What’s So Funny? How Humor Makes Us Think

The University Museum of Contemporary Art presents its Twelfth Annual Curatorial Fellowship Exhibition, What’s So Funny? How Humor Makes Us Think. 

Co-curated by Kayla Peterson (M.A. Art History, 2020) and Siyu Shen (M.A. Art History, 2020), What’s So Funny? How Humor Makes Us Think explores how humor may be used to provoke serious conversations on topics surrounding the political, social, and sexual climate of our world. Viewing art within the context of humor creates opportunities for new perspectives and expectations which will lead viewers to ask: What’s so funny, and why? Do you feel uncomfortable laughing when others are not? Or do you feel the need to laugh with others?

With works by Mary Frey, Barbara Morgan, Andy Warhol, and others from the UMCA permanent collection, the exhibition encourages viewers to linger on these questions as they make their way through art that embraces the ridiculous, the obscene, or the polemic.

Now in its twelfth year, the University Museum of Contemporary Art’s annual Curatorial Fellowship Exhibition is the culmination of a year-long independent project, designed to deepen students’ understanding of the intellectual and practical work of a curator in a museum setting.