Prop Master at Charleston's Gibbes Museum of Art

• Main Authors: Susan Harbage Page, Juan Logan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Emory Center for Digital Scholarship 2009-09-01
• Series: Southern Spaces
• Subjects: African American Studies; Gender and Sexuality; Slavery; Social Class; Whiteness Studies; Arts
• Online Access: https://southernspaces.org/node/42525
• ISSN: 1551-2754

Susan Harbage Page and Juan Logan, Prop Master exhibit, Charleston, South Carolina, 2009. Photo: Rick Rhodes. The Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina presented the exhibition Prop Master: An Installation in the museum's Main Gallery from April 3 through July 19, 2009. This site-specific, large-scale installation created exclusively for the Gibbes drew materials from the museum's permanent collection of portraits, landscape paintings, and archives, begun over 150 years ago. This online presentation of Prop Master, with original wall text by Laurel Fredrickson, reveals how artists Susan Harbage Page and Juan Logan juxtaposed art objects drawn from the Gibbes's collection and decorative art objects from local public and private collections with works of their own creation. In doing so, they investigate the role of the institution of the museum as both a prop master and a prop with regard to race, class, and gender relations in historic Charleston society.