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“One of you will show your work at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and will take home $100,000.”
At least that’s the promise made by Dometi Pongo, the host of a new reality television series, “The Exhibit,” about the making of an art star. The first season is six episodes, produced by the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn together with Paramount, MTV and the Smithsonian Channel.
The program, which starts March 3, focuses on seven rising artists from around the country who were selected by Hirshhorn curators. Each week, the artists are commissioned to make a themed work — such as an exploration of gender — that is evaluated by Melissa Chiu, the Hirshhorn’s director, and a team of guest judges (the artists Adam Pendleton, Kenny Schachter and Abigail DeVille are among them).
“This TV partnership was really about an expansive idea of art — radical accessibility,” Chiu said in a telephone interview, adding that the show will be “bringing new light to artists and artwork.”
Recently, the museum also appointed the Colombian pop star J Balvin as a global cultural ambassador to work with teens in its Artlab education center. And the museum recently created the Hirshhorn Eye (Hi), which allows visitors to point their phones at a work of art and see a video of the artist talking about it.
Having the TV series broadcast on both MTV and the Smithsonian Channel (there are no plans to stream it) will allow the Hirshhorn to reach both “a younger demographic as well as a more mature demographic,” Chiu said, adding that she hoped the program would reveal more about “what the museum does, but also the artistic process.”
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Robin Pogrebin
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