"From Guild to Genius": A Conversation with Marianna Zingone '26

Curated by Marianna Zingone ’26, the exhibition From Guild to Genius: Inventing “The Artist” in Western Culture traces shifting conceptions of “the artist” in the Western world from the medieval era, through the Renaissance, until today. The following conversation offers insight into the curatorial development of the exhibition. The transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Amanda Skinner (AS): How did this curatorial project first take shape for you? What sparked the idea, and how did your concept evolve from initial proposal to the final exhibition?

Marianna Zingone (MZ): This idea for From Guild to Genius first started percolating when I was a sophomore. I was taking Professor Steve Perkinson's Northern Renaissance class. We learned about the trajectory of the idea of “the artist” and artists’ social standing in society in Europe. Artists were originally considered craftspeople, and it was not until the fifteenth century when they really started to get teased out as this larger-than-life figure.

As a cinema studies minor, I was simultaneously taking Professor Tricia Welsh's class on film history from 1935 to 1975. I had no idea that the conception of a film director had a similar evolution. When we started the class in 1935, directors were just one of many movie workers who were putting out a Hollywood movie. It wasn’t until the 1950s in France and then in America that the director also became a larger-than-life figure. Nowadays, a film is first and foremost a director's creative vision, which wasn't always the case in how people viewed movies.

The summer after my sophomore year when I was working at the BCMA as an intern, I was also working remotely at a production company in Los Angeles. It was right around the time when the writer’s strike was happening. And I think a lot of the questions in the writers’ strike nodded to these ideas. For example, we may go see a “Christopher Nolan movie,” but Christopher Nolan isn’t, of course, the only person who has worked on it. The writers’ strike raised important questions about compensating workers who make up most of the labor that goes into Hollywood productions.

So, some of the questions I had regarding film history transpose very interestingly on the trajectory of the historical rise of “the artist” too.

AS: Speaking of collaboration, how did working with Anne Collins Goodyear, co-director, and Cassandra (Casey) Mesick Braun, curator, influence your research and thinking as you were developing the exhibition?

MZ: Working with Anne and Casey together was awesome—they both bring such vast knowledge of different time periods and museum practice in general. I'm a part of a standup sketch comedy group on campus called Purity Pact. I'm now a co-leader, so it's been a big part of my year this year so far. And one thing I've always loved about it is the collaborative element. For example, someone will come up with an idea when we're pitching and maybe at first doesn't know where to take it. But then as part of the process, we’ll sit in a circle and throw out ideas to help develop the initial idea.

Working with Casey and Anne felt a little bit like that because we would sit in the BCMA conference room and put up my tentative mock-up on the board and drag and drop and play with things and throw around ideas.

AS: Were there any challenges or unexpected turns in this process, and did it change your approach or the exhibition’s narrative?

Working with Casey and Anne, the biggest challenge we encountered was narrowing down the scope of my initial idea. I really wanted to showcase the change from craftsperson to artist figure and to do that, you have to jump back all the way to the medieval era. But because of my original inspiration for the exhibition, I also wanted there to be contemporary works. So, the question became: “How do you showcase 500 years of history on three and a half gallery walls?”

AS: Well kudos, because you landed on a very thought-provoking selection of objects for the exhibition. Is there a specific one that you are excited to share with audiences?

MZ: I'm really excited about the set of fresco fragments from the fifteenth century. In researching the BCMA’s permanent collection for the exhibition, I found the object record for the frescos but there was no digital reproduction. When I included it in my original checklist to send to Casey, I thought, "This is probably in really bad shape. We probably can't show it, but I had no idea we had this!" And lo and behold, when we finally sat down to talk about it, we found that it had been conserved recently, but it had never been on view before. I originally wanted it to include it as an example of those early Renaissance fresco painters. But as I was digging, I saw that when the object originally came into the collection in the 1920s from Edward Perry Warren, and it was enclosed in a frame that read “From the house of Fillipo Lippi,” who was a famous Renaissance painter.

Then I found that the object file for the frescos contained a note from an art historian named Christopher Daly, stating that the frescos definitely didn't come from Filipo Lippi’s house and were likely produced instead by a fresco painter named Filippo Filippelli. I was very interested in the note, so I reached out to an old email address I found for Christopher and amazingly was able to connect with him. I asked him, "What do you think the motivations would be for marketing at it as ‘From the house of Fillipo Lippi’? Do you think it really did come from the house of Fillipo Lippi, or do you think it was just a fiction?" He concluded that it was probably a fiction to make these seem more valuable to an American collector by attaching it to a name that at that point had already become famous. This idea of the celebrity artist and the accompanying cultural value is a theme which comes through in a lot of the wall labels.

AS: That sounds like it was an interesting mystery to pursue. What has this experience of researching objects and curating the exhibition meant for your own studies and next steps?

MZ: Something I didn’t know about until interning at the BCMA was that there is the opportunity to propose and do Becker Gallery exhibitions. Getting to curate your own idea from start to finish feels very special. I’m interested in a lot of ideas about this exhibit, and it resonates with a lot of other classes I’ve taken. In terms of next steps, I don’t know where it will take me, but I will always have a soft spot for museums and art. It was an amazing experience to have this opportunity to take what I am interested in and share it with audiences.

AS: What do you hope audiences will take away from the exhibition? Are there questions do you hope visitors will carry with them after they leave?

MZ: First and foremost, I want visitors to consider the change in the way we think about the singular nature of “the artist.” The way we view artists now is not how they’ve been viewed historically. I hope viewers enjoy learning about this. One of my favorite sub themes is thinking about what this modern conception of the artist has meant for the idea of “originality.” Our definition of originality in the West has really changed over time as well.

I also hope people will think about the unseen labor that goes into a great work of art or film. I really want to emphasize the inherent collaborative nature of making things, which in some ways has been obscured by the artist as celebrity figure.

From Guild to Genius: Inventing “The Artist” in Western Culture is on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art through March 8, 2026.

Amanda Skinner
Assistant Director of Museum Communications