Curatorial Rationale

Our teacher gave five groups in our class randomly selected famous people from the top 100 influential people in the world. In my group who were Darya, Salina, Cassandra and myself, we were given a lady named Samantha Power, we had to make her on a large scale with Chuck Close inspired grid techniques. In our collaborative piece we had to show who Samantha was and what she does for a living, so we were told to go and research about her and what we found out was that she was an American academic and diplomat who is currently working in the US ambassador to the UN and at 43 years old, she was appointed as the youngest person doing so. Additionally, Samantha worked as a brilliant journalists who has written for The Economist, The Boston Globe and The U.S New & World Report where she covered the Yugoslav wars. So we portrayed Samantha significance, strength and risk taking abilities by showing she was a journalists by making her hair out of newspaper articles and we portrayed her risk taking abilities by making her shirt with camo material. 

This collaborative piece was exhibited on the 16th of February, which was on our international day. Not only was this collaborative piece exhibited on that day we also had our own individual portraits which were also exhibited. As a class we had to try and figure out how we were all gonna portray these pieces in our school cafeteria and try to make it look interesting. Our idea was to let the big collaborative portraits have there own area as they were extremely big and took a lot of space, they were all placed on the left side of the cafeteria and underneath them had a little bit of information about the person. We also had to try and figure out where all our individual pencil sketch portraits were going to be put, as a class we had many different ideas, some student suggested to put up the portraits on the pillars and another student said it would be a good idea to hang them on them up on the walls. After many different opinions were passed around the class we decided to put all the pencil sketches on one big board as it was a lot more easier and convenient to do so. 

We did all of this after school on the 15th of February, Monday, a day right before the exhibition was meant to take place. Before we let our Collaborative portrait go down to where it was to be exhibited we refined bits and pieces of the portrait like fixing some parts hair by adding more newspapers and repainted some parts of the face and neck as there was a few past mistakes we had made on them, also I worked on four boxes on her neck as there was some blending problems so I managed to fix it and make it look all even and not odd. After that was finished and we were sure there was no need for more refinement to be done we sent it down to the cafeteria for it to be exhibited for the next day. Me and a couple of girls from the class were in charge of putting up the pencil sketch portraits on the board. Before we put up the pencil portrait sketches we added a bright red paper onto the board so the pencil portraits would pop and make people look its way and notice the work. We stapled the background up and then took out the portraits and laid them on a clear table and tried to figure out what was going where. We put the biggest portrait in the middle and then surrounded it with the smaller ones. We put them according to how light and how dark they were on the board.