Student Curators: Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Art and Cultural Artifacts Collection

Ohio State’s Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Art and Cultural Artifacts Collection serves as a teaching resource in support of a growing curriculum on Andean and Amazonian Studies while providing graduate and undergraduate student research opportunities and curatorial experience. Supported through National Research Center federal funding for OSU’s Center for Latin American Studies and private donations, this collection is housed as a permanent exhibit in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese (found in Hagerty Hall 255).

Student curators work with items in the collection in a variety of ways. Student-developed digital interactive features created in collaboration with Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) enhance the collection and are featured in our national traveling pop-up exhibit, “The Hidden Life of Things: Andean and Amazonian Cultural Artifacts and the Stories They Tell,” produced with the help of the Center for Languages, Literatures and Cultures (CLLC). Student curators work with visiting artists on the exhibit and its public-facing extensions, co-curate, and reflect in this applied context on important issues of representation, material culture production and museum/exhibit studies. For more information and insight into the work of these curators, please see our Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Art and Cultural Artifacts Collection website.  

Michelle Wibbelsman is faculty curator of the collection. Undergraduate student curators past and present include Diego Arellano (2015-2018), Elaine Louden (2019-2020), Jenna Mayeres (2019), Brandon D’Souza (2019-2021), Frances Dillon (2020), Kelly Tobin (2021) and Hallie Fried (2021). We have also counted on the support of graduate students Anna Freeman, Alana Radlo-Dzur and Jessica Pissini.

Please email inquiries about classroom uses or undergraduate/graduate research to wibbelsman.1@osu.edu.