Smith College / Smithsonian Institution Internship Program
Research Project Proposal
Name of Supervisor(s): Dorothy Moss, Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture
Department or Office: Painting and Sculpture
Museum/Unit: National Portrait Gallery
Phone Number: 202.633.8313
Email Address: mossd@si.edu
1. Please provide information on your research and/or the work of your office:
I am currently developing a ONE LIFE exhibition on Sylvia Plath in partnership with Karen Kukil,
associate curator of special collections, Smith College. The exhibition will present a visual biography of
Sylvia Plath from childhood to her early death with photographs, Plath’s prom dress, a painted portrait
(now in the collection of the Smith College Museum of Art and on view in the Poetry Center on
campus), recently-discovered illustrated family letters that Plath wrote when she was seven, schoolbook
sketches, self-portraits from Plath’s art courses at Smith, Plath’s sketch of Ted Hughes, and some of her
personal belongings, including the wooden desk she shared with Ted Hughes and a small cradle that
Hughes built and she decorated. The exhibition will also include contemporary artists’ responses to
Plath’s work. This will be the first exhibition to present the span of her life in the context of an art
museum and will be the first to present comprehensively her artwork in tandem with her manuscripts,
letters, and photographs of her.
The most recent Plath exhibition outside of heavily archival and photographic installations at Smith’s
Neilson Library was “No Other Appetite:” Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Blood Jet of Poetry took
place in 2005 at the Grolier Club in New York. This exhibition, curated by Karen Kukil, highlighted
“the young couple’s commitment to a shared writing life.” The past fifteen years has seen the release of
an abundance of original material that has yet to be assimilated into the story of Plath’s life. Ted Hughes
lifted a previous restriction on access to two sealed journals at Smith College and, in consultation with
Plath and Hughes’s two children, authorized the publication of an unabridged edition of all surviving
journals and journal fragments dating from Plath’s adult years. I am hoping that this exhibition will
coincide with the publication of Plath’s letters, which Karen Kukil is currently editing, and allow that
material to be incorporated into her story through the portraits on view.
This exhibition will diverge from the Grolier Club’s highly acclaimed one in that the focus will be on
Plath’s entire life and will highlight her identity as a writer and the way she carefully crafted her public
identity through her writing, sketches, and photographs that others took of her. She once wrote in a letter
to her mother, “I have a visual imagination.” The power of her vivid descriptions has influenced
generations of writers and visual artists and shaped our perception of her. This exhibition will examine
her careful crafting of her identity and her visual sensibility.
2. Describe the project (include duties, nature and scope of the work), and indicate any particular
academic background or specific courses needed as preparation:
The intern will work with me to locate objects for inclusion in the exhibition, compile an exhibition
script, locate sound recordings, draft interpretive texts, and will help with administrative tasks in the
initial stages of developing the exhibition catalogue.
The intern will draw on archival sources around Washington and will be in touch with Karen Kukil and
curators at the Lily Library at the University of Indiana regularly as we develop the exhibition script. The
intern needs to be detail oriented and have a background in English literature and art history.
3. Please describe possible research products an intern might develop, either from the project or the
work of your office, to fulfill the academic requirement of the Smith College Program:
Aside from her work on developing the exhibition, the intern will participate in the daily life of the
department of painting and sculpture at the National Portrait Gallery. She will attend depart meetings
weekly and curatorial meetings monthly to discuss proposed acquisitions. She will also develop a public
tour on portraits of influential women in the NPG. Depending on her interests, she would be welcome to
develop a project on contemporary responses to Plath’s work. Another possibility would be to work on a
project about the portrayal of American women writers using objects in the NPG’s collection.