Arts & Sciences Spring 2024

What is An E-Museum? An e-museum is a digital collection of objects and artworks published online. The Art, Ecology and Climate Project includes nearly 1,000 digitized objects from the SU Art Museum’s collections, grouped into 15 themed e-museums on the museum website. Each grouping includes an introduction, teaching guides and a digital gallery of related objects and artworks. This allows students to compare many different items and analyze how perspectives on a given topic have changed through the years. To accomplish this ambitious task, Goode and Holohan worked with a student team which included Jeffrey Adams, a Ph.D. candidate in English, Abigail Greenfield ’25, a history and political philosophy major and art history minor, and Jeanelle Cho ’24, an architecture major and art history minor. Together, the team combed through nearly 30,000 of the art museum’s 45,000 objects. Then, the students researched the artworks and helped write the teaching guides.

Video: Students talk about the artwork most meaningful to them such as the Chow Bag series by Robert Rauschenberg (1977) .

Deep Dives into Art Among the works Greenfield studied was a series of prints by Robert Rauschenberg depicting mass-produced feed bags made by a national pet and animal food retailer. Greenfield, whose work on the project was supported by the SOURCE, a University initiative which funds undergraduate research, says, “I was really fascinated by the idea of using art to talk about ecology because I’m interested in climate change and the impact that it’s having on our world.” One of the works that Adams, the Ph.D. candidate, researched for the “Wilderness and Wildness” e-museum and accompanying teaching guide was “Exhausted renegade elephant, Woodland Washington,” (1979), a photograph by Joel Sternfeld. It depicts a tranquilized elephant that escaped from a local zoo (see inset, facing page). In the teaching guide, users can compare that photo with a grouping of images of elephants (opposite) and explore larger questions about animal captivity and the relationship between humans and animals. “Learning how to work in a museum has been pretty rewarding and given me practical experience,” says Adams, whose work was funded by Syracuse University’s Graduate School. Jeanelle Cho, another team member whose participation was supported by the SOURCE, says having the opportunity to research the historical and ecological significance of artworks was fulfilling. “Helping to create these learning resources, which encourage students to go beyond what they might see initially and interpret an artwork from different angles, was very rewarding,” says Cho.

“While one set of art exhibits is not going to [change the future] by themselves,

they can be part of something bigger,” says Goode.

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Syracuse University | Arts & Sciences