What is Bad Art? Where do our ideas about aesthetics come from and how do those ideas change over time? Have you ever taken a still life class where the model was a dog? What does Enya have to do with all of this? Find out in our conversation with Maggie Unverzagt Goddard and Mika Matsuno, the Brown University students behind a recent crowdsourced exhibition on Bad Art.
Maggie Unverzagt Goddard is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Brown. She received an MA in Public Humanities from Brown and an MA in American Studies from the George Washington University. Her research engages visual culture and performance studies through a focus on objects, aesthetics, and the body.
Mika Matsuno is an undergraduate senior at Brown studying History and Sociology. She enjoys most the tactile experience of art making and gravitates most towards collage, printmaking, and fabric arts.
What is Bad Art? Where do our ideas about aesthetics come from and how do those ideas change over time? Have you ever taken a still life class where the model was a dog? What does Enya have to do with all of this?
The music on this episode is excerpted from the song “New Day” by Lee Rosevere (licensed via Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International).
This episode kicks off a series focusing on Gallery Lab, an exciting initiative here at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage that invites graduate students and their collaborators to curate, perform, and organize an exciting array of exhibitions, events, and activities. You can read more about Gallery Lab in the Brown Daily Herald and check out the full calendar of events here.
Hannah Mooney and Molly Pailet stopped by Public Work to talk about “Monument Worthy,” an exhibition they curated on the topic of “personal memory markers.” Hear Hannah and Molly talk with Jim and Amelia about the monuments and debates informing their work, the forms of monuments to personal memory that were revealed in their exhibition, and the ways we remember, erase, and interrogate history through our relationships to material objects large and small.
Hannah Mooney is a first year in the Public Humanities Master’s Program, who is interested in public history, museum education, and historic preservation. Aside from Public Work, her favorite podcast is 2 Dope Queens. For tweets related to museums and history, or more likely dogs, you can follow her @hannahemooney.
Molly Pailet is a first-year student in the MA Public Humanities Program. She is passionate about applied history, non-traditional education, and creating opportunities for engagement and connection. Her favorite podcast is The Mortified Guide, because she too has a very embarrassing collection of journals that the historian in her can’t bear to get rid of…primary source documents! Check her out on Twitter @akimboflamingo.
Hannah Mooney and Molly Pailet stopped by Public Work to talk about “Monument Worthy,” an exhibition they curated on the topic of “personal memory markers.” Hear Hannah and Molly talk with Jim and Amelia about the monuments and debates informing their work, the forms of monuments to personal memory that were revealed in their exhibition, and the ways we remember, erase, and interrogate history through our relationships to material objects large and small.
New Orleans Mayor Rich Landrieu’s speech on the removal of Confederate monuments (mentioned by Hannah) can be found online: here is a transcript and here is video.
