May 17 – July 25, 2013
In conjunction with RAM’s groundbreaking exhibition, More Dreamers of the Golden Dream, the Riverside Art Museum announces the second iteration of the Riverside Art Museum’s Student Curatorial Council (RAMSCC) internship program. This program provides a group of four locally-based students, ranging from undergraduates to PhD candidates, a firsthand experience working as curators. The students have worked alongside RAM staff to plan, execute, and write about their related exhibition programming component, which collectively occupy special featured areas of the museum reserved for this project. Students were given various options to program the RAMSCC exhibition spaces in response and relation to the current exhibition and were encouraged to develop their own unique proposals. The range of the four students’ projects includes: curatorial presentation of a selected artist’s work in relation to the exhibition, curatorial presentation of the curator’s own artwork in response to the exhibition, and original projects that encourage visitor interaction and dialogue.
Participating Curators’ Annotated Biographies:
Andrea Brown
Andrea Brown, born in Asheville, NC in 1985, currently lives and works in Riverside, CA. She is a MFA candidate at the University of California, Riverside, 2015, and received her BFA in photography at the Lamar School of Art, University of Georgia, Athens. Brown has recently exhibited at Vox Populi Gallery, PA, DOMA Gallery, NC, The Light Factory Museum, NC, The Hagedorn Foundation Gallery, GA, and The Atlanta Photography Group Gallery, GA. In 2009, Brown was awarded the Arts and Science Council Artist Grant and completed an affiliate-artist-residency at the McColl Center for Visual Art. In 2008, She was awarded Best in Show at the Shepherd Center Photography competition, juried by Julian Cox and Jane Jackson. Her work is part of the Fidelity Bank Collection.
Nicolette Rohr
Nicolette Rohr is a PhD student in history at the University of California, Riverside. Her research interests include the nineteenth and twentieth century United States, family history, and the intersections of race, gender, and popular music. As part of UCR’s Public History Program, she has backgrounds in museum studies, curation, and archival management. She completed an internship with the Heritage Program of the Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota in the summer of 2012 and participated in a curation project with UCR’s Department of the History of Art in 2013. She earned her B.A. in History, summa cum laude, from UCR in 2011 and A.A., with great distinction, from Riverside City College in 2009. Born and raised in Riverside, she is also interested in regional history and in projects that engage the Riverside community.
Carolyn Schutten
Carolyn Schutten is interested in art in the public sphere, our relationship to public space, as well as collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to curating public spaces. Her projects draw from historic primary sources and critical theory as well as vernacular storytelling. Schutten’s work is concerned with giving voice to marginalized histories as well as interactive and discursive approaches to engaging the public realm.
Schutten is a PhD student emphasizing in museum studies in the public history program at University of California, Riverside. Her research interests include urban and environmental history, photography, and nineteenth and twentieth century American history. She received her master’s degree from the College of Environmental Design at California State University Pomona, specializing in urban design and historic preservation. Schutten has served on the boards of the Inland Empire Section of the American Planning Association and the California Planning Foundation and has received numerous academic awards, including the Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellowship from UCR and honors from the American Planning Association, the California Planning Foundation and the Women’s Transportation Seminar. She most recently received a research grant from the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment for her work with a small collection of photos of disabled WWI veterans.
As the Outreach and Education Director for Art VULUPS (Art as a Vehicle to Understand Land Use Planning and Sustainability), Schutten has developed collaborative outreach art programming at the Riverside Metropolitan Museum, the UCR/California Museum of Photography, the Riverside Community Arts Association, Riverside Ballet Arts, and the College of the Desert. Art VULUPS was honored with two Education Project Awards from the American Planning Association. Schutten is currently working in the photography archives at the UCR/CMP and is conducting outreach and education research on climate change and invasive species at UCR. She has done several Art Alive installations at the Riverside Art Museum, winning the People’s Choice Award in 2008, and has exhibited photographs at the UCR/CMP and the Millard Sheets Center for the Arts. Schutten, a native Californian, also has a background in literature and foreign languages, has travelled extensively and has lived in Mexico and Europe.
Pejman Shojaei
Pejman Shojaei is a student at UC Riverside double majoring in Art History and History. He has worked at the California Museum of Photography where he recently curated an exhibition and has been producing public programs for UCR ARTSblock Art Walk events through the Gluck Fellowship Program. Pejman has also participated in the Getty Multicultural Internship Program at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. He is interested in different dimensions of performance and participation within contemporary art and will be continuing his studies within Art History.