Text? as exhibition

In today's New York Times Holland Cotter had a featured article "Modern Is Modern Is..." concerning two current museum exhibitions taking place in San Francisco. Each focuses on Gertrude Stein as their subject of  inquiry. "Fantastic!" I thought to myself as I settled in with a big bowl of cafe au lait hoping to discover how one might go about creating an exhibition based on a writer.

I was interested because I am attempting to present a "curatorial" practice in my dissertation work about Maxine Greene. Right now the curatorial idea is serving as a hook of a metaphor as I go about the data collection and analysis. I don't know how the final product will be impacted by a curatorial sensibility. I don't know that this hook will even be apparent to the reader/viewer.

Maybe this way of working is more akin to all of the background research and source material gathering that would happen in our theatre productions back at Tiny Mythic Theatre Company. We would gather images and literature and read, read, read. When I was creating the character of Kirilov for our production of Dostoevsky's The Possessed, I was reading Nietzsche, Notes from the Underground, the gnostic gospels, and The Book of Revelations.

It was intense stuff and who knows if anyone could "read" my reading in my performance. But it didn't matter as this was the stuff of character building. I was attempting to embody the intellectual curiosity of Kirilov.

And I wonder, worry even, that this curatorial practice I want to invoke may not be seen by the reader/viewer of this dissertation/exhibition. Maybe I need to use this hook as I did with the source material of theatre. Mostly, I probably shouldn't even think about it. Just see what happens.

Those exhibitions in San Francisco that Cotter discussed didn't provide me with any new insight as to how a curator might present a writer. It seems the shows relied on lots of visual imagery to re-assemble our sensibilities of Stein. There were photographs of her, some of the paintings from her collections. The lens employed seemed to be biographical in nature--though the biography was a new interpretation. The visual elements seemed to support the biography.   

I still don't know what this exhibition/dissertation will look like in the end. I'm okay with that. I just hope that my committee can support my not knowing how this will all play out.