A new installation at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art contains pieces selected by students in a curatorial practicum seminar offered through the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences.
Students created the installation as part of their class, which included discussions about Indonesian art, provenance, repatriation, community engagement and the changing status of Indonesian art within the canon of fine art.
“Indonesia Embodied: Performing the Space Between” complements the museum’s "Hum of Life" exhibition. The student installation will be up until the fall in the Museum’s Southeast Asia gallery on the fifth floor.
“Southeast Asian art history came into the canon during the time of the Vietnam War. Cornell was the place where so much of that was written about,” said Kaja McGowan, associate professor of history of art, who co-taught the spring curatorial seminar with Ellen Avril, the Judith H. Stoikov Curator of Asian Art and interim director of the museum.
The 14 undergrad and grad students in the seminar, who came from various colleges, chose artworks, developed the themes and installation plan, researched and wrote wall labels as well as the introductory description:
“Here, performance unfolds not as something fixed or complete, but as something continuously dissolving and reconstituting across time, space, and material. Underlying this is a concept from Buddhist and Indonesian philosophical traditions: ‘sunya,’ the idea that emptiness and fullness are simultaneous conditions,” the students wrote. “A puppet is still until moved. A mask’s spirit is only enlivened when performed. This special installation was developed collaboratively by students from different majors and backgrounds, each bringing their own understanding of what performance can be.”
Some of the works in the installation are on public view for the first time and student research contributed to new knowledge about their significance and use, Avril said.
Olivia Kim ’26 chose two early 20th century puppets from the collection for her research on wayang theater traditions in Indonesia.
“This project reframed my understanding of puppets not only as objects of ‘play,’ but as central participants in communal life and storytelling,” said Kim. “I was also really interested in the craftsmanship and care that went into these puppets' design and creation. The hair is carved so intricately you can almost see individual strands.”
The puppets Kim worked with represent a princess and a servant girl, but Kim discovered that power and status were conceived differently in Indonesia than in the west.
“This ultimately shaped how I displayed them — rather than staging subservience, we positioned the two puppets as if walking together, which felt truer to the kind of reciprocal or symbiotic relationships between princesses and their servants described in the court literature,” she said.
William Ritter ’26 chose a textile called an ider-ider that would have typically been hung around a temple or shrine, but this one curiously had the word “cigarette” embroidered not once but twice.
“I found no corresponding cigarette depicted within the scene itself, so this curious discrepancy encouraged me to read the word as a sort of caption for the imagery and to focus my analysis on the symbolic structures at play within the work,” Ritter said.
Ritter broadened his research, with the help of anthropology Professor Marina Welker, whose book “Kretek Capitalism” focuses on the kretek, an Indonesian cigarette. “This allowed me to consider the ider-ider as a structural analogy for the social, political and economic significance of the cigarette/kretek as a commodity sign,” Ritter said.
One of the pieces chosen by Esther Brenner ’26, a print created by Henri Cartier-Bresson, shows a princess performing serimpi, a classical court dance. “Although serimpi appears serene, the dance carries a subtle martial dimension. Performers often wield kris, the distinctive wavy-bladed dagger associated with Javanese court culture that functioned both as regalia and as symbol of spiritual power,” Brenner wrote in her label.
Nephele Sarrinikolaou ’27 also chose a print by Cartier-Bresson, this one showing trance dancers. “In Bali, trance dances often unfold in temple courtyards, where boundaries between theater and religious practice dissolve,” she wrote. “Cartier-Bresson captures the intensity of the moment, where art and mysticism merge in a depiction of community.”
Students in the class also chose batiks, paintings, sculptures and other media from the collection for their installation.
“Taken together, this exhibit becomes a kind of time capsule, tracing how performance in Indonesia has evolved,” students wrote. “From the material traces embedded in ceremonial mats, buraq, or wayang golek puppets, to photographs capturing performances in a newly independent Indonesia, each object offers a unique snapshot of performance as both a lived practice and a historical record.”
“A lot of inspiration came from the readings they did in class or items that we brought for them to see,” MacGowan said. “I am so proud of what my students did; they were so engaged in the process.”
The practicum is offered every year or every other year, McGowan said, as more and more students are interested in careers related to museums and galleries.
“Students want to have direct experience working with objects,” Avril said. “They see art curating in museums, galleries or the private sector as a viable career path.”
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