As part of a new class, Creating and Curating with the Brooklyn Museum, June D. ’23 was inspired by the portrait Doña María de la Luz Padilla y Gómez de Cervantes by Miguel Cabrera to create an homage to “underrepresented people,” like the dressmakers who made Doña Maria’s beautiful dress. Dorsch fashioned a paper skirt of news articles about 19th-century dressmakers’ labor strikes, and pinned them to a scarlet red bodice.

In the class, taught by Visual Arts Department Chair Laura Coppola ’95, students were guided by the Visual Arts faculty and Brooklyn Museum staff, and were given the unique experience of exploring how to be curators and educators. Through museum visits, classroom discussions, and art-making, students considered new ways to tell stories and display histories by selecting and organizing artworks from the museum’s American paintings collection, responding to them through art-making, and installing their own exhibition at the Spring Art Show at Poly.