Bledsoe awarded a distinction

A still from Candice Breitz's Extra! show, which was on at the Iziko SA National Gallery during the period of Bledsoe's study

Third-year study-abroad student Clark Bledsoe, who spent one semester at UCT based in the Archive & Public Culture unit, was recently awarded a distinction for his paper exploring the ideas of curation that are at work in the South African National Gallery.

Hailing originally from Jacksonville, Florida, Bledsoe's home university is Macalester, an undergraduate liberal arts college in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he studies Anthropology with a concentration in African Studies.

Under Professor Carolyn Hamilton's supervision, Bledsoe brought together his passion for the arts and his anthropological skills in a fieldwork report in which he sought to arrive at an understanding of what curatorship means to the SANG in light of its position within the Iziko Museums group and the post-apartheid social sphere more generally.

'To engage my inquiries, a brief review of contemporary curatorial literature contextualizes the bulk of my research, which consists of a critical analysis of the curatorial elements of the exhibitions and storage spaces concurrent to my period of research,' reads Bledsoe's abstract.  'In an underfunded gallery ripe with institutional tension and curatorial constraints, this paper aims to explore how the SANG's notions of curation affect the extent to which it writes South Africa's national narrative.'