Installation view, Names Printed in Black, 2017
Emily Butts, a current master's candidate in Art History, was awarded the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions' (LACE) third Emerging Curators program grant to curate Names Printed in Black. The exhibition opened in January 3 and was on view until February 11, 2018. Prior to LACE, Butts served as the curatorial assistant for the exhibition Home - So Different, So Appealing, which opened in June of 2017 as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative.
Names Printed in Black at LACE explored the impact that memory has on the physical and psychological body, using loss and trauma as a framework to understand individual and collective rememberings. The artists featured in LACE's exhibition explored human rights violations, the language that is meant to protect us against them, representations of violence in the media, and how our body reacts. Butts included work from Department of Art and Art History alumna Adriana Corral (MFA in Studio Art, 2013) among other artists, including Carmen Argote, Carlos Motta, Lisa C Soto, and Samira Yamin.
Art and Cake LA writer Genie Davis described Names Printed in Black as "a valuable show, an exploration of loss, trauma, violence, and violation."
"It’s potent and prescient in today’s world of media exploitation and the recognition of violence against people of color, women, and the LGBT community," Davis writes. "The show specifically addresses memory, and the repression of same, as well as depicting social and political issues on a personal level, and how we react to them, to acts of violence, violation, and cultural history."
What is the LACE Emerging Curators award and how has it affected your work as a curator?
This was the third year that Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) awarded a grant for an emerging curator to conceive and organize an exhibition. I learned of the program through my friends, Selene Preciado and Idurre Alonso, who had been awarded the grant two years prior, but I have known of LACE's experimental programming since I was in undergraduate at Pitzer College. Coming from working at a larger institution, curating this show at an institution with four employees-compared to 500-was certainly a challenge, but offered much more flexibility in the end. Because the staff is so small, we all wore many hats during installation; indeed, much of the time I was on a scaffold installing works.
What was your experience with Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and their Pacific Standard exhibition?
I was a curatorial assistant at LACMA for the recent Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA exhibition entitled Home - So Different, So Appealing, which featured U.S. Latinx and Latin American artists who explore the universal notion of "home" through an array of conceptual strategies. My day-to-day consisted of a lot of emailing with internal departments and corresponding between the show's three external curators. Working on a 19,000 sq. ft. exhibition is a challenge, but I found that even more so when 75 percent of the curatorial team is offsite. This did, however, offer unique opportunities such as presenting concepts of the exhibition to internal employees and building close relationships with the artists in the show.
Installation view, Names Printed in Black, 2017
What other curatorial opportunities have you had the chance to pursue prior to Names Print in Black?
My first curatorial foray was a small exhibition at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) in 2016, featuring works by an LA-based artist Star Montana, whom I met through the vast alumni network from the Getty Multicultural Undergraduate Internship Program. I was approached by the director of the CSRC, Chon Noriega, with whom I worked with on Home, to put a together a show for the center. Even though this exhibition was prior to my studies at UT, I like to keep younger, emerging artists such as Star in my mind as I move forward with my research.
What are your research interests or your area of focus during your master's studies at UT?
My focus is modern and contemporary U.S. Latinx and Latin American art. My undergraduate thesis looked at three key exhibitions of Chicana/o art in LA from 1990-2011, using the art collective Asco as the connecting thread to discuss how the discourse was evolving (or not evolving) during this period. This thesis began as a way to educate myself in what I saw were holes in my art history education, which soon turned into somewhat of an obsession to explore erased histories from the traditional art historical canon.