The Ciscle Method:

Pedagogy, Practice and Impact
by Jeffry Cudlin

In 1989, curator George Ciscle launched The Contemporary, a new type of museum with no fixed address. This nomadic, non-collecting institution connected with audiences wherever they lived by presenting its exhibitions all over Baltimore—indoors, outdoors, and anywhere in-between. During Ciscle’s tenure as founding director, The Contemporary installed artworks in such unlikely venues as a former Greyhound bus service terminal (Photo Manifesto, 1991), atop the bed of a 1959 Chevy pickup truck (Catfish Dreamin’, 1993), and woven throughout the Howard P. Rawlings Conservatory in Druid Hill Park (Ignisfatuus, 1996).[1]

In these ad hoc art spaces and non-art institutions, Ciscle and his Baltimore community partners invited thorny conversations about identity, activism, and the political class—all against the reactionary backdrop of the culture wars. For the inaugural 1990 Contemporary exhibition, Visual AIDS, Ciscle rallied 200 regional and national artists to address the U.S. government’s criminally indifferent response to the AIDS crisis.[2] For Mining the Museum, their seminal 1992–3 project, Ciscle and curator Lisa Corrin invited artist Fred Wilson to ask uncomfortable questions about the stories told by the Maryland Historical Society and its collections.[3] Wilson “[examined] the ideological apparatus of the museum in general,” as Corrin explained, “and how one museum in particular has ignored the histories of people of color.”[4] And in 1994, for Labor of Love, Ciscle helped artist Willie Cole turn the Baltimore Museum of Industry into a bakery, creating fetus-shaped loaves of bread in an extended meditation on the fertility industry in Baltimore, and the then-largely-unspoken-of roles of technology and skilled labor in contraception, conception, and infant care.[5]

Based on these examples, one might conclude that The Contemporary’s exhibitions merit attention simply because of Ciscle’s formal innovations and fearless social commentary. Yet the shape and content of each of these projects reflect an underlying method, developed in response not just to political controversies of the moment, but to hierarchical museum structures, corporatist top-down decision-making processes, and inaccessible, ideologically-loaded standards for visual display. All of Ciscle’s choices as a curator prefigure systemic changes inside and outside of art institutions—and create spaces for audiences to make meaning and learn together.

Ciscle’s way of working—animated by his strong, democratizing personal ethos—is perhaps most clearly evident in the curatorial pedagogy he established after leaving The Contemporary, through twenty years of teaching and leadership at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). This mid-career jump from museum director to full-time educator near the end of the nineties might appear like a break, but it was in reality a doubling-down on first principles: For fifteen years prior to organizing his first exhibition at George Ciscle Gallery[6], he had developed an interdisciplinary high school arts curriculum and worked in a program for disadvantaged children.[7] At MICA, Ciscle began to see all art as essentially a means to an educational end: “In the long run, the most important thing was not necessarily the art itself,” he explained in a 2018 interview, “but what role art could play in a person's life, in their learning, ability to change, develop and grow…the exhibition space is the same to me as a classroom when working with my students.”[8]

It seems that other curators have caught on to Ciscle’s personal revelation. “Pedagogy” has been a keyword in curatorial discourse since 2010, when Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson published their influential anthology Curating and the Educational Turn. That book notes how, beginning sometime around the turn of the millennium, forward-looking curatorial projects increasingly adopted educational formats and techniques.[9] Seen through this lens, the recent history of curating becomes a story in which discourse, participation, and learning have grown from didactic elements languishing at the margins of a typical museum experience—the panel discussion or artist’s lecture inviting passive spectatorship; the nearly-hidden educational resource room, offering a few books or a computer display tucked into a small space near an exhibition’s exit—to dynamic main attractions.

