Special Projects
Emerging Curator Platform
John William Gallery is thrilled to announce the sponsorship of its newest project, the Emerging Curator Platform. Designed as a fellowship through partnerships across corporate and nonprofit organizations, the platform offers essential training opportunities for emerging curators from underrepresented communities in the museum field. The combined professional expertise from our team at John William Gallery, The Delaware Art Museum, and the spacious atrium of 1313 North Market sets the stage for this emerging talent. With guidance in practical skills, our new curatorial fellow will learn the best practices of exhibition research, design, planning, and management that support the artist’s intentions and expand the visitor experience. The platform further aims to showcase the work of artists from underrepresented communities in museum and gallery exhibition programs.
Jillian Pini has been chosen as the first emerging curator, beginning this September 2023. She is studying Art History for Museum Professionals at the University of Delaware. A bright and creative mind amongst her peers, Pini hopes to expand her knowledge of museums as essential vessels for education and distinctive spaces for building community. Through her studies, internships, and volunteer work, Pini brings a unique curatorial and personal perspective.
“Glitches: New Work by Reginald Fludd,” Pini’s inaugural exhibition as a curator will feature works on paper exploring the experimental process of digital imagery. The exhibition opens Friday, October 6, 2023, from 5:30 - 9:00 PM during October Art Loop.
A traveling exhibition
John William Gallery brings together an exhibition of multi-media work by luminous international women artists in collaboration with national and international museums. Showcasing the work by artists such as Cianne Fragione, Monique Rollins, Ola Rondiak, Joana Vasconcelos, and emerging artist, Samara Weaver, in alliance with British fashion designer and activist, Vivienne Westwood, the exhibition will celebrate two-dimensional art-making and the common threads that cross-pollinate three-dimensional fashion and fiber arts.
The exhibition visualizes the complicated relationship between body and feminine adornment, as well as the rituals of handcraft integrated into domestic life. Each artist places a premium on the spontaneous quality of gestural expression grown organically through the gradual accumulation of material and technique. The painstaking, additive processes across disciplines indicative of repetitive motion that have sustained artisans in the vicissitudes of life remind us that women are capable of extraordinary courage; they know how to leverage art to the highest degree to heal personal angst, protest war, exalt domestic life, and/or advance greater social consciousness.