Sarah Burford, a third-year doctoral student in the History of Art program, spent the summer and fall of 2014 working as a Curatorial Research Fellow for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia on the exhibition Barbara Kasten: Stages (February 4 – August 16, 2015). The first major survey devoted to the artist Barbara Kasten situates her photographs, installations, and a variety of other works within contexts ranging from modernist theater and Bauhaus Constructivism to postmodernism and the California Light and Space movement. During her summer fellowship, supported by Bryn Mawr’s Curatorial Internship Program, Sarah spent her days working with Curator Alex Klein at ICA and in area libraries and museums researching archival materials related to Kasten’s own exhibitions, early twentieth-century theater and photography, mid-century textile and crafts, and contemporary photographic practice to bolster the exhibition’s catalogue essays and interpretive materials. She is the author of the catalogue’s exhibition history and bibliography, and worked this fall to research and compile more than forty years’ worth of material documenting Kasten’s career from the 1970s through the present.
Barbara Kasten: Stages runs from February 4 – August 16, 2015.