The Colgate University Gallery Crawl, involving the Longyear Museum of Art, Picker Art Gallery, Clifford Gallery and Bernstein Hall’s new Fabulation Lab, kicked off on Friday, Feb. 21 at 5 p.m. when participants received a campus map to hole punch at each location. Once each building was visited and all hole punches collected, the participant filled out a raffle ticket. At 8 p.m. sharp, the Crawl organizers drew the winning tickets and passed out three textile and weaving-themed prizes, including a Woobles beginner crochet kit.
Everyone on campus was encouraged to participate, including students, faculty, staff and visiting NY6 Spectrum Conference guests. Despite the snow, dozens of people made the trek between buildings to look at pieces and speak with visiting artists.
Starting at the top of the hill, Longyear’s exhibition, titled “Unraveled: Labor and Meaning Behind Weaving,” was curated by a class of ten students last semester. Two of the student curators guided Crawl participants through basket-weaving and bracelet-making crafts.
Senior Emma Herwig, one such student curator and a long-time museum ambassador took the curating class out of curiosity, but ended up loving it.
“We led with this idea called collaborative autoethnography, which is a qualitative research method where multiple researchers come into a project and have their own identity impact the research and final product,” Herwig said. “It was like one big group project.”
Picker’s exhibition was similarly created with the cooperation of multiple artists and curators. Titled “A Thought is a Thread,” the contemporary exhibition investigated what textiles can communicate about human connection and communication.
Michelle VanAuken, administrative and academic coordinator for University museums and museum studies, shared thoughts about Picker’s beauty.
“To me, that’s one of the most fun things about working for museums,” VanAuken said. “I love the way that the same space comes to life in different ways. It just totally takes on a different life and whole story.”
This exhibition was particularly interesting since it was the first fully textile installation at Picker. The off-the-wall 3D works, like hanging tapestries and other woven art, were a new experience.
Excited at the number of visitors the Gallery Crawl brought in, VanAuken spent time both explaining the Crawl’s maps and raffle system to participants and speaking about Picker itself. The Crawl invoked a fresh interest in Colgate’s museums and galleries.
“There used to be students who would graduate and they wouldn’t even know there were museums on campus, and now, students graduate and they’re like ‘I didn’t know that I like museums,’” VanAuken said. “Not only are there multiple museums on campus, but students know about them [now] because there’s a lot of programming focused around museums, and there’s a lot of collaboration between the museums.”
Upstairs from Picker, an interactive art experience was taking place. “Yarnival,” an art piece that encouraged people to throw balls of yarn across the empty middle space between the Dana Arts Center’s floors, drew in a crowd. Participants could attach notes to their string. A notable one near the ground floor read: “I SEE YOU.”
The next location, Clifford Gallery, had a single piece pinned on its far wall, plus a movie playing in a tucked-away room. “For alliances with the beaver people” featured an eleven-meter tapestry, an account of the relationship between people and beavers through time, and “The Sound of New Waterfall,” a documentary about beavers as friends and teachers. This exhibition takes the loose textile theme shared between each Crawl location and angles it towards the environment.
The Fab Lab in Bernstein Hall, the last stop in the Crawl, displayed no exhibition, but it did have Colgate’s new digital loom, as explained by Co-Director of University Museums and Curator of the Longyear Museum of Anthropology Rebecca Mendelsohn.
“It’s very cool. You generate an image on the computer and it converts the pixels to stitches, and then the machine weaves it for you,” Mendelsohn said.
Above all, the Gallery Crawl was meant to bring together the Colgate community (and guests) to celebrate textile artistry and creativity. The event showcased a variety of pieces and exhibitions, each with its own particular theme and curatorial experience, to engage onlookers in a shared exploration of the impact of art. With its blend of hands-on experiences, opportunities to speak to the people behind the exhibitions and the simple ability to witness beautiful art, this Gallery Crawl will be remembered for a long time.
