How to put up a good art exhibition
You might be reading this article to explore an alternative approach to evangelistic events for your Christian Union or Arts Network Hub. I love your enthusiasm and desire to get creative and encourage all CUs to try new ways to meet people and share the joy of knowing Christ.
Before I discuss the practical side of putting a good exhibition, I want to preface with this: whatever event you are planning, please do it with a loving heart. I am not talking about loving the Gospel and sharing it (you obviously do!). What I mean is a heart towards the people you are reaching. A desire to listen to them and care about the things they care about.
Approach it like cross-cultural mission
I have attended CU art exhibitions that convey an attitude of, ‘Oh, we have some arty people at our university that we want to evangelize. We are not sure whether they do Fine Art, design or architecture, we don’t know what kind of art they like, but let’s put up an exhibition and host a talk! They like art, they’ll come!’
These events often result in the exhibition being a decorative background to the talk and a party for CU members who haven’t been given a reason to care about the art around them. The exhibition is shallow with no care for the artists and the ideas they are engaging with. There is no wider narrative that ties the show together - and the art isn't given much value.
If you are not in the arts yourself, it is important to bring the mindset of a cross-cultural missionary to your exhibition planning. When missionaries learn the language and culture of the country they’re serving, they approach it with humility and desire to learn from others.
So why not take some time to briefly familiarize yourself with art and art history? Visit an exhibition. Involve some Christian and non-Christian artists in the exhibition planning. Listen to their interests and find out what the Bible has to say about them. Build meaningful, collaborative relationships. And after getting to know them, invite them to a CU talk you know they’d find interesting.
For example, literature students have a deep appreciation for good books and the use of language, you would not assume they’d enjoy reading just anything. And if you were to recommend your literature friend a book, you would think carefully about your suggestion. Likewise, artists, curators and art history students genuinely love art and deeply appreciate the culture they’re engaging with. They take art seriously, constantly immerse themselves, visiting galleries and exhibitions sometimes several times a week.
Like Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well, I hope you will approach evangelism by meeting people in the arts where they’re at and loving them. Don’t rush to tell the Gospel and jump first to what you think is important to say. Have an open, loving heart, a listening ear and be attentive to what the Bible says about your audience’s values and interests.
I hope this guide encourages you to be thoughtful and loving in the planning of your exhibition. Don’t worry about the success of your exhibition – as with many missionaries before you, God will use this experience to teach and grow you and build your relationships with others for His glory.
Now let’s talk about the practicalities!
Planning a good exhibition
Anyone can put up an exhibition and I hope this guide is helpful. Below are aspects of an exhibition to think about. I have numbered each point, but these steps are not in chronological order, and you don’t have to do everything suggested. Exhibition planning requires some flexibility and back-and-forth thinking, making sure you create something manageable for your CU and relevant to your context.
I have included photos from SANDCASTLE, a student/graduate exhibition I organized for student/graduate artists in 2023 as an example exhibition. See the appendices for other helpful resources.
1. Getting a space
- Find a space for your exhibition – is it accessible for your audience?
- Is the space suitable for paintings, installation, video or performance etc.?
- How many days are you exhibiting? What times will the space be open to visitors?
2. Finding artists
- Select some artists whose work you’d like to exhibit
- What are the strengths in their work?
- How do the various artists’ work complement each other?
- How do the art pieces work together in the space? What story do they tell?
3. Select a theme and write an exhibition statement
- Brainstorm a concept/theme and title for your exhibition. Have fun with it!
- Write a statement for your exhibition (see appendices A and B). Here are some ideas for your text:
- Include your reflection on curation from step two – how do the works complement each other? What narratives and discourses are they generating?
- How is the exhibition relevant to this cultural moment? What is happening around the world right now?
- How does it connect with art history?
- Think about whether this text is interesting to you. Would it be interesting and accessible to other artists and the wider public?
4. Publicity
- Are there online platforms to promote your exhibition? Any university platforms?
- Send direct invites to your friends and course mates. You could send a personalized invitation - make it special so your friends feel welcomed.
- Be sure to include all the exhibition information (title, artists, location, dates, timings, social media) on any posters, flyers or online event platforms (see appendix C).
- Are you hosting a Private Viewing? Contrary to its name, a PV is a public opening event for the exhibition where drinks are served, and the artists invite friends and course mates to celebrate their work.
