Moves like Walter: New Curators Open the Corcoran Legacy Collection is a product of Director and Curator Jack Rasmussen’s spring course on curatorial practice. Upon receipt of the Corcoran Collection, graduate students in art history, arts management, and studio art have curated a playful and provocative interpretation of the 9,000-piece gift. The exhibition is inspired by Walter Hopps, briefly the Director of the Corcoran and an erratic but seminal American curator of contemporary art. The curators have divided their responses into five sub-groups, Boundless: Existing Within Ambiguous Space, The Road Home, The Selfless Spirit: Nature vs. Nurture and the Effects of Motherhood in the Corcoran Collection, American Legacy: Reconsidering Non-Western Subjects in the Corcoran Collection, and Redefining the Gaze: Shifting the Power.
Using the medium of drawing to varied and distinctive effect, Rogers, Sures, and Watkin trace human connections to the natural world—across time and varied landscapes. The three artists work from both a consciousness of drawing’s ties to illustration and evidence; and, the medium’s unique ability to transmit the artist’s “hand” and personal response to their subject. From the deserts of Kenya, forests of the Midwest, to the Potomac watershed, these artists are deeply attuned to the mutually affecting relationship between the anthropological and natural worlds.