Sarah Fan: With KVCR News, 91.9, my name is Sarah Fan. As you are walking throughout downtown Riverside, you spot a building in the corner of your eye, surrounded by green and blue colors. At 3824, Main Street in Riverside lies the California Museum of Photography, also known as UCR arts. You walk into the museum and the world outside falls to a silence. You look around and you see different types of photographs surrounding you, different pieces of art. How did this museum come to be? How are these specific pieces chosen? I'm here today with Nikolay Maslow, a curator at UCR Arts Museum. Nikolay’s job as a museum curator involves
Nikolay Maslov: Researching thematic and subjects for potential exhibitions, collaborating with artists on artist projects, working from our museum’s collection to organize projects and exhibitions. I also organize film screenings and events here as well and teach workshops too.
Sarah Fan: Nikolay himself started on his journey to become a curator through the UCR Arts Undergraduate volunteer program as a museum intern.
Nikolay Maslov: They post job listings just on the UCR job website for students, like those working at the front desk.
Sarah Fan: Nikolai is just one of many workers in the museum with two curators under their employment. UCR Arts is the biggest photography Museum in the West Coast. The museum has had more than 500,000 pieces in its collection being over 50 years old. They have had everything ranging from television presentations and sound speakers, from UCR art studio Professor Lin Marsh to printed archival photographs and newspaper articles about the founding of Koreatown by Edward Chang. From thousands of pieces as options, choosing the specific art pieces for an exhibition could be challenging.
Nikolay Maslov: You have a specific theme, and you work to really look at works that are in conversation with the theme or will support the theme. Or sometimes the theme emerges from the work itself.
Sarah Fan: Nikolai describes this process using the Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-based Image World Exhibition, where the theme resides on art and science colliding.
Nikolay Maslov: Like, say, the space race, because a lot of this technology was produced during the space race in the Cold War of the 60s, and looking at the way that the military and the government and scientific research works hand in hand. But then you sort of find artists, or talk to artists, and these themes begin to be shaped and refined in new and interesting ways. Seemingly simple exhibition could take many years to produce. One, you have to do the research right? You have to travel to different places, read a bunch of different things, visit archives, sometimes you artists need time to make the work.
Sarah Fan: With the Digital Capture exhibition, it started back in 2019 almost three years ago. 50 artists were involved, and over 90 plus individual objects are in the collection. Technology has made the curation process a much smoother and more efficient process. With Zoom, curators do not have to travel to other countries, the other side of the world, and can simply just meet online. Not only that, it has opened a new pathway to art.
Nikolay Maslov: We have an artist named Refik Anadol, a Los Angeles-based artist who works with AI data paintings. So, this is using photographs from our collection, and he's having his AI algorithm-sort of dream or hallucinate new images based on things in our collection.
Sarah Fan: The museum as a whole serves to be a conduit of the public's voice.
Nikolay Maslov: Museums are our living things, right? Museums are composed of people and just itself. What kind of things are we exhibiting? What kind of communities are we serving? What kind of artists are we working with? Is there ways to bring in kind of community around the art? Right? Is this sort of a body of work or artwork that lends itself naturally to like doing different, you know, programs or talks or performances. You'll invite artists who do a lot of really interesting work, and you'll sort of turn this space over to them, or turn a gallery over to them, and have a very sort of dialog with the world around it. And art is a product of the world around it, so also just being in constant dialog with what the people and things around you helps you just be better, and helps this place be better.
Sarah Fan: Museums themselves are a place of beauty and wonder. Each piece in a collection has a unique effect on the beholder, whether it evokes longing, sadness, happiness and so much more.
Nikolay Maslov: An art exhibition, you should be able to go through it without reading any of the text or any of the descriptive labels and still walk away with something, right? Because there's something that art gets to that's almost beyond language, right? It just makes you sort of feel a way about something.
Sarah Fan: You can see which exhibitions UCR Arts has to offer through ucrarts.ucr.edu. Enter museum today and see what discovers you'll make about the past, present, future, or even just yourself. From KVCR News, this is Sarah Fan.
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UCR ARTS Website: https://ucrarts.ucr.edu/
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Sarah Fan is a student at the University of California Riverside, majoring in Biology and a minor in Education. She grew up listening to radio since she could remember, jumping at the opportunity to be part of KVCR.