One Lucky Liaison: Emily Mello at Work at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati
Ed.M. AIE '03
by Scott Ruescher
In her great job at the Contemporary Art Center (CAC) in Cincinnati, Emily Mello, Ed.M.'03, relies almost daily on the lessons she learned in the Arts in Education Program at HGSE. Lessons not about the execution and intentions of the conceptual art that the CAC shows necessarily--but lessons about the presentation of that art to the public.
"Before I attended the AIE Program, I suspected that collaboration between museum educators and parents and schools was important," she says, "but at AIE I learned just how important that collaboration is--and now it's something I put into daily practice."
As associate curator of education at the once-controversial but heartily thriving institution, Mello spends parts of those days planning and overseeing a number of educational programs at the CAC. She helps to see, for example, that children from area schools participate in programs sponsored by the Scripps Schools Program and the General Electric Foundation; that the weekly Family Sunday and Thursday Art Play sessions for children and their parents run smoothly; and that the CAC's adult-education programs, including the popular Contemporary Fridays and Evenings for Art Teachers series, go off without a hitch. Emily has a hand in administrating all of these programs--while with the other hand, in a sense, she helps direct creative arts activities for Cincinnati-area youth in the playfully named UnMuseum that takes up the entire top floor of the building.
As both administrator and teacher, she says, "I find myself especially fortunate to have spent a year studying the sensitive terrain between the community at large and the difficult work at the core of the art world today"--especially conceptual work that is "at least iconoclastic if not confrontational." It's a matter of "negotiating relationships between the museum's exhibits and its patrons"--of unpacking, to use a deconstructive term, the cultural complexities and multidimensional connotations of edgy art for an audience with sometimes more conventional tastes; and of explaining, to those who figure there must be something more to it if so many clever and accomplished people are interested in it, visual art work that on the surface might seem ridiculous or superficial.
"Who knows," she agrees, "that the work might actually have been made to seem ridiculous or superficial for a particular, possibly satirical reason." The multiple silkscreen representations of Andy Warhol's soup cans, to cite the most obvious example.
Not surprisingly, Mello finds it particularly satisfying when she is able to help schools integrate the arts into the routine of their school days, especially in this age of standardized testing and no-nonsense basics, and the essentially playful spirit of conceptual art can't help but be fun to introduce to children.
"Going to grad school at HGSE was great; but it's nice not just to be wondering anymore how to deal with the problem of art being considered ‘extra' and superfluous," she notes, "or how, once I was out of school, to advocate for art's central inclusion in a curriculum. I'm doing these things now--dealing with the problem and advocating for the central inclusion of the arts in a curriculum!"
Not far from the CAC elevator that empties its occupants into the UnMuseum grows an electric, interactive tree of lights with synthetic boughs the children can sway with levers. Along one wall stand several children's self-portraits--done, in response to a museum educator's challenge, on three-dimensional replicas of video game stations. In the adjacent room, the elevated floor tilts dramatically, like Van Gogh's foreshortened bedroom in the famous painting, sloping up from spirit-level at a 20-degree angle, more or less, without upending the plumb work tables and chairs that stand on legs of adjusted lengths. Nearby, for less agile toddlers and slip-shod parents, the work room offers a fluid, contoured, built-in web of white, bench-high surfaces. It's a cool place for kids, and a great place for educators--just the kind of real world Mello hoped to find after a year in the relatively sequestered environs of the academy in Cambridge.
Mello arrived on the scene not long after the CAC, equal parts museum, educational facility, and gallery, moved into its spectacular new quarters, designed by Iraq-born architect Zaha Hadid (make that Iraq-born female architect), in surprisingly lively downtown Cincinnati. It hadn't been too many years since the controversial exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's explicitly homoerotic photographs put the CAC on the map in 1990, in a less conspicuous downtown location than it now occupies. The CAC was not just surviving when she arrived--but thriving in the wake of the Mapplethorpe controversy, perhaps because the controversial publicity brought donations as well as notoriety to the Center. In any case, Mello found--and still finds--the one and only job she's had since graduating from HGSE to be a good fit as well as a natural result of the Arts in Education Program's interest in the multidisciplinary application of the arts in various educational settings.
"I liked being in classes at the Ed School with students who were interested in multiple genres--in theater, literature, painting, and the rest," notes Mello of her classmates. "And l liked the diversity of places they were interested in working after graduation--in schools, community centers, and museums where they could advocate for the arts in education on a number of influential fronts. "All of these places should work together to form symbiotic relationships, after all. It's crucial that the HGSE Arts in Education Program remain not just a program for museums or for schools but one for educators who want to work in all sorts of places."
She must feel lucky--an East Coast native, Rhode Island-raised and Mount Holyoke College–educated, charged to interpret for Reds and Bengals fans the meaning of the curious collection of litter that fills a glass box near the entrance of the impressive glass edifice, courageously exposed to the sidewalk crowds rather than isolated fearfully from the public. "That litter has been contributed by CAC goers themselves," she explains. "It's a perfect introduction not only to the ‘multiplicity' idea behind some conceptual art, but also to the democratic suggestions of such art," which hold that all objects are created equal, especially if mass-produced and used by ordinary people from all walks of life.
For six months in 2005, the second-floor galleries of CAC featured a show, Multiple Strategies, that served as a sort of encyclopedic history of conceptual art, especially the kind that exploits the theme of mass-production (and "the endless duplication of lives and of objects," as poet Theodore Roethke put it in his poem "Dolor") to comic effect. Including work by many active artists as well as others 30 or 40 years past their prime, the show proved that the work in a sense had been done in the cause of liberty--almost as if the Boston Tea Party had been a work of polemical performance art--and not in the scornful, condescending, sacrilegious spirit that the enemies of experimental art assigned to the genre in the early 1900s on their way to seeing the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts slashed and burned. As conservative critics might have noticed had they visited the CAC and looked a little more closely, this interest in "multiple strategies" makes a tacit, free-spirited response to the specter of commercial totalitarianism, in an independent spirit that a believer in good old American self-reliance and independence should admire.
