Student curators organize ‘Mundos Enteros’ exhibition

The School of Art, Art History and Design presents “Mundos Enteros [Entire Worlds]: Selections from the Gloria Rodriguez Calero Collection of Puerto Rican Works on Paper,” an exhibition now on display at the Eisentrager-Howard Gallery in Richards Hall through Sept. 1.

A closing reception for the exhibition will be 5-7 p.m. Sept. 1 in the gallery. Regular gallery hours are Monday-Friday, 12:30-4:30 p.m. Admission is free and open to the public.

This exhibition is the first time that these 25 works in diverse media, including silkscreen, engraving, linocut, woodcut and conceptual printmaking, will be exhibited in public since they arrived at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Sheldon Museum of Art in 2012. Thanks to a generous loan from Sheldon, this bilingual exhibition puts the 25 works into dialogue with Lincoln’s campus and city communities.

The show was organized by students in Katie Anania’s, assistant professor of Art History, spring 2023 course, AHIS 805: Curatorial Methods in an Art Museum and is divided into six thematic sections, each of which explores a different aspect of Puerto Rico’s cultural and political history. The exhibition’s wall labels and other didactic materials were written by students in Anania’s spring 2023 course, AHIS 256: Latin American Art. Students conducted original research on individual prints and wrote essays on broader themes, which are available in the galleries to read.

“’Mundos Enteros’ is not to be missed,” Anania said. “It centers on the Sheldon’s rich holdings in Latin American and Latine/Latinx art by showcasing some of the creative networks that brought this collection to Nebraska in the first place. It was a truly collaborative project—the curatorial students designed the layout and thematic framework for the exhibition, while the students in History of Latin American Art conducted research on individual artworks and wrote the exhibition labels. As a result, this show demonstrates a lot of intellectual networking too, both with scholars and curators in the field and on UNL’s campus. I hope everyone in Lincoln gets a chance to see it—not just to witness the students’ terrific choices for the exhibition (like immersive dance installations and wall vinyl poetry), but also to see the ways that Puerto Rico and the Caribbean are central to US Art and cultural history.”

The exhibition describes itself as “a public project grounded in both history and theory.” To prepare for the show, the student curators researched Puerto Rico’s indigenous histories, as well as its colonial past and present, organizing their inquiry around several critical questions: How might the story of Puerto Rico—an unincorporated island territory of the U.S. and one of the oldest colonies in the world—come out through objects? What possibilities might there be for engaging Puerto Rico’s past in relation to the present, and the realities of its spaces and coasts in relation to landlocked Nebraska? The result is a set of whole worlds—“mundos enteros”—that speak to the Caribbean’s many ecologies, indigenous identities, resistances, embodiments, public celebrations and national narratives.

The Eisentrager-Howard Gallery is located on the first floor of Richards Hall at Stadium Drive and T streets on the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s city campus.