Laura Schiavo Becomes Director of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design

Starting in July, Laura Schiavo, Ph.D. '03, begins a five-year term as director of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, housed in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. She has been on the museum studies faculty at the George Washington University for 17 years. (Lauren Onkey, the current director, will assume a full-time teaching role on the music faculty.) She is the editor of the book "U.S. Museum Histories and the Politics of Interpretation" (Routledge, 2024). Schiavo talked with GW Today about the Corcoran's past, present and future.

Q: What's your diagnosis of the arts scene at GW?

A: The arts scene at GW is alive and well. We just had the NEXT Festival, our end-of-year celebration of the work of our graduating undergraduates and graduate students, and the work is extraordinary. Students are thinking a lot about politics. They're thinking a lot about issues around identity and freedom of speech, political discourse, civil discourse, but also digging deep into their own ideas and experiences and the things that are important to them. And they're experimenting with interdisciplinarity.

Q: Do you see economic trends and other uncertainties affecting GW's investment in the arts?

A: Everybody across the university is working on reduced or flat-lined budgets. At the Corcoran, our classes often have pedagogical limits on how many people can be in a room at the same time. You have people working in studios who are moving around the studio and teaching individually, sequentially over the course of the studio period. That requires an investment. However, we bring a lot to the university. We bring this critical engagement with the world in a creative way. Our programs include both studio and performance programs as well as disciplines like museum studies and art history. These are all valuable elements of a liberal arts university. We're proud of our students' work, and I think we contribute to the university as much as we are supported by it.

Q: You've taught for 17 years in the Museum Studies program. What's your overall view of that time?

A: Museum Studies has been at GW for a long time, since 1976. We're celebrating our 50th anniversary. There have been a lot of changes in museum practice over time, so there's been a natural evolution of the program.

The gathering up of Museum Studies and other programs when GW created the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design has brought tremendous opportunities. For example, I teach two linked courses in museum studies, Curatorial Research and Planning in the fall and Exhibition Development in the spring. Before we were a part of the Corcoran, students would research a topic in fall and then write an exhibition script based on that research in spring. We got to the Corcoran and I thought, 'Wait a minute, we're in this building with these incredible gallery spaces and we're in a school with people who know about exhibition design and interaction design and graphic design.' So now in that class, students develop a full-on exhibition that's part of NEXT, in collaboration with other Corcoran students.

Q: Talk a little bit about your work on the role of museums in our national life.

A: My thinking about museums and visual culture dates back to my Ph.D. in American studies from GW. My dissertation was about stereoscopes and stereographs and the introduction of this three-dimensional form of photography right at the beginning of photography. Middle-class people were buying up stereographs like crazy and this is the way they saw the world, in 3D-this sort of imperial view of the whole world from their parlor. That's what my dissertation was about, visual culture and national identity.

These are ideas I continued to think about in my book about interpretation over time in U.S. museums. Exhibitions are really arguments about something, and I'm most interested in the ones that are about history, identity and national stories. Sometimes exhibitions are more normative and sometimes they are more challenging. But in all cases, there is a politics of interpretation.

As is clear in my scholarship, I am a historian. I create exhibitions based on other people's work, and I write about exhibitions historically. So, now, at the Corcoran, it's really fun to be in a space with students and faculty who are creators of art and culture and also performers. For me, this is kind of like a dream.

Q: Is there an initiative that you can't wait to get cracking on?

A: There's a lot of work to do to continue to support our students. There's just a lot of daily work that needs to happen on all levels to make that happen.

We're in our third and final year of the residency of For Freedoms Artists Collective as part of our ten-year partnership with the National Gallery of Art, and I'm very excited to continue our partnership in the years to come. We'll all work together to think of what future years will look like.

I really want to spend as much time as I can working with our communications people on bringing our work to the forefront, out to the university and beyond. There's always work to be done on that. GW is a big place, and I think we can exist in our little spaces and not know what else is going on. In the end, I just want to do everything I can to help students find their voices and learn and grow.