Ciscle developed his teaching practice as that story was unfolding, quietly workshopping approaches now taken for granted in curatorial or social practice programs throughout the U.S. His first step in that journey was the founding in 1997 of Exhibition Development Seminar (EDS), a year-long undergraduate course in which students propose, plan, and deliver a major exhibition somewhere in Baltimore.[10] The course is student-led, and while students are split into teams to administer various project elements, all decisions must be made via class-wide consensus. A solution is proposed, all voices are heard in response, and everyone agrees to either move forward together or reconsider their approach.

Early on, EDS students seemed to pick up exactly where The Contemporary had left off, creating critical interventions in museums and developing collaborative projects in community spaces. In 2000, the class brought Baltimore sculptor, fiber artist, and MacArthur Fellow Joyce J. Scott to the Baltimore Museum of Art, installing a sprawling retrospective of her early work inside and outside two of the museum’s galleries. Scott and EDS created site-specific interventions—including a small sculpture of a lynched figure, rendered in tiny, glistening black beads, and suspended directly over the head of Rodin’s Thinker in the museum’s atrium.[11]

The following year, EDS collaborated with elderly residents of Marlborough Apartments in MICA’s Bolton Hill neighborhood.[12] Together, students and seniors explored the collection of Etta and Claribel Cone—the Marlborough’s most famous former residents, having donated more than 3,000 art objects to the BMA[13]. With help from EDS, the current residents created their own new artworks for an exhibition in the Marlborough community room.[14]

And in 2007, a group of 36 students from MICA and Morgan State University worked for two full years on At Freedom’s Door: Challenging Slavery in Maryland, a sprawling exhibition occupying both MdHS and the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African-American History and Culture. The students designed four full months of programming, including film screenings, family art workshops, and community festivals, and brought together historical artifacts and newly commissioned works from artists like William Christenberry, Whitfield Lovell, and Maren Hassinger.[15]

In 2011, after more than a decade spent empowering students to take risks and gain professional experiences in partnerships across the city, Ciscle founded MICA’s Curatorial Practice MFA (CP)—the first MFA of its kind in the country, focused on creating audience-aware, socially-engaged exhibitions and programs.[16] At the Fred Lazarus IV Center, located in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District, CP students work within their own private, personalized spaces, which they use as professional offices and production studios. Students create two or more exhibitions during their two years in the program, including the annual collaborative Practicum project and individual Thesis exhibitions throughout Baltimore—and, increasingly, across the country. Following The Contemporary’s example, CP students have brought art and public conversation to a range of unexpected sites: from Michelle Gomez’s Devociones y Fe (2014), consisting of recorded interviews and artworks sited within El Tesoro Mexican restaurant and exploring Latino spiritual traditions in the Fells Point and Highlandtown neighborhoods;[17] to Melani Douglass’s nomadic Family Arts Museum, which presented Love on the Line (2015), a series of performances and programs inside Baltimore’s Spin Cycle Coin Laundromat;[18] to Maria Emilia Duno’s Circulation Desk, a series of workshops with adults and children exploring alternative archives, bookmaking, and radical librarianship inside Duno’s own non-circulating library and gallery space, The Menial Collection.[19] EDS and CP both continue to this day with new faculty and challenges, but always reflecting the pedagogy established by their founder.

On both the graduate and undergrad sides of campus, Ciscle’s classrooms have functioned as fluid spaces for free exchange, communal realization, and hands-on learning, instantiating decidedly horizontal power relationships among faculty, advisors, and students. “EDS became this whole holistic system of working together as teams of collaborators,” Ciscle says. “I learned that the more I gave up, the more power I gave to my students, that more important things would come out of it for them.”[20]

When CP program guest Pablo Helguera describes the ideas behind his seminal 2006 project The School of Pan-American Unrest—for which the artist and museum educator drove a portable schoolhouse from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, inviting community conversations and collective actions at thirty stops along the way[21]—he echoes Ciscle’s principles regarding power and collaboration. Helguera specifically cites educator and philosopher Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy as essential to thinking about collaborative learning and art.[22]

In Freire’s 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he describes how teachers and students can pursue critical consciousness and create meaning together: “Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist,” Freire explains, “and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is…himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow.”[23] For Helguera, Freire, and Ciscle alike, simply lecturing or providing information in a learning environment shuts down dialogue, patronizes students, and prevents development and self-realization.

