Chucho Martinez Padres ’23 awarded Senior Exhibit Fellowship

Chucho Martinez Padres ’23 has been awarded the Yale Library 2023 Senior Exhibit Fellowship to create and curate an exhibition exploring the methods of art historian George Kubler, PhD ’40, one of the foremost scholars of Pre-Columbian America and Ibero-American Art. Kubler was Professor of the History of Art at Yale from 1938 to 1983.

Martinez Padres’s month-long fellowship researching Yale Library special collections will begin in mid-July and provide him with foundational research for his senior essay and accompanying exhibit, which will open in Sterling Memorial Library’s Wall Street Exhibition Corridor in spring 2023.

Martinez Padres, an architecture major who was born in Mexico City, was first inspired by Kubler’s 1948 essay about Mexico’s sixteenth-century monasteries. He will consult both Spanish- and English-language texts and materials to explore the “intellectual context” that led to the development of Kubler’s practices. “In line with Kubler’s framework,” Martinez Padres writes, “the research and curatorship of the exhibit will be based on the premise that it is not history in itself that matters, but our relationship to it.”

As he conducts his research and develops his exhibition, Martinez Padres will be advised by Jessica Quagliaroli, Architecture Records Archivist, Manuscripts and Archives; Surry Schlabs, critic and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the School of Architecture; Kerri Sancomb, Yale Library’s exhibition program manager; and Sarah Davis, the library’s exhibits technician. Martinez Padres will work a minimum of 25 hours per week on exhibit-related work, including twice-weekly planning check-ins. The library will also provide workshops on exhibition planning, conservation, curatorial practices, and primary-source research.

The Senior Exhibit Fellowship provides funding for a month of summer research in library collections along with mentoring and support by a library advisor, a faculty advisor, and the library’s exhibit production staff.  The fellowship was introduced in 2021 as an expansion of a previously established opportunity for a selected senior to curate a library exhibition based on the student’s senior essay, but full implementation was delayed until this year due to COVID-19 restrictions on in-person research.

Read more about the Senior Exhibit Fellowship or contact Kerri Sancomb at kerri.sancomb@yale.edu.

—By Deborah Cannarella

Photo by Kerri Sancomb