The Art of Curation

Xinyue Guo ’14 makes a lasting impression at the Hood.

Two winters ago Hood Museum director Michael Taylor unexpectedly came across a remarkable collection of paintings by an unfamiliar Chinese artist in Stoddard, New Hampshire. They were accompanied by a dusty archive stuffed with photographs and letters written in Chinese. Taylor needed some help. That’s when art history and math major Xinyue Guo stepped in. For 12 months the native of Suzhou, China, spent 10 to 20 hours a week sifting through the materials, translating historical artifacts and unraveling a timeline of the artist’s life and work. “Through this project I learned so much about the history of my own country in the 20th century,” says Guo. “The paintings of Fan Tchunpi opened up a window for me to learn what it was like to live as a female artist in China in the 1920s and 1930s.” Guo helped curate 24 works from more than 1,000 paintings and delved into gallery design and composition for an exhibit that went on display this fall. “I really got the whole spectrum of the experience. Now I can confidently say that I know how to run a show,” she says. The teaching museum offered her “a unique opportunity to pursue my academic interests while professionally contributing to the level of cultural diversity at Dartmouth,” she adds.