Through the years, participants in EDS have remarked on Ciscle’s quiet presence in the classroom and his unwillingness to dictate or prescribe ready-made solutions—what Freire refers to as “the banking concept of education.”[24] Between March and May of 2021, a group of Ciscle’s former students, resident artists, and MICA instructors gathered in a series of four moderated online conversations to reflect on this open classroom environment and the feelings of empowerment that it fosters. All agreed that Ciscle’s distinctive pedagogical approach—referred to approvingly by artist, filmmaker, and Professor Emerita at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Ann Fessler as “the Ciscle Method”[25]—has had significant long-term impacts on their professional practices.

During her time with EDS as an artist-in-residence for At Freedom’s Door: Challenging Slavery in Maryland, artist Joan Gaither was particularly struck by Ciscle’s reticence in front of students. “George’s process, I’ve always said: He is not that sage on the stage, but he is that guide on the side,” she explained. “It’s almost like you don’t even know he’s in the room…every so often he would plug a little question—and it was always a question—there.”[26]

Working with Ciscle and students from MICA and Morgan State University, Gaither quickly saw how opening space for the voices of learners could lead to a more nuanced understanding of contested histories:

That, to me, is the takeaway for that process…you can’t be the star; you can’t be the know-it-all. You have to allow room for—and then be able to help deal with and process—all this other emerging information that comes out of it that may not totally agree with you…[George’s pedagogy] allows all of these voices to come in while at the same time making those voices feel welcome. And the person who is sort of in charge—which is, really, the whole group itself—they begin to know that there is space for that story, that voice.[27]

Glenn Shrum—a lighting designer with Flux Studio Ltd., associate professor at Parsons School of Design, and former EDS mentor and instructor—recalls that Ciscle’s unwillingness to be the “know-it-all” could initially cause bewilderment. “When George wasn’t in the front of the room,” Shrum says, “[students] would turn to me and say: ‘Can’t he just tell me the answer?’”[28]

As a mentor for EDS in 2008, then as instructor for the 2009 one-artist retrospective, Follies, Predicaments, and Other Conundrums: The Works of Laure Drogoul,[29] Shrum found that Ciscle’s example made him re-think how to conduct himself in the classroom and communicate with students: “For me, this has had a lasting impact and I regularly find myself defaulting as an educator to giving answers—and I go, ‘Oof! Shouldn’t have given the answer.’”[30]

Ciscle’s reoriented student-teacher relationship allows independent learners to take charge of their own educations, feel ownership over their labor, and bring creativity and agency to their work. In the planning for Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square (2008)—a show of ten outdoor site-specific interventions throughout Mount Vernon Place, created in partnership with the Walters Art Museum for the city-wide Festival of Maps[31]—former EDS student and Founding Director of the Culture Workers Education Center Natasha Bunten likens her experience not to administrative work, but to the artistic process:

It’s certainly part of the pedagogy that in the way that these projects are initiated, there’s an inherent dismantling of institutional norms…the students have to trust in that process, and learn as they go, and address challenges as they come up. It is almost like thinking about artmaking, additive and subtractive simultaneously: It subtracts the traditional way in which students are expected to learn, many times through emulation…[there’s no] “here’s your book on exhibition-making, chapter one; come up with your thesis.”[32]

Although Ciscle expected his students to discover their own novel approaches to exhibition work in real time—and to potentially risk failure—he thrust them into high-stakes situations in the field in which they stood on equal footing with museum professionals. As Joyce J. Scott described the work of EDS students on her retrospective, Kickin’ It With the Old Masters:

He also then insinuated students at [the Baltimore Museum of Art] in a way that they hadn’t had before—because they had a voice…he was teaching them how to be aware and in and of the moment. That’s very important because empowering someone to trust themselves, and to be that strong in that moment, and to blossom in that moment—this is real knowledge-building. It’s not from a book; it’s the act of being, the actual making.[33]

Dismantling norms and learning on-the-job not only changes the atmosphere in the classroom but also offers a model for professional practice after graduation—one exemplified in the work of groundbreaking curator and past CP program guest Mary Jane Jacob. For her 1993 exhibition of temporary installations throughout the city of Chicago, Culture in Action, Jacob had to broker tricky reciprocal exchanges over time between artists and audiences.[34] As Jacob describes it in the show’s catalogue: “Culture in Action brought the public from various Chicago communities into the process of the work of art as active participants and co-creators, rather than as casual, albeit new, spectators.”[35]

In her essay “Making Space for Art,” Jacob describes this collaborative process as requiring a mindset akin to the Buddhist “mind of don’t know.”[36] “I had to work with communities not my own but also outside the art world to become educated,” Jacob explains. “As curator, I was not the authority; at best I could become a conduit for the ideas of others, translated and transformed by the artist.”[37]

Graduate students in Ciscle’s CP program take the same tabula rasa attitude into their curricular projects. In the catalog for Congregate—a 2013 exhibition created in five houses of worship in central Baltimore for the year-long Practicum course—curator Caitlin Tucker-Melvin describes the CP program as home to “more accessible writing, co-creative processes, and an emphasis on placing work in non-traditional or experimental venues.”[38] For Congregate, as they worked in the community, the students mirrored what they had experienced with Ciscle’s pedagogy. “As we discovered discrepancies in our assumptions,” Tucker-Melvin recounts, “we took a step back to allow ourselves to be taught by our community…we have all discovered through this process what is necessary for our own practices, and how to function as a unit with a singular goal.”[39]

Being willing to be taught by others—and accepting the uncertainties of group work, co-authorship, and achieving consensus—can be painful for artists and curators accustomed to working alone. “There is a level of working in group that is just not fun,”[40] admits Kibibi Ajanku, CP alumna, founder of Baltimore’s Sankofa Dance Theater, and Urban Arts Professor at Coppin State University. In 2015, during Ajanku’s first year in CP, she and five of her classmates researched 100 years of history at the intersection of Baltimore’s North Avenue and Charles Street, a juncture marking the flow of different cultural and socioeconomic demographics across the city over time, from north to south, east to west.[41]Titled Intersection, and installed in MICA’s Riggs and Leidy galleries on North Avenue, the project included four newly-commissioned contemporary art projects, each of which required facilitation, care, and finding common purpose among a group of curators with divergent interests and practices.

Yet as Ajanku describes it, as she and her cohort opened themselves to the ideas and voices of others, they made surprising discoveries:

  I thought that this way of teaching—particularly compared to other classes I had taken—was “oh, wow, I’m not trying to be better than other students; I’m not trying to come up with the only answer…” Here’s this opportunity—and it’s hard—but everyone’s going to have a seat at the table, and everyone’s going to have their voice heard…it may be a difficult process to navigate, but what comes out of that is something that is so much deeper and more complex.[42]

Although this pedagogy asks students to have difficult conversations inside the classroom, expectations for working outside of the campus bubble—in the community, with neighbors and potential partners—are even higher. In that regard, Ciscle leads by example, participating in meetings and programs all over Baltimore, and sharing a full calendar of suggested events with students and faculty day-to-day. Artist Jeffrey Kent recalls knowing who George was prior to ever attending MICA, simply through repeat encounters as an artist active in the city: “I knew George before I knew George,” he explains. “One of the things that made EDS [a course I decided to] take for my master’s year, was: I saw his name.”[43]