5. Budget
- Every CU has a different budget, so plan realistically and work within the funds you have available. You can still plan a good show with a small budget and a strong concept.
- Essentials:
- Hiring a space – does your university have any free or reduced-rate spaces you could use?
- Transportation – do you need a van to transport large art works
- Drinks at PV – If you have planned a good exhibition, you might be able to get support from a local brewery. Email them to ask if they can provide some free drinks for the PV. They may ask for promotion on your social media in return.
- Create an exhibition catalogue or print sheets with the exhibition details, text, and a map or list of the works.
- Extras:o Wall text – you could use vinyl lettering stickers to place your exhibition title and/or text on the wall.o If you have extra funds, use it to make the exhibition space clean and sharp. For example: if you are showing video work, install some cable covers to hide the messy wires.
6. Invigilation
Who is invigilating the exhibition during opening times? You might want to create a rota.
7. Safety of the artwork
- How are you guaranteeing the safety of the artists’ work? Make you handle the artworks respectfully and ensure safe transportation and installation.
- Complete any risks assessment forms required.
8. Artist talk or interview
- Interview your artists about their work at the PV or separate event if you want to include a talk for your exhibition. The curator or exhibition organizer could plan some questions for the artists related to the exhibition theme and take questions from the audience.
- Inviting a Christian thinker to speak at your show can work. However, it is very important they understand the artists’ work and care about the concept of the exhibition. Think about whether their talk complements the exhibition? Is it relevant?
- Do you need a speaker? Could your exhibition be an opportunity to intentionally listen to and support your creative friends? Find out which topics and issues interest them and see whether the Gospel has something to say (it usually does). You could plan a follow-up talk to invite your friends to after the exhibition or meet up one-to-one to continue the conversation.
- I am not discouraging evangelism. I love evangelism, it’s beautiful! But I don’t want you to feel pressure to make your exhibition a successful evangelistic event. Focus on caring for the community you’re serving and listen to them in an unrushed manner. As you get to know them, you will discover their questions and how the Gospel can bring them joy in their specific circumstances. If you are intentional in this way, I believe you will host a successful evangelistic event where Christians show genuine care for their guests.
9. Pray
- Pray for the friends who are organizing the exhibition with you and pray for your audience.
- Pray as you prepare the show. Feel free to express your frustrations and seek wisdom from your teammates and others with more experience.
Appendix A. Exhibition Test Example
Under the burning sun, a boy squats in the sand, fiercely focused on building a sandcastle at the beach. Blazing sunrays pierce through the carelessly applied sunblock on his back. His skin swells and peels as it burns. But the child’s senses have been completely overridden by his task. In the world, it’s just him and his sandcastle.
And then suddenly he hears a merry tune. It’s the ice cream van. The boy leaps up and runs towards the van, calling to his mum. She buys him an ice cream which he enjoys immensely. Once satisfied, his thoughts return to his sandcastle. But as he surveys the beach, he cannot find it. It’s gone.
Where did it go? Did a wave wash it away? Has his older brother sabotaged him? Or did some spiteful old man drop-kick it while walking his dog?
‘Where is my sandcastle?’ the boy cries out.
‘Oh darling, it’s just a sandcastle. You can always build another one,’ his mum says, resting her hand on his shoulder.
He looks up at her forlornly. ‘It’s not just a sandcastle, Mummy. It was my pErSoNa.’
South Korean bloggers identified ‘multipersona’ in 2021 as a social trend that destigmatised the idea of having multiple selves and allowed people the freedom to self-express numerous facets of their identity, especially online. This trend is traceable across the globe. Although its presence cannot be exclusively claimed by our contemporary digital moment, there is a strong argument that the internet has taken our need to constantly create various ‘self-brands’ to a new level of intensity (Cornell 2015, p.38). Dating apps reveal our romantic and sexual selves, our nerdom is cultivated and accentuated in niche forums, and our reputations are shaped through online professional networks. Consciously and subconsciously, we curate our image on various social media platforms, creating an assortment of personas that we carefully exhibit to the multiple worlds watching us.
