Exposé

cRITIC

Eduardo Rega

TEAM

Mitchell Coziahr, Amy Koenig, Phoebe Hu, Laurel Li

PROJECT STATEMENT

Art institutions have a social responsibility to be public institutions that justly and accurately promote art and artists to encourage widespread access and critical public discourse around aesthetics, their role in society and their social and cultural impacts. However, as capitalist-colonial institutions, their modus operandi comes nowhere close to this. The influence of private donors and collectors, the board of trustees, and corporations that support these institutions dictate the mainstream public discourse and the selection of works of art they display with the goal of increasing art’s monetary value within the dynamics of a Market.

Our pavilion is a critique on the way museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, operate through these influences. As a sculptural piece, the pavilion represents the layering to how museums operate, the internal conflicts they hide, and the image they project outwards to the public. The busts on the exterior are aiming to demystify the people in power that they represent. In most cases these are made up of board of trustee members and donors who are normally seen as these sacred heroic figures. The busts represent the façade that museums tend to present towards the public, depoliticized and symbolic, but begin to reveal the monstrous acts that are so often associated with these types of donors. The pavilion is trying to bring the art back to the people. It’s not something that should only be looked afar, it can be touched, moved around and explored. While we are trying to pull back the curtain on these issues, we also want it to be something that people aren’t afraid to interact with.  By taking the formal language of the frame and reimaging its role in framing art, there is the creation of a different kind of display- the art of the protest, public discourse, revelation of truth.