Everything I Know About Curation I Learned From an Artist (Curator)

“After ten minutes of talking, the role of a curator is quite vague. Pretty much everybody has laid out an idea of a curator that’s different than the other.” - Roundtable participant

I came into curation by way of curiosity and accident. I was enchanted by an exhibition at the Arvada Center that paired artists’ studio chairs with a work by each artist, inviting the visitor to sit in the artist’s chair and look at an artwork. It is a recreation of a moment I had lived many times in my own studio–sitting, looking, feeling around inside myself to ask if the work was done. To have this small, crucial, intimate moment mirrored for a visitor in a gallery felt generous and brilliant. The concept blew open my brain. Before this exhibition, I (ignorantly, confoundingly) had no awareness of how a curator shaped my experience of an artist’s work. But here, I sat in an artist’s chair and realized simultaneously that I had no idea how exhibitions were made and that I immediately needed to know everything about how exhibitions were made. I took this newfound urgency to the gallery’s director and curator, artist Collin Parson, who offered me a job as a gallery assistant and taught me everything I know about curation. There should be no doubt about my own entrenched and beloved biases here. I am an artist-curator mentored by an artist-curator, and a healthy dose of my favorite people in the world are artist-curators. Many of them were at September’s Tilt West Roundtable SPACE: The Artist as Curator, led by artist curator Drew Austin.

In his book Ways of Curating, Hans Ulrich Obrist [1] shares a lesson he learned from artist Alighiero Boetti: that a great curator makes artists’ dreams come true by asking about unrealized projects, getting curious about why they haven’t been able to move forward on the project, and finding the resources to make it happen. This role was named “curator as doula” during the roundtable as artists told stories of curators who served as a guide for the artist to develop and deepen their work and as a champion to connect resources (space, money, time, administration, energy, snacks, companionship, laughter, a deadline–every project needs a different combination of hard and soft supports) to make the artist’s dreams come true. At the Arvada Center, this artist-centered ideology supported artists to raise a 20’ forest inside the gallery (Patrick Marold), to create their first exterior public sculpture (Ana Maria Botero), to sprawl a calligraphic upholstered bench reading “Lies” across the space (Michael Beitz), and to finally try out that nagging idea that just hadn’t had the opportunity to come out into the world yet.

The role of curator is squishy and hard to pin down. Though its meaning has morphed, its Latin root cura–to care for–has stayed central. An ancient Roman curator cared for public infrastructure like aqueducts and roads. By the middle ages, a curator was spiritually responsible for the care of people’s souls. Now, we land somewhere in the middle, acting as a bridge between the artist and the public, caring for the administrative infrastructure of an exhibition while offering a unique collection of things in space as an invitation to experience something new. A curatorial practice includes care for the artist, the space, the objects, the visitor, the budget, the schedule, the institutional mission, the spreadsheets, the install, the lighting, the paint colors, the promotion, the interpretation, the labels, the whole, arranging and orchestrating and collaging it all into something greater than the sum of its parts. And sometimes, if all the administration, relationships, funding, space, and artwork is arranged just deliciously so, the curator can make artist dreams come true in the process of expanding the visitor’s experience of being human.

Artist-curators can uniquely apply the golden rule–treat the artist as you, your artist self, would want to be treated–with a mutual empathy and understanding. When working with a curator as an artist, I take special notice of the way they work with me. If I feel held and seen in the little details of my practice, I make note of what the curator did. I steal their methods. If I’m unsure of my deadlines or how my artwork fits into the larger whole, I refine my timeline and context communications for the next exhibition I’m curating. Being an artist makes me a better curator, constantly strengthening how I can best support the artist and create that logistical structure so they can focus on being in the studio. This dual identity helps lead empathetic conversations during disagreement: I agree, your individual artwork would have looked stunning on that big wall up front! For this show, I used your piece to draw the visitor back deeper into the gallery–see how it grabs your eye from a distance right when you walk in the door? In the whole, your piece is a keystone of that visitor choreography in the exhibition. In this vein, being a curator makes me a more understanding artist. When my artwork is tucked in an awkward corner of a group show, I trust that the curator put it there for a greater good, and I can zoom out to see the role my piece plays in the context of the whole exhibition and how it brings up new conversations with the surrounding artworks even if it feels forgotten in a back alcove.

If the curator’s care of artist, visitor, and whole is central to their role, things get ethically tricky when an artist-curator prioritizes their own work in an exhibition. Should a curator include their own work in a show? A small roundtable cohort immediately shouted NO! I was one of the aggressive NO-shouters, but have since wished I responded with a nuance-welcoming it depends. When the inclusion of the curator’s artwork takes away an opportunity from another artist, the curator should not select their own work for the project. The inclusion of the curator’s artwork can draw attention or resources away from another artist’s work, creating a visitor bias to see the curator’s art as more important or by creating a competing meta-narrative to the exhibition. Instead of focusing on the show’s whole, the viewer must now consider the choices of the curator as a featured artist. Did they place their work at the front because it was best for the show or because they are engaging in self-promotion? Did they place their work at the back because they wanted to include their work in this conversation but were self-conscious about the optics? Can I trust that this curator is caring for the whole, or are they centering their own art? Care is central to the curator’s role, and someone else’s care gets shortchanged when the curator forwards their artistic career within their curatorial role.

However, there are many instances where the inclusion of the curator’s artwork benefits and supports the whole exhibition or project. The shape of contemporary art is owed to artists who created their own shows, often in response to rejection by powerful institutions. Unhappy with his acceptance rate with the all-important Academy Paris Salon jury, Gustave Courbet invented the self-mounted solo show in 1855 with a pop-up of 40 paintings in a temporary DIY space. An 1863 group show of radical paintings rejected by Napoleon’s tradition-loving Salon jury showcased the edgy art movement deemed too shocking for the public and chipped away at the absolute authority of a jury in selecting what art is worthy of being seen. With these early self-mounted shows, artists sidestepped the established power structure of the art world and brought their work directly to the public. If an artist creates their own opportunity to show their work, whether alone or by organizing with other artists, of course they should include their art in the project. If an artist is part of a collective or community and has taken on the role of curating for that group, excluding their work would detract from the exhibition and deter artists from stepping into a necessary leadership role within the group. We–the collective, communal, global we–need artists to act as curators and cultural leaders. We need them to create opportunities for self-promotion as well as for the promotion of their artist communities, collaborators, and fellow artists. I hope that our rushed and decisive NO! at the roundtable does not discourage artists in the room from expanding their identity as artist to one that includes artist leader, artist community organizer, and artist-curator. 

Within our arts community of so many fascinating people holding these squishy, blurred identities, we need a communal practice of care and generosity for each other so that the artist curator can sometimes just be cared for as an artist. My role of curator-as-doula is unfathomably fulfilling, and it is also a role that I cannot seem to provide for myself in the studio. I delight in using my creative collaboration and organizational processes to make an artist’s dream come true. I could spend hours cleaning up another artist’s inventory spreadsheet so I can select works for a show, and part of that joyful focus is knowing that my effort will make it easier for the artist to apply for other opportunities. But when it comes to my own artistic practice, I just want to be in the studio making things. I need another curator to come and ask questions, to bring out the waste and the sketches and see their value, to ask to see my inventory so I have a reason to get my own stuff organized. I need a doula too. Sometimes a curator (artist) must give the opportunity to another artist instead of themselves; sometimes an artist (curator) needs to invite a curator (artist) to nerd out with them during a studio visit. If we keep a habitual awareness of the overlapping roles we each hold in our art scene, we can provide mutual care for each other in all of our artistic and curatorial squishiness.