The Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College was honored to receive a grant from the Getty Foundation to support the AllPaper Seminar, a multi-year program designed to introduce emerging professionals of diverse backgrounds to the field of works on paper (prints, drawings, and photographs). The grant is part of The Paper Project, an international initiative of the Getty Foundation that supports training and professional development for early- and mid-career curators of prints and drawings.
For 2022, the Benton organized a two-part program that will bring undergraduates and recent graduates together with established professionals to learn about the stewardship of these collections. The first part, a two-day orientation session at the Getty Center, took place in the spring. The second part was a weeklong residency at the Benton from June 6 to June 12, 2022. The residency included hands-on sessions that treated the material properties of prints and printmaking, the history of printmaking and collecting, practices of interpretation and project development related to works on paper, and trips to visit print collections and workshops in the Los Angeles area. At the end of the program, participants produced a professional-level project such as a scholarly essay, exhibition proposal, print-on-demand booklet, or podcast episode.
We were thrilled to welcome our inaugural cohort to the AllPaper Seminar and loved exploring the field with them in 2022.