Art and Social Media: Telling a Story
Hi there! My name is Rachel and I am one of Kristin’s new Awesome Ladies Creative Team members. Instagram is my favorite internet hangout because photography is my absolute favorite creative outlet!
Do you guys remember Kristin’s awesome posts about Kara Walker’s Domino art installation? Well, she inspired me to share my trip to another awesome and interesting art exhibit called #SocialMedium at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA. This exhibition was curated by the public through the Museum’s various social media accounts. They uploaded all 232 pieces of the Museum’s Founding Collection to Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest to have people vote and comment on their favorite pieces. The resulting show is made up of the 40 most popular paintings based on the number of likes and comments received. It opened on October 4, 2014 and goes until January 4, 2015.
The resulting show is very eclectic and intriguing. There is a wall at the beginning of the exhibit which is covered in the Facebook names, Instagram accounts, Pinterest usernames, and Tumblr screen names of the “citizen curators” who contributed to the show. The wall text next to each piece includes a selection of public comments from social media made during the voting period. This makes for some interesting and sometimes hilarious reading. All of the paintings also have the number of likes and comments on the wall below them, resulting in paintings that look like real life versions of an Instagram feed.
What I found particularly interesting about the set-up of this exhibit is that it challenges the way we traditionally think of museums. Allowing the public to pick the pieces included in the exhibition gives the authority to decide what deserves to be shown in a museum to that public. In a time when many people are questioning the place and purpose of museums, this exhibit tried something different to change the dynamic of the museum as an institution, which is traditionally seen as handing down knowledge, not inviting people to contribute to it.
The Museum intends to continue the public’s involvement with the exhibit, through people posting to social media using the exhibition hashtag (conveniently also the name of it, #SocialMedium). There is a monitor at the beginning of the show, which shows real time tweets and Instagram posts. The Museum has also organized a crowdsourced audio guide to the show, which anyone can record themselves talking about one of the pieces in the show and add it to the audio guide.
The art that ended up in the exhibition was rather varied: lots of landscapes and portraits, some still lifes, more than a few animals. Some of the variety had to do with the pieces that make up the Founding Collection, which was the personal collection of Charles and Emma Frye, who started the Museum. There was one element of the paintings the public chose compared to the makeup of the entire collection that really intrigued me. Nudes are a minority in the Frye’s Founding Collection, but a large percentage of the nudes in the collection made it into this show. This got me thinking about what people are drawn to in art and what purpose art plays for us in modern society. I think the popularity of the collection’s nudes shows that in many ways society’s expectations of women’s bodies has not changed much. Women’s bodies are still expected to be available to the public in art.
My experience at this show got me thinking a lot about art in general, social media, the intersection of art and social media, and social media as storytelling. Seeing my tweet about the exhibition on the monitor in the gallery reminded me that our social media presence tells our story to the world. It reminded me that these bits and pieces on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are worth representing in my memory keeping, whether it’s through a screenshot of my phone or a photo of my tweet showing in the Museum.
I loved visiting this exhibit as it was so thought provoking for me. Having a background in art history, I found the questions this show raised about authority in museums really interesting. What do you all think about this exhibit? Have any of you experienced a show like this before and did you like it? I really enjoyed thinking about my social media as a part of my story and a tool of my own storytelling. How do you guys like to incorporate your social media with telling your stories and in your memory keeping?
A note: I am a volunteer at the Frye Art Museum, but I did not have anything to do with this show other than participating as a private “citizen curator”. The views expressed in this post are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the Museum. I just wanted to share this very cool experience with you guys!
Rachel is a photographer, nerd, occasional tweeter, queer woman, and social justice advocate. She enjoys an excellent cup of coffee (or a diet coke), traveling, and discussing thought provoking topics of all kinds. Rachel is going back to school to study Museum Studies and combine her love of nerdy things, museums, and preserving and sharing stuff.