Kent’s artistic and curatorial practices are perhaps uniquely bound up in Ciscle’s methodology: He not only worked as a student on the 2009 project, Follies, Predicaments, and Other Conundrums; he also returned after graduating to become artist-in-residence for the 2013 exhibition at the Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park Museum, Preach! New Works by Jeffrey Kent. For that latter project, Kent opened his studio for a number of studio visits with EDS and outside guests, inviting contentious exchanges over a body of work—painting, bricolage, and video—that drew parallels between the Civil Rights Movement and the then-ongoing struggle for marriage equality in Maryland. “All of these artworks were originally informed by images of Black Americans organizing and demonstrating in order to deny rights for their fellow citizens,”[44] he explains in the show’s catalog.

In his work with BmoreArt’s collecting initiative, Connect + Collect, for the Peale Center as Chief Curator, and as a practicing artist, Kent understands the importance of initiating and sustaining relationships, and bringing community members into art spaces—and he credits Ciscle for demonstrating how to do it:

When I think about George’s method with inviting people, with having people at the table…I [think] about his appearances. And what I mean by that is: He’s in attendance in the community…he goes to exhibits; he goes to town halls; he gets to meet [people from] all different walks of life…[he] becomes intimate with everyone. And he’s genuine, and it comes from a genuine place.

[So] one of the [ways] to start to get to know the community is to just start going places, starting to be in places as much as possible. And then when it comes time [to say] who needs to be at the table, you have an idea—because you’ve been out, and you’ve met people.[45]

Add to all of this testimony my personal experience: Over the past ten years, George Ciscle’s pedagogy has made an indelible mark on my own teaching practice. I arrived at MICA in 2011 as the first full-time faculty member teaching in his then-newly-established CP program. In the summer months preceding my first Fall semester—during which I would teach both EDS and the CP Practicum course for the first time—I shadowed George as he met with leaders inside and outside the school, visited classrooms across campus, and prepared newly renovated studio and classroom spaces for his first incoming graduate cohort.

During those busy days, spent moving from office to classroom to still-nascent workspaces, I began to question my assumptions about the job I had accepted. As we wandered the halls outside of MICA classrooms, again and again, George would ask me: Whose voices are you hearing? Are you hearing students, finding their voices and arriving at potent truths, or are you hearing lecturers with PhDs, “banking” their knowledge as Freire cautioned against?

As questions came up about resources, procedures, or partners, instead of searching the internet for an answer or sending a cold e-mail, George would walk me to the building where the person who had the answers worked or lived for face-to-face interactions.

And as I began to contemplate themes for my inaugural EDS, George wanted to make sure I understood: These were not my shows. These projects belonged to the students, the artists, and their community partners.

These, then, were the lessons I would carry into each new year doing real-world, hands-on curricular projects: Rethink how best to teach and how others might learn; value personal relationships and the knowledge of people in the community; and rethink authorship, being willing to see your ideas refracted and diffused through many conversations, many minds—yielding wholly unexpected results.

By the time Ciscle became Curator-in-Residence Emeritus in 2017—handing leadership of the CP program to its current director, José Ruiz—hundreds of his students had taken these very same lessons into museums, galleries, and other spaces for culture around the world. As of this writing, EDS and CP graduates now serve as directors of public programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC; and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Ciscle’s alumni also run their own alternative, commercial, or experimental gallery spaces in cities across the country; work in arts administration and philanthropy, locally and internationally; and serve as adventurous curators—in galleries and museums small and large, up to and including the Smithsonian Institution. Even outside the arts world, as educators, activists, and entrepreneurs, EDS and CP alumni use Ciscle’s pedagogy to transform ideas of participation and leadership.

Across these varied settings, Ciscle’s students demonstrate their commitments to listening instead of speaking, creating space for the voices for others, and abandoning conventional expectations for work, authorship, and autonomy. Ciscle’s exhibitions as a curator and museum director may have asked viewers to imagine change, but his work as an educator has produced it.

