Natalie Wright, curator of the Rapid Response Mask Collecting Project, provides insights into the project’s ongoing efforts to capture the varying and vital roles that masks play in daily life during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ruth Davis Design Gallery
Rapid Response Mask Collecting Project
Online Launch: Fall 2020. Since March of 2020 face masks have become our central tool in the fight against COVID-19. This exhibition seeks to understand the new ways in which textiles play a critical role in our daily lives as protective face coverings. It uses a “rapid response” collecting model to select masks for the HLATC which mark this contemporary moment as historic.
Harmony and Evolution: An Exhibition of the Chinese-American Art Faculty Association
Installed in Gallery: February 26, 2020–April 5, 2020. Online Launch: Summer 2020. This exhibition showcases the work of art and design faculty from across the U.S. to address how art and design express cultural integration and creativity. The CAAFA represents the U.S. & China.
What Would a Microbe Say?
Was to be installed in Gallery: April 29-June 7, 2020. Online Launch: Summer 2020. Artist Sonja Bäumel, collaborating with Helen Blackwell of the UW-Madison Department of Chemistry, explores the perception of what bodies are made of through microbes and the body’s surface. Bäumel reimagines skin as a fictional layer of communication, and as a multi-being landscape linked to the discovery of the human microbiome.