TFW you can add “Internationally exhibited” to your resume

This is Jessica. Recently a museum in Italy approached me about contributing some images and a short essay on uncertainty visualization, for an exhibit they were planning related to uncertainty. The request seemed much more exotic than some of the usual ‘Will you submit something to our conference?’ type requests I get. So Lace Padilla, who also works in this area, and I teamed up to write something up and sent some images. Today I got the exhibition catalog in the mail.

uncertainty vis book excer

Being asked to create something for a museum reminded me of how back when I used to have friends who were in art school, I would sometimes read their artist statements, where I frequently saw the pretentious phrase, ‘[so and so] is an internationally exhibited artist.’ So I asked my husband, who went to art school, about it. He agreed it’s overused, and said it just meant some gallery or maybe just a coffee shop somewhere in the world showed your stuff, and that there were third parties who would prey on artists who wanted to have this coveted phrase in their statements by offering to put their art in a gallery somewhere in Europe for a price. So you never knew whether to take it seriously.

Anyhow, not saying I agreed to do this museum thing only for the novelty of being able to say I am “internationally exhibited,” but I have to admit it was the most salient part of my thought process!

I do like the bit Lace and I wrote though, which is sort of an abridged version of other things we’ve written walking through uncertainty visualizations and common challenges that arise, like a chapter we did on uncertainty visualization not too long ago.

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