HWS News
5 May 2023 Croce '25 Reflects on Curating Gallery Exhibit By Colin Spencer '19
Provenzano Student Art Gallery co-director shares on organizing and curating a solo exhibit for capstone.
As part of her capstone project, Adriana Croce ’25 got a chance to experience what her potential future career of being a museum curator would be like as she recently curated an exhibit at the Provenzano Student Art Gallery.
One of the Provenzano co-directors, Croce is a double major in French and Francophone and art history with a minor in critical museum studies. Croce curated “Savage Sensuality,” an exhibit with works created by Jafri ’24 as part of her minor capstone. “Savage Sensuality” recreates canonical artworks featuring white, cisgender people with people of color and gender nonconforming people through photography.
The process for creating and curating the exhibit included putting out a call for artists’ work, selecting the artist, working with Jafri on how they wanted the gallery displayed, and painting the walls of the gallery to fit with the photos. She also wrote a guide on the gallery and included a poster where people could share their thoughts.
This was also the first time Croce created an exhibit by herself.
“I love working together with the other interns, but it was really cool to work on each step on my own and watch it come to life,” Croce says.
An important area she focused on was how to decolonize museum text on artists when discussing the work of people of color. While this was already part of her curriculum as a critical museum studies student, she further researched the topic, reading articles on how to best present the ideas of the artist’s works without talking over them.
“I feel like with the gallery, all of the work I’ve done has been such a learning process, especially figuring out parts on my own,” Croce says. “I feel I have the skills that will be valuable going forward thanks to this project. And I know that for curators in galleries in the real world, a lot of things get placed on their plate and I feel like I juggled it well. So that will come in handy in the future.”
