From September through December, the Wellin Museum’s Jeffrey Gibson: This is the Day exhibition attracted a continuous flow of media attention. Press coverage began with an inclusion in a New York Times article on “the things our editors find interesting this week” in September and continued with a Wall Street Journal feature in October, an ARTFORUM interview in November, and finally an extensive exhibition review in Hyperallergic in December.
Wellin’s Johnson-Pote Director Tracy Adler discussed the exhibition with Roundtable host Joe Donahue on public radio station WAMC, which reaches a seven-state audience, in November. Other articles appeared in Architects and Artisans, The Brooklyn Rail, and OUT magazine.
Hyperallergic described the exhibition as feeling "like a very big and searching exhibition, as it is genuinely an exploration of ethnic heritage and all the ways it might be refracted by personal experience," in an article listing the top 20 exhibitions in the United States in 2018. Jeffrey Gibson: This is the Day was listed as #2.
More than 4,200 visitors viewed the show before it closed on Dec. 9. Twenty-four Hamilton courses engaged with the Jeffrey Gibson exhibition, a 25 percent increase over last year’s numbers. Almost 300 Hamilton students visited the museum as part of their coursework. Classes spanned a wide range of subjects including those directly related to the subject matter – Native American Spiritualities, North American Prehistory, Conquest of the Americas, and Introduction to Sculpture – as well as others with less obvious connections – Gender and Immigration in France, Echoes in Literature, History of Theatre, and Rethinking the Romance.
Additional media this fall heralded the fall 2019 semester exhibition, Elias Sime: Tightrope. ARTnews included the Wellin’s video trailer for the show on Dec. 18.
