Williamson Interns Host Gallery at Scripps

By Lucy Altman-Newell
Editor-in-Chief

Each year, Scripps College’s Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery’s interns design and curate their own art exhibit, using works from the vast Scripps College art collection. This year’s exhibit, put on by interns Moor Chen ’16, Mikayla Raymond ’15, Abby Rodriguez ’16 and Maggie Wu ’15, is titled “Angels and Demons,” and runs from March 30 to April 9 in Room 112 of Lang (the art office).

This year’s intern-curated exhibit focuses on notions of good and evil across different religious practices, times and cultures. The show incorporates twenty different pieces illustrating concepts of good and evil. These pieces originated from such countries as the U.S., China, France, Italy, Germany, India and Japan, and include a Warhol screenprint, mosaics, ceramics, etchings, ink on paper and prints.

Photos by Suzette Guzman '18

The Scripps Voice caught up with some of the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery’s interns to discuss how the show was put together, as well as the concept for the exhibit itself.

TSV: How did you interns come up with the idea for the exhibit?

Raymond: Abby (Rodriguez) and I spent a lot of time beforehand thinking about what types of exhibition themes had the capacity to interest and excite people. Looking at our collection, we noticed that we had a lot of pieces that dealt with religion, but neither of us could really think of any exhibitions during our time at Scripps that had explored these themes. We then got together with the other interns, and decided on highlighting Angels and Demons.

TSV: How did you go about putting the exhibit together? What were the steps in doing this?

Raymond: We used the gallery website, which has a list of all pieces accessible there. We then looked through different artists, periods, and geographical locations; scouring for religious images. We then took these ideas, and went down into the collections to actually look at the objects. We narrowed it down from there.

TSV: What are your hopes for the exhibit?

Raymond: We really hope that people...get to appreciate some pieces from the Scripps Collection they otherwise may have never seen.

Chen: To facilitate discussion on ethics and aesthetics.

TSV: What do you hope people take away from the exhibit?

Raymond: I hope people not only start thinking about religions — that is, their differences and similarities in how they represent good and evil — but [also] about Scripps’ collection more globally. We have an expansive collection that is, in my opinion, not seen enough or used enough by students outside of Art, Art History and Art Conservation Majors. Our collection has the capacity, being a teaching collection, to inform many different disciplines.