Q&A with Félix Zamora Gómez
Félix Zamora Gómez recently curated an art exhibit in the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA). Located in the Museum's entrance gallery—the Apse—it welcomes visitors as they walk through the main entrance. The curation of the exhibit is part of Félix's Fellowship as an Irving Stenn Jr. Fellow in Public Humanities & Museum Pedagogy. The exhibit features recently curated pieces of various mediums; from paintings to sculptures, fibers to photography. Walking through the exhibition, main themes emerge, as if in conversation with one another: global migrations, race, gender, and climate change.
How were you selected to curate the exhibit? Is it part of your fellowship as UMMA's Irving Stenn Jr. Fellow in Public and Digital Humanities and Museum Pedagogy?
I was asked to curate the show as part of my fellowship last year. Fellows at UMMA get assigned a curatorial project related to their expertise and academic focus. In my case, the show's premise was to showcase recent acquisitions. This led me to set a time range to highlight pieces that had entered the collection between 2019 and 2022. Last year, UMMA published its Strategic Plan for 2022-2027. This document helped me immensely in understanding the identity of the museum and guided me as I took a deep dive into the collection. Being able to do this without any period, geographical, or conceptual limitations to the range of works I could include in the show helped me form a clear image of UMMA and its commitment to DEI and anti-racism through programming, acquisitions, teaching, and engagement with its surrounding communities and constituencies.
Who is the intended audience for the exhibit? How have people responded to it?
Everyone! As to how people have responded, well, so far great. It is a great privilege for me to be responsible for curating the central gallery at UMMA for two years. I recall visiting the museum shortly after moving to Ann Arbor. I entered the museum through the main entrance of the Alumni Memorial Hall. This gallery—the Apse—was the first I ever visited at UMMA and, back then, it was a permanent space for traditional British and American art mainly from the 18th century. In 2019, the gallery underwent its first major reinstallation in a decade. All of those works are now recontextualized and put in conversation with contemporary art pieces in a great show called Unsettling Histories, Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism. Since then, the Apse has become the gallery used for shows focusing on collection highlighting, recent acquisitions, etc.
Everyone at the museum has always been very supportive throughout the process across departments and ranges. UMMA is the best work environment I’ve seen on campus, and that impacted how easy it was to navigate the complexities of curating and teaching within a museum. The Apse is also the central space for events at UMMA. Before A Gathering opened, in the fall of last year that space welcomed the members of the Burt Lake Band for the very powerful opening of the show Future Cache by Andrea Carson, and most recently the museum hosted the opening for the collaboration between UMMA, Monument Lab, and the artist Canupa Hanska Luger which examines the foundational narratives of the land occupied by the University of Michigan. Having A Gathering as the background of this event led to great conversations during and after the event with colleagues and constituents of the museum that made me feel seen and valued as a curator and professional.
Everyone at the museum has always been very supportive throughout the process across departments and ranges. UMMA is the best work environment I’ve seen on campus, and that impacted how easy it was to navigate the complexities of curating and teaching within a museum. The Apse is also the central space for events at UMMA. Before A Gathering opened, in the fall of last year that space welcomed the members of the Burt Lake Band for the very powerful opening of the show Future Cache by Andrea Carson, and most recently the museum hosted the opening for the collaboration between UMMA, Monument Lab, and the artist Canupa Hanska Luger which examines the foundational narratives of the land occupied by the University of Michigan. Having A Gathering as the background of this event led to great conversations during and after the event with colleagues and constituents of the museum that made me feel seen and valued as a curator and professional.
Photography, sculpture, painting, and linocut prints are all part of the exhibit. How did you select the pieces included? What would you say are the main themes?
Part of this process was becoming familiar with the last couple of years of acquisitions. In the process, I immediately started identifying common threads across the collection that interested me. The threads I decided to focus on were global migrations, race, gender, and climate change across media. Most works are articulated in conversation with some other piece, usually from a point of view in an attempt to create potential spaces for discussions for visitors in general and students in particular. During my time as Irving Stenn Jr. Fellow in Public and Digital Humanities and Museum Pedagogy, I worked in University Learning Programs curating small selections of pieces for course visits to the museum. I curated the entire show with the goal of creating a space that could be useful to university courses across disciplines. Having the possibility to combine media gave me also the opportunity to actively take into account the qualities of the space, its light and colors, and to consider how to engage with the presence of the two sculptures Nydia, by Ann Arbor native and master sculptor Randolph Rogers, and Flora, by James Wyatt through curation.
What do you hope visitors take from A Gathering?
My honest hope for visitors is that they gather at the exhibition and the museum. A Gathering is a show intended to welcome visitors and also offer a space where they can pause and reflect. UMMA has an amazing set of programs and exhibitions right now. The museum is the sponsor of the Fall 2023 theme semester Arts and Resistance. Currently on display, you can find the three-part collaboration between UMMA, Monument Lab, and Canupa Hanska Luger, the show Curriculum/Collection which this semester focuses on the theme semester, and the incredible show Hear Me Now which features the work of African American potters in the decades surrounding the Civil War, and more. With that in mind, I hope A Gathering offers a space to gather and process the timely questions posed by those other shows while allowing visitors to engage with works that may be connected thematically but are incredibly unique and different from one another that complement many of contemporary salient issues important to UMMA. Along with the rest of the programming, exhibitions, and teaching UMMA offers, I hope A Gathering collaborates in making visitors leave the museum feeling they know better the museum and what an amazing resource on campus it is.
Is there anything else that you think we should know about the exhibit?
To best preserve pieces that are light-sensitive, museums rotate these works every six months. This means that in a month or so a new rotation of works will go on display. Until then, visitors can still stop by the museum to enjoy amazing pieces by Stephanie Syjuco, Khaled Al-Saai, Mark Dion, Mike Kelly, and Suchitra Mattai, among others.
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Thank you to Félix for the interview, and to the artists and their representatives for allowing us to showcase their artwork on this page.