On one wall of the gallery hung a diptych that juxtaposes photos of the bronzeage iceman who was discovered in the Alps a few years ago and a freckled Howdy Doody with marionette strings still suggestively attached--a sacred-and-profane juxtaposition that first seemed like a send-up of the sober headshot-portrait tradition in Western art that glorifies the noteworthy individual and that next brought to mind multiplicity maven and bebop pop poet Allen Ginsberg's famous question, "America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?" A collection of punny signs from the General Ideas group occupied a small patch of wall space across the room--a take-off on such generically named mass-producers as General Motors, General Electric, and General Foods.
On still another wall, a set of photos documented the ephemeral and for the most part probably illegal public works of a 60s-era German conceptual artists' group: photo after photo of public fixtures they'd stuck together with tape--a sidewalk row of newspaper vending machines they'd bundled as one with duct tape, for example. In a glass case nearby, in a comical crack on the classy museum-educator's practice of providing insight into the old masters' processes, the CAC had laid out samples of the kind of Oreos those conceptualist German tricksters might have affixed to the side of a mail box or police station door, open-faced with the sweet pasty filling white-side up in the case, the way the curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, might display etching tools, plates, and acids in a show of Rembrandt prints.
Nearby, another glass case contained a three-dimensional representation of, well, dog feces. Next to that, a case displayed relics from one of Yoko Ono's absurdist exercises in cataloguing. And still another case contained some explicit sexual imagery by a 1960s-era experimental artist of feminist assumptions--a conspicuously iconoclastic visual commentary on porn that in its way may have been as critical of "sexploitation" as any conservative critic of the "permissive" culture.
For Mello, the challenge of presenting such work to the sometimes wary public doesn't seem as daunting as you might imagine. After all, the multiplicity theme of conceptual art does have all of that historical precedent. Before it found a home in the work of such American artists as Andy Warhol--who mass-produced silkscreens of celebrities and stacked boxes of Brillo pads in a New York studio aptly named The Factory--it got a good start in Rembrandt's sequenced self-portraits and Monet's variously lighted haystacks and cathedrals. The mass production of religious imagery--madonnas, annunciations, and last suppers--that began with the Italian Renaissance also comes to mind in this regard. It has been said that the soup cans and celebrities of Andy Warhol speak, for better or for worse, to the similarly sacred value assigned to modern consumerism.
But in light of the Mapplethorpe controversy at CAC and the corresponding attack on the National Endowment of Arts that resulted in the decimation of the NEA's budget and new restrictions on the granting of such to individual artists, well--you might still wonder how Emily would present this graphic imagery to the public as an educator responsible for teaching children, especially, about contemporary art.
As if remembering conclusions she'd reached in a paper for a museum-education class at HGSE a year before she proved them to be true on the job, she says, "That's a good question! It depends. A lot on the culture of the group we're introducing to an exhibit, or on the mores of the individual family. We always say something at the outset to warn them about the sexual content. Honestly, though, it really hasn't been a problem. We do get plenty of mail from rightwing religious groups--but those people wouldn't come to the museum."
In October of 2005, the CAC opened three new shows to which Mello applied a variety of learning tools she learned to work with in AIE. One of the three, Sacred and Profane, is a collection of sonic art--with cacophony-proof headphones on the wall lit like works by the great masters. Another, Star Star, features multi-media treatments of the ubiquity of celebrity in contemporary culture. And a third, A Thousand Years Too Late, is billed as a history of soul music in Cincinnati.
"There's definitely more of a local component to this exhibit than to most of our shows," observes Mello. "It turns out that Cincinnati record companies produced a lot of the good pop music during the Motown era. James Brown's band came from Cincinnati, and Bootsy Collins is from Cincinnati. And the nationally broadcast TV show Soul Street also came out of Cincinnati. Apparently, there were a number of independent recording labels here--and a lot of the musicians from those days came to the opening of the show! We made a 20-minute documentary, interviewing local people for anecdotes and histories of the era.
"We acknowledge this as a beginning; the exhibition might actually change a few times before it comes down at the end of the year. People will be invited to contribute to the exhibit by correcting and adding to the cases of archives--it's an interactive exhibition in the truest sense!"
Recently, Cincinnati has had the misfortune to be known not just for the Mapplethorpe controversy of the early 1990s at the CAC but for the race riots of the late 90s. Just as the Mapplethorpe controversy might have resulted indirectly in the Center's successful move to the great new building, so have the recent riots (in protest against several instances of police brutality by white officers against black suspects) resulted in the public exposure of black Cincinnati's contribution to the Motown sound of the 60s and 70s.
Naturally, A Thousand Years Too Late offers a few challenges to the museum educator. "People talk to kids about local history when they're at this show," says Mello. "It reminds me of the questions we asked in AIE: Which histories get talked about? How would you present the cultural history of your neighborhood? I'm training docents in this and asking the questions myself, and we'll have teachers to do it too--public school teachers, that is. It's important for kids to know what was happening in their communities! They need to know that these were times of turmoil, that there was a lot of pride and inspiration in the air, a do-it-yourself spirit--a feeling that there was something urgent to say, something that needed to be expressed, like when one group, the DAB [Dark and Beautiful] Band, cut an album titled 400 Years of What? You didn't have to be number one--you just had to get it out there!
"What's been important to me, and it was reinforced by AIE, is that museums should not be a one-way conversation but a dialogue with community and community voices."
