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- Visual Culture 2: Unpacking Art, Power, and Modernity
- Creating an Exhibition Checklist
Visual Culture 2: Unpacking Art, Power, and Modernity
What is a "Checklist?"
A checklist is a list of the artworks and/or artifacts that are included in an exhibition. It provides basic information about each item's creation, form, and current location.
Each work should have its own entry on a checklist. The entry should include an image of the work accompanied by the following information:
- Creator/artist
- Title, Date (the title should generally be italicized, and the date should generally just be the year or span of years it was created)
- Medium
- Dimensions (typically, these should appear in inches, rounded to the closest quarter inch; the most important thing is consistency)
- Location of each object (e.g., a museum or private collection, and the city); for objects in museum collections, you might also see information about the provenance
The entries should be consistently formatted. They should also be listed in the order that they appear in the gallery space, following the flow of the room(s) from entry to exit. This makes it easier for viewers to identify which entry corresponds to each work when viewing the exhibition in person. Further, it provides more context when the list is viewed separately from the installation.
The page should be formatted such that the objects appear on the left side of the page, with details about the object on the right side of the page. See examples below.
Finding Examples
- Exhibition catalogues (often spelled catalogs) sometimes include a checklist within the appendices toward the back of the book. Find the page number in the table of contents. It may be referred to as "list of exhibited works."
- These types of books exist throughout our print collection. Try searching in OwlCat to find call numbers for specific items.
- Some gallery and museum websites have checklists of prior exhibitions available to view online.
- MoMA's exhibition history database: if they are available, you can find checklists and press releases within the "Publications" section of the page.
- Find digitally archived checklists from gallery exhibitions through the Contemporary Art Library (contemporaryartlibrary.org), a repository that compiles information about contemporary exhibitions. When you select a project, you can find any associated documents linked on the right side of the page. Please note that many but not all projects have a checklist available, and their formatting varies.
Online/PDF Examples
Suggested Exhibition Catalogues:
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Riffs and Relations: African-American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition
by
Riffs and Relations: African-American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition presents works by African-American artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries together with works by the early-twentieth-century European artists with whom they engaged. Black artists have investigated, interrogated, invaded, entangled, annihilated, or immersed themselves in the aesthetics, symbolism, and ethos of European art for more than a century. The powerful push and pull of this relationship constitutes a distinct tradition for many African-American artists who source the master narratives of art history to critique, embrace, or claim their own space. This groundbreaking catalog -accompanying a major exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. - connects the work of artists such as Romare Bearden with Pablo Picasso; Renee Cox and Robert Colescott with Édouard Manet; Norman Lewis with Paul Klee; and Leonardo Drew with Piet Mondrian. The volume explores how blackness has often been conceived from the standpoint of these international connections and presents the divergent and complex works born of these important dialogues.
Call Number: N6538 N5 C54 2020ISBN: 9780847866649Publication Date: 2020
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