Multipersona in the digital age places us at an uncomfortable juncture in human perception. On the one hand, a person is accepted as a complex and multi-faceted being and their freedom to be so is celebrated. On the other hand, we ‘know’ a person other only through the shadows they allow their onlookers to see. Photo after video after caption, the internet is an endless cycle of narratives feeding into a torrent of visual data. Is this information even meaningful? Or, as art philosopher Jean Baurdillard puts it, is each new digital image merely a ‘simulacrum’ – a representation of another representation, part of a steady distancing from an original meaning within a stream of endless image-making (Emerling 2006, p.89)?
Indeed, as filmmaker Guy Debord describes, we are arguably living in the Society of the Spectacle, wherein our social relationships are mediated by images (Debord 1994, p.12). We might consider what the implications of this are for human relationships. How might this notion of the ‘spectacle’ have been enhanced by digital technology? And how are social power dynamics affected by an image-based society?
The freedom to build infinite sandcastles is a great one, but sand is fragile, the beach is vast, and the tide comes in quickly. Is all this building a futile effort? SANDCASTLE shows the work of six artists exploring ‘multipersona’ in a digital age.
Bibliography:
Cornell, Lauren. 2015. “Self-Portraiture in the First-Person Age.”. Aperture (San Francisco, Calif.), no. 221, pp.34–41.
Debord, Guy. 1994. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books.
Emerling, Jae. 2005. Theory for Art History. London: Routledge.
Foster, Hal. 1996. The Return of the Real: the Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Appendix B. Curational Commentary
Six artists’ works are brought together across three spaces within the gallery to catalyse a critical discussion around the concept of multipersona.
The works of Sun Oh and Xiaoling in the first space explore the construction of individual worlds and digital microcosms. Together, these works expand and contract the size and shapes of these personal habitats and dreamscapes. Sun Oh’s stage acts as a ‘second Earth’, a safe space from which she can control her interactions with the outside world. This piece portrays her desire to simultaneously express herself and protect her true self as she navigates her surroundings. Hence Sun Oh redefines life for herself by saying ‘The stage and performance is to me real life, and the external and all it entails is just a preparation for this’. Conversely, Xiaoling’s digital microcosm depicts a digital self-portrait exposed to infinite expansion and possibility. Her avatar actively participates in multipersona by absorbing its environment and accepting a diverse state of being. Xiaoling’s work raises questions regarding the authenticity of self.
Grace Penton’s work in the second space builds upon the notion of world-building through narrative. Penton’s work comments upon the ability to construct multiple personas within imagined and digital realms, as the artist performs multiple characters in her own romantic comedy, critiquing ideas of redemption commonly associated with happy endings. Her work effectively highlights our tendency to perform according to consumerist pressures and desires of personal fulfilment.
The third space presents a multifaceted perspective on the blurring of digital and physical worlds. The works of Corrine Chan and Jia Xi Li express the possibilities of the collision of these two worlds. While Li’s practice embodies the use of both digital and material making, Chan’s work visualises an overlap between the two ecologies. ‘I want to capture the memory and relationship I have with a space I cannot occupy anymore,’ says Li. Her work comments on the changes to identity imposed by constant geographic relocation and explores the memories imbued in physical objects that contribute to a stable sense of self. Chan’s work, in a humorous reversal, displays digital fingers tickling a physical curtain playing with the idea of constructing digital realities via physical means. As fingers type out code that form the bricks of digital spaces, her work playfully prods at the world-shaping influence digital discourses have on material existence.
Within this same space, Dohyun Baek’s works, while being absurd and humorous, add a more critical perspective to such overlaps; they consider the emotional and psychological strain on people that the encroachment of the digital on the real can bring. Baek accentuates the potential for heightened vulnerability in a world shaped by multipersona and the fragility this induces in our understanding of being human.
Throughout the exhibition, the conversation around multipersona is multi-layered; whilst this contemporary concept is treated as a digital, technological phenomenon, the artworks simultaneously reveal the essential, very human undertones of the digital realms. Created by people, the countless multipersonas scattered across the web disclose their creators’ vulnerability as traces of real and raw emotion are still visible through the multiple facades of flawlessness. Thus, SANDCASTLE presents a very human, emotional and vulnerable view of multipersona. The exhibition seeks to ask the audience to consider their own thoughts about their experiences of such themes in this contemporary moment.
Appendix C. Exhibition Flyer Example
