Exhibition design (proposal)
Convener: Sanjit Sethi for GWU Corcoran School of Art and Design
On June 13, 1989, Christina Orr-Cahall, Director of the Corcoran Gallery and School of Art, citing political pressure, announced withdrawal of the museum from “The Perfect Moment,” a touring retrospective exhibition of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. The decision turned scandal, centering the institution in a national censorship battle. The response of the arts community was to blacklist the Corcoran, an enduring mark that precipitated its multi-decade decline and ultimate dissolution and reconstitution under George Washington University in 2014.
6.13.89, an exhibition of the remnants of the controversy, is an atonement, an initiative of the new Corcoran’s Director, Sanjit Sethi, to reconcile the past and introduce a progressive agenda for the institution’s future. The show, opening on the 30th anniversary of the triggering press release, will include artifacts from the Corcoran’s and DC community archives, contemporary looks-back, and examples of ongoing suppression in the arts.
Ghosts (OPTION 1)
Ghosts is an architectural séance. It is a reading of the Corcoran’s Flagg Building for the haunts of the Mapplethorpe scandal. The gallery walls reveal fragmented images from “The Perfect Moment.” The records of the controversy, its letters and news clippings, create an atmospheric mist. The footprints of the institution’s now dispersed collection register as shadows in their historic sites.
Collage (OPTION 2)
Robert Mapplethorpe’s works embody a drive to reconcile the principles of classical beauty and order with that of imbalance, irregularity, aberrance, and the illicit. Collage gives the Corcoran’s neoclassical Flagg Building over to Mapplethorpe’s compositional sensibilities. It transfigures the structure’s symmetries, turning them into anchors for Mapplethorpe’s early geometrical plays.