What does it mean to truly look closely? This year’s VRA annual conference, Zooming In, invites visual resources professionals to shift from the wide view and settle into the details, the workflows, tools, discoveries, and community conversations that define our day-to-day practice.
Delivered fully online, VRA 2026 brings together a rich program drawn from 40+ proposals spanning panels, lightning talks, virtual tours, and more. Whether you’re navigating new roles in your institution, exploring how AI is reshaping cataloging and metadata work, grappling with collection development decisions, or finding new ways to activate and engage communities through visual collections, there’s a session built for where you are right now.
This year’s program reflects both the breadth and the depth of our field: from digitizing ancient scrolls to first-time service management, from reparative description to classroom pedagogy, and interactive digital maps. It’s a conference for asking: what happens when we look more carefully?
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From Curatorial Pedagogy to Professional Development: Skill Building through Student Exhibitions This 60-minute panel examines various models for staff and instructors to empower students learning curatorial practices through hands-on experience, and demonstrates how these programs can evolve over time. Bringing together panelists from institutional archives and a visual resources center illustrates how facilitating student-run exhibitions can be adapted to a variety of contexts.
Sarah Melloy shares two case studies of unique art exhibits curated from materials in the University of Louisville's Archives & Special Collections by students in curatorial studies courses at the Hite Institute of Art + Design (Hite), co-led by Hite faculty and archives staff enrolled in Hite's MA program. In 2024, students drew from the Williams-Nichols collection — one of the largest LGBTQ+ archival collections in the country — to curate Not Yet / Always Been: An Archive of Queer Louisville. The following year, building on that momentum, students curated Doing Americana: Photography, Mythology, and the American Dream, blending fine art and documentary photography from archival collections in conjunction with Louisville's Photo Biennial. These semester-long courses generated further interest in exhibiting with archival materials among curatorial studies students, leading to more formal and streamlined programming for student exhibits developed by archives and Hite faculty and staff.
Caitlin Cooner presents CWAC Exhibitions, an evolving model for teaching curation through an applied methodology. Managed by the University of Chicago Department of Art History's Visual Resource Center (VRC), CWAC Exhibitions gives students and courses the opportunity to curate and exhibit artwork throughout the Cochrane Woods Art Center. Since its inception, the program has produced 17 exhibitions and 8 pop-up exhibitions curated by individual students and art history courses, and has employed students in the VRC to execute them — showcasing contemporary art in conversation with pieces from the Joel Snyder Materials Collection. The CWAC Exhibitions team will soon publish a Curatorial Toolkit outlining the steps and processes of a successful CWAC Exhibition, adaptable for various levels of curatorial experience and different art spaces.
Brittan Nannenga will present examples of student-curated exhibitions and events at the John M. Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After a renovation project in 2023, staff in the Library and Special Collections came together to rethink and expand programming for the newly enhanced exhibition and event space. The result was an exhibition proposal process, which welcomed members of the SAIC community, and specifically student curators, to submit ideas for exhibits and events that utilize library and special collections or highlight works related to their coursework or research. Since then, the library has showcased a variety of exhibitions and events curated and planned by undergraduate and graduate students, student groups, and classes. The new exhibition process offers student curators the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with concept development, research and selection, visual display and design, installation, and outreach and promotion–with support from library staff throughout.
Together, these programs demonstrate how archives staff working closely with students and instructors can lead to successful exhibitions while equipping students with hands-on professional skills in curation, archival research, and other GLAM-related work.
