So it seems that the semester is really coming to an end. I mean, we still have 3 weeks left until we have to pack up and board our planes back home, but it’s pretty much right around the corner. It didn’t really hit me until last Sunday when we (art majors) had to set up our final curated show in Genazzano…in a castle! Who get’s to say that they had an art exhibition in a castle on top of a hill in the Italian countryside?
It would be an understatement to say that it was a great experience, because it was way more than that. For a director of a museum to allow college juniors to have an exhibition in his museum, is beyond anything any one of us could have thought possible. And even though many of us have set up shows before, somehow this one was different.
For starters, the spaces that we potentially could have used were incredibly massive; for only 8 people, there was no way that all of us could fill in all that empty space. So Claudio Pisano, the director of the CIAC Museum, made the executive decision to place us all in the same room, and somehow we made it work. The space seemed to fit us all in it perfectly, Sara grabbed a corner, Anastasia, Izzy and Christine each procured a wall, Jacqueline and Joy each claimed the middle of two open spaces, Brooke appropriated the darkest part of the room and I took to one of the two archways in the room.
Photo Credit for above: Sara Cha
Photo Credit for above: Sara Cha
Setting up the show seemed like took a few long hours to accomplish our goal, but at some point during the preparations Luana and Claudio both disappeared and returned bearing food. I don’t know where the time went because it seemed to me that we had only just arrived. By the time we finished the food and went back to work, time seemed to pass entirely too quickly: by the time most of us were putting the finishing touches on our work it was already 5pm. That makes 7 hours to set up 8 works of art..How that happened…I dont know, but I guess it was a bit of stress, decision making, readjustments and panicking.
But after those 7 hours, our semester of living in Rome, going through school and field trips and classes and work and internships, finally seemed finite. We finished with a show in a castle, and we owe that entirely to the help of our professor Luana Perilli and director of the CIAC Claudio Pisano.
-Tyler Williams