Liliana Porter: Three Realities developed from Niko Vicario’s Amherst College course “Curating between the Virtual and the Physical: Liliana Porter” and the exhibition Liliana Porter: Two Realities (February 22, 2022–January 8, 2023), organized by curator Lisa Crossman at the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts. 

Liliana Porter has persistently explored the fluid and often paradoxical relationship between what she describes as “virtual reality,” or representation, and “the real thing.” Over the decades, Porter’s practice has spanned media from printmaking to installation, selectively engaging technologies like photography and video that expand and complicate experiences of these realities. The exhibition Liliana Porter: Two Realities extends this dialogue about representation in Porter’s art to consider the porous link between physical and online spaces. During the spring 2022 semester, Amherst College students in Professor Niko Vicario’s course created four online curatorial projects in conversation with the artist and with the support of the Mead’s curatorial team. 

Featuring short reflections from participating students, excerpted texts from their online projects, and brief essays by Vicario and Crossman, the publication can be disassembled and rearranged by the reader and embodies yet another way of engaging with the act of curating and with the playfulness of Porter’s work.

Mead Art Museum, Amherst College