Curating Your First Exhibition

Leanna Leithauser Lesley, Bo Berry, 2017

Opening my first exhibition was very different from how I thought it would be. I fully expected it to
be difficult, but I never imagined the late nights I’d spend pulling my hair out at the library looking
for information that I thought would be readily available. There is so much that I never thought of
that was part of the process. As well as things that were much more difficult than I thought they
would be. 

The first step in creating our exhibition was to decide what kind of exhibition we wanted to have.
The three of us really wanted to have an exhibition in which we highlighted a local artist. After
deciding this we researched a lot of artists and wanted to choose an artist whose work represented
part of Birmingham. Through this we discovered Leanna Leithauser Lesley. Lesley’s works in
needlepoint to create portraits of musicians, mostly jazz musicians. We were immediately interested
in her work not only because of how impressive it is, but also the strong connection between jazz
and the south. We soon reached out to Lesley and proposed our exhibition to her. Thankfully, she
was very excited to work with us, but she could have easily said no due to the nature of the exhibition
since we were working as students. 

Once we decided the content of our exhibition we began meeting with Leanna. We met twice to talk
to her about the exhibition and about her work. We wanted to make sure we knew her decently
well in order to represent her appropriately through the exhibition. We realized the big responsibility
it was to make sure that we remained truthful to our artist. At these meetings we took notes to later
use in our labels about her and about the history of needlepoint. 

From that point we began doing our own research about jazz and needlepoint. Jazz was of course
very easy to find information on, but needlepoint was surprisingly difficult. We had to use many
sources to find any decent information about the origin of needlepoint because many sources
disagreed. This was probably the most difficult part of the process not only because of the difficulty
in finding information at times, but also deciding what we wanted to include in our final labels.
Originally we wanted to include a lot more about jazz and needlepoint’s connection to the abolition
and civil rights movements, but later decided to reduce how much we focused on that. Once we
had gathered a good amount of information we began writing our labels for the main ideas of the
exhibition. This lead to many more renditions of the labels than I had previously thought would be
needed and it took much longer than I had planned. Label writing was probably the most surprising
part of this whole process. I had always assumed it would be very similar to writing an essay.
Because labels have to be short though, I found it difficult to fit all of the information we had collected
into a format that was easy to understand and read yet short enough to be engaging. 

After we did finally finish our labels though, we began installing soon after. We met with
our artist at the exhibition space at her request so that she could get an idea of the space and a
few days later we began installing all of the pieces. Balancing between what we wanted and what
the artist wanted was interesting in that we had very different ideas of how the pieces should be
hung. We eventually all agreed on a more a-symmetrical layout to make the space a little more
visually interesting. 

The most important part of all of this was making sure that the artist was happy with the end result.
We were lucky to have an artist who was incredibly nice, encouraging, and excited for our exhibition
so being able to create something for her that she was happy with made us very proud.