Visual Inquiry - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017

This article describes the planning and development of the 2016 exhibition Unraveled: Textiles Reconsidered as a case study to investigate contemporary art curating as research; curatorial methodology as an approach to problem solving; and curatorial process as a driver of curatorial decision making. The author of this essay guest curated Unraveled: Textiles Reconsidered for the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, where it was on view from 22 April 2016 to 14 August 2016. As a component of the argument the article iterates the CAC’s institutional mission and educational art making workshops. The logic of how, when and why curatorial decisions were made can be applied to many other types of creative decision-making.

The Sankofa bird stands as an appropriate metaphor for student curators in schools. The Sankofa alludes to the saying, ‘Return to the source and fetch’. This, essentially, is what student curators do when they engage the roles and tasks of mounting art exhibitions in schools. Art exhibitions comprise five task areas: theme development, exhibition design, exhibition installation, writing and publicity, and the event where the exhibit is presented to the public. In theme development, the student curators must reach back to the origins they discovered in their art. In exhibition design and installation, they must build bridges between abstract themes and ideal spaces for their art to be displayed. Through writing they extend their sources and bring (fetch) them to their audience. In the final step − the event − they come full circle and fetch what they have learned for the benefit of the whole community.

Each year for the past twenty years, seventh graders at the Ross School in East Hampton, New York, have performed as curators, organizing thematic exhibitions of the work of professional artists for the school’s gallery. This programme was designed to empower students to engage with art in meaningful and authentic ways, while helping them acquire skills in organization, critical thinking, and collaboration. The article shares the students’ step-by-step curatorial process and gives examples of the interdisciplinary learning that takes place as they meet and interview artists, choose work, design the installation, coordinate publicity, write and produce catalogue documentation, and act as tour guides. In written reflections, students identify the memorable and challenging aspects of organizing and presenting a cohesive and meaningful exhibition.

Renewed interest in curatorial practice within the K-12 art curriculum in the United States has created opportunities to explore new approaches to displaying student artwork in school. This article considers the exhibition-making and curatorial practices of eight Advanced Placement Studio Art students who were given the responsibility of curating a school-wide, end-of-year art show. The student curatorial process was developed by examining the art exhibition throughout history, and by focusing on contemporary installation and curatorial practices. Collaboration with a local gallery owner exposed students to real-world curation applications. Evaluation of the process was ascertained through student reflections and post-show feedback as collected by students through photography, observation and a ‘graffiti wall’.

Museum of Anthropology (MOA)’s Fall 2015 exhibit, ćəsnaʔəm, the City Before the City, was an interactive artistic installation depicting contemporary and historical Musqueam First Nation life in the village of ćəsnaʔəm, situated at the mouth of the Fraser River in Vancouver adjacent to University of British Columbia. The co-curators worked with a Musqueam Advisory Committee of elders to create the kitchen table installation component entitled ‘gathered together’, consisting of a dining table and chairs inside a small room with an audio voice-over of Musqueam elders reminiscing about growing up to become the ‘knowledge keepers’ of their community. Curatorial practice and presentation drew museum visitors into an art education experience through memory, colloquial discourse, documentary storytelling, and visual art that particularly appealed as cultural history and socially engaged art in terms of intention, framing, making and wonder.

Guided by this special issue theme of ‘Curating as a Condition of Art Education’, I will discuss how curating, and art production more broadly, increasingly operate directly as expanded educational praxes. The educational turn in professional curatorial and art practice has been prompted by consideration of pedagogical models within various curatorial strategies and critical art projects. In this article I speculate on curatorial practice as a form of artistic investigation by art students. My research engages with theories of public curation, the artist-curator, and material culture art education, and I illustrate this discussion by presenting a case study of a collaborative art project initiated in Canada’s largest education archive. By enfolding theory and practice, I was able not only to envision and implement a project with students, but also to reorient my role from art teacher to ‘teacher-curator’ and address the non-traditional pedagogic thinking required to facilitate these kinds of projects at the high school level.

In this writing, I conceptualize the curricular explorations, experiments and improvisations in a collaborative high school art and architecture history course as a curatorial riffing that activated a curricular architecture from which new and differential histories emerged. Homologous with curatorial experimentation, the curriculum consisted of historical and contemporary works of art and architecture positioned alongside disparate, seemly unrelated tasks, events