Tiny Tang & Cabinet of Queeriosities
During my tenure at the Tang Teaching Museum, I spent the summer working on my internship capstone. I nicknamed it the Tiny Tang Project. Born out of a lack of space on the museum schedule for me to curate in a gallery, I decided to make my own miniature gallery and to curate an exhibition in that new space. When the Tang plans exhibitions, they use scale models of the gallery spaces, where one foot is reduced to one inch, and interns like me create scale models of the artwork under consideration. I found working with the models of artwork and the miniature galleries to be charming. So my plan was to create a public-facing model and to curate an exhibition of miniature artworks. Cabinet of Queeriosities presented artworks from the Tang Teaching Museum collection through a queer theory lens, with the intention of beginning a dialogue about what it means to “queer the collection.” Because no single person can present a comprehensive view of what queerness means to everyone, the initial installation of the artwork reflected my perspective on queerness in the museum but viewers were invited to rearrange the art and re-curate the show to express their personal understanding of what queerness is, regardless of how they identify. The artworks were selected around six pillars of the queer experience: joy, resistance, pain, sexuality, privacy, and community. Many of the artworks in the show spoke to multiple of these experiences simultaneously.
The Tiny Tang took place in a retrofitted dresser to evoke images of home and encourage self-reflection. It featured a journal with thought-provoking prompts, books for further learning, and safer sex supplies. The curator's tour I gave for this exhibition was the most well attended post-COVID curator's tour at the time.
