is a studio and arts space in Rosendale, NY. It was founded in 1974 as a women-centered art space and now, under new leadership, WSW has begun to tease out what exactly “woman-centered” means in a contemporary context. In approaching WSW as the subject of the spotlight exhibition, we were interested in both responding to this question alongside telling a brief history of the Workshop. In using the spotlight space, we were also engaging Vassar’s connection to WSW as a repository for all their artist’s books, as well as engaging WSW’s role in the broader Hudson Valley arts community

In addition to this project, I also planned one class session for Paper Protests, the fall intensive. After a visit to Interference Archives in Brooklyn, I became interested in the spatial theater that posters create when in public space, and how that theater mitigates the original intention of the posters. As a community-centered organization, WSW has collected posters created for various programming and events since its inception. WSW became an outlet to explore spatial theater on a micro scale, while I found readings to guide a discussion of spatial theater on a macro scale.

Between all the research, I visited many locations across the Hudson Valley, including the WSW archives, Art Omi, and Bard CCS. I’m very thankful to John Murphy as well as the rest of the Loeb staff and look forward to further exploring the curatorial process in future endeavors.