[1] Irene Hofmann and Pamela Berman, 20 Years: The Contemporary Museum (Baltimore: Contemporary Museum, 2011), 22–23, 32–33, 44–45.

[2] Hofmann and Berman, 20 Years: The Contemporary Museum, 21.

[3] Hofmann and Berman, 20 Years: The Contemporary Museum, 26–31.

[4] Lisa Corrin, “Mining the Museum: Artists Look at Museums, Museums Look at Themselves,” in Mining the Museum: An Installation (New York: The New Press, 1994), 7–8. Link to essay under website’s Archive: The Contemporary.

[5] Hoffmann and Berman, 20 Years: The Contemporary Museum, 36.

[6] In 1985, Ciscle established the George Ciscle Gallery at 1006 Morton Street in Baltimore; there, for four years prior to launching The Contemporary, he supported the work of emerging artists.

[7] Sue Anderson, “Museopunks Episode 21: The ‘Outsiders’ Edition,” American Alliance of Museums, July 11, 2017, accessed September 12, 2021, https://www.aam-us.org/2017/07/11/museopunks-episode-21-the-outsiders-edition/.

[8] Joseph Orzal, “On Curatorial Practice: A Conversation between Generations—George Ciscle, Jose Ruiz, and Joseph Orzal,” Dirt, November 8, 2018, accessed September 12, 2021, https://www.dirtdmv.com/writing/oncuratorialpractice

[9] Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, introduction to Curating and the Educational Turn (London: Open Editions, 2010), 12.

[10] “EDS Projects,” Curatorial Practice, accessed September 4, 2021, https://inside.mica.edu/curatorialpractice/eds-projects.

[11] Jo Ann Lewis, “The Wit and Anger of Joyce Scott,” The Washington Post, Sunday, January 30, 2000, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/2000-01/30/042r-013000-idx.html.

[12] Carl Schoettler, “Art of the Everyday at the Marlborough,” The Baltimore Sun, April 18, 2001, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2001-04-18-0104180157-story.html.

[13] “Modern Art: Overview,” Baltimore Museum of Art, accessed September 30, 2021, https://artbma.org/collection/modern/

[14] Schoettler, “Art of the Everyday at the Marlborough,” https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2001-04-18-0104180157-story.html.

[15] Glenn McNatt, “Artists Examine Freedom Through Modern Eyes,” The Baltimore Sun, February 4, 2007, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2007-02-04-0702030357-story.html.

[16] “About,” Curatorial Practice, accessed September 4, 2021, https://inside.mica.edu/curatorialpractice/about

[17] Marnie Benney, “Curating Community: An Insider’s Guide to MICA’s 2014 Curatorial Practice MFA Thesis Exhibitions,” BmoreArt, April 23, 2014, accessed September 30, 2021, https://bmoreart.com/2014/04/curating-community.html.

[18] Melani Douglass, “The Family Arts Museum” (master’s thesis, MICA, 2015), 27, https://mica.assetbank-server.com/assetbank-mica/action/viewAsset?id=3975.

[19] “Information,” The Menial Collection, accessed September 30, 2021, https://themenialcollection.com/Info.

[20] Joseph Orzal, “On Curatorial Practice: A Conversation between Generations—George Ciscle, Jose Ruiz, and Joseph Orzal,” Dirt, November 8, 2018, accessed September 12, 2021, https://www.dirtdmv.com/writing/oncuratorialpractice

[21] Pablo Helguera, “On Plowing the Sea (An Introduction Turned Epilogue),” from The School of PanAmerican Unrest: An Anthology of Documents, ed.   

[22] Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art (New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011), 51–2.

[23] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 80.

[24] Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 72.

[25] Ann Fessler (Professor Emerita, RISD), moderating an online discussion with Joan Gaither (Center for Art Education, MICA, Professor Emerita), Jeffrey Kent (Artistic Director, The Peale Center), and the author, March 4, 2021.

