Curated by the nine William & Mary students in Professor Xin Conan-Wu’s class The Curatorial Project, Scales of Chaos: The Dance of Art & Contemporary Science presented fresh ways of reading art, and of artworks that embody a sensible intuition of complex phenomena. Scales of Chaos: The Dance of Art & Contemporary Science was originally scheduled to open on April 17 in our first floor Sheridan gallery. Professor Conan-Wu and the students in The Curatorial Project quickly adapted after the university’s suspension of in-person instruction due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They accomplished all curatorial tasks, recorded videos discussing the featured works and why they were chosen, created an interactive 3-D virtual exhibition, and produced an exhibition catalogue. After the completion of their class the Museum staff and Professor Conan-Wu stayed in close contact hoping to eventually share the exhibition that the students worked so hard on. The Museum is pleased to announce that we mounted a modified version of Scales of Chaos in our second floor galleries.

Additionally, an online exhibition documenting the collaborative process and behind-the-scenes work as well as the student created digital elements of the exhibition will be available on VIRTUAL MUSCARELLE as an online companion. Adriano Marinazzo, Curator of Digital Initiatives at the Muscarelle, says that this project is a key example of how “the Museum’s digital platform can serve and elevate the merging of liberal arts and digital humanities.”

A number of institutions and individuals at William & Mary made this project possible, including staff at the Muscarelle Museum of Art, Department of Art & Art History, Special Collections Research Center of the Swem Library, and University Communications Web & Design.