It is the third week of the second block now—and I can hardly believe how quickly time has flown! The opening of our class exhibition at the Fine Arts Center at Colorado College is just around the corner. During the last 10 days, we have been working on the didactic labels for each artwork and the wall text for the whole exhibition. Coming up with a ‘perfect’ 300-word label is indeed more complicated than I thought it would be.
To start this phase of the project, Jessica, 
the curator for the UnBlocked Gallery, came to class last week and gave us a working session on how to write the didactic label. With the help of guidelines and label examples, we began to draft our own by researching our artists’ backgrounds, analyzing the artworks, and exploring their connections with the theme of our exhibition: identity. After peer review, another gallery visit, professor comments, and reading them aloud, our didactic labels eventually made it to the final draft after revising a couple of times. It is amazing to see our labels printed and mounted on the wall! I used to visit the public galleries without paying much attention to the wall text or the arrangement of artworks on the wall. The wall paint, frames, labels and wall texts: I took the entire set-up at galleries for granted. However, after taking part in an exhibition-curating task myself, I realized that everything in the gallery is the result of curators’ attentive design and hard work.
In addition to the exhibition preparation, our art history lecture in class has moved on to Impressionist paintings and modern art. As our class approaches the end, it’s amazing to look back and see how far we have come through the history of western art—from the pre-historic period all the way to modern times. As this was my first class on the block plan, it has been quite surprising to see how much progress we made in just eight weeks. This FYE class has not only taught me a lot about art, but it has also helped me to adapt to the special block plan schedule at CC.