[26] Joan Gaither (Center for Art Education, MICA, Professor Emerita), in an online discussion moderated by Ann Fessler (Professor Emerita, RISD), Jeffrey Kent (Artistic Director, The Peale Center), and the author, March 4, 2021.

[27] Gaither, discussion.

[28] Glenn Shrum (Lighting Design Professor, Parsons the New School Graduate Program), in an online discussion moderated by Natasha Bunten (Founding Director, Culture Workers Education Center) and Jann Rosen-Queralt (Rinehart School of Sculpture, MICA, Professor Emeritus), April 21, 2021.

[29] Edward Gunts, “Get It Together,” The Baltimore Sun, January 29, 2009, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2009-01-29-0901280073-story.html

[30] Shrum, discussion.

[31] Samantha Gainsburg, Suzannah Gerber, Leslie-Morgan Frederick, and Lisa Rigby, “Exhibition Description,” from Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square (Baltimore: MICA, 2008), 1.

[32] Natasha Bunten (Founding Director, Culture Workers Education Center), in an online discussion with Glenn Shrum (Lighting Design Professor, Parsons the New School Graduate Program) and Jann Rosen-Queralt (Rinehart School of Sculpture, MICA, Professor Emeritus), April 21, 2021.

[33] Joyce J. Scott (sculptor, performance artist, and educator), in an online discussion with José Ruiz (director, Curatorial Practice MFA, MICA) and Myrtis Bedolla (founder and Director, Galerie Myrtis), moderated by Emily Blumenthal (Educator in Charge, Teaching and Learning at The Metropolitan Museum of Art), April 9, 2021.

[34] Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), 100.

[35] Mary Jane Jacob, “Outside the Loop,” from Culture in Action, ed. Mary Jane Jacob, Michael Brenson, Eva M. Olson (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 58.

[36] Mary Jane Jacob, “Making Space for Art,” from What Makes a Great Exhibition?, ed. Paula Marincola, (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2010), 135.

[37] Mary Jane Jacob, “Making Space for Art,” from What Makes a Great Exhibition?, ed. Paula Marincola, (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2010), 140.

[38] Caitlin Tucker-Melvin, “How Congregate Came to Be,” in Congregate: Art + Faith + Community (Baltimore: MICA, 2013), 42.

[39] Tucker-Melvin, “How Congregate Came to Be,” 43.

[40] Kibibi Ajanku (Founder and Director of Baltimore’s Sankofa Dance Theater), in an online discussion moderated by Natasha Bunten (Founding Director, Culture Workers Education Center), May 19, 2021.

[41] “Practicum Projects,” Curatorial Practice, accessed September 30, 2021, https://inside.mica.edu/curatorialpractice/practicum-projects

[42] Ajanku, discussion.

[43] Jeffrey Kent (Artistic Director, The Peale Center), in an online discussion with Joan Gaither (Center for Art Education, MICA, Professor Emeritus), Ann Fessler (RISD, Professor Emeritus), and the author, March 4, 2021.

[44] Jeffrey Kent, “Artist Statement,” in Preach! New Works by Jeffrey Kent (Baltimore: MICA, 2013), 45.

[45] Kent, discussion. 

Jeffry Cudlin

Washington, DC-based artist, critic, and curator Jeffry Cudlin serves as Professor of Curatorial Practice at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Since 2011, Cudlin has taught in MICA's first-in-the-nation MFA in Curatorial Practice program. Cudlin previously served as Director of Exhibitions for the Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, Virginia, and as a member of the Board of Trustees for The Contemporary, Baltimore’s groundbreaking nomadic art museum.
Cudlin's writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Washington City Paper, and Sculpture Magazine. In 2009 and 2008, Cudlin was awarded back-to-back First Place Altweekly Awards for Arts Criticism. Cudlin’s projects as artist and curator have been reviewed in the Washington Post, Art Papers, and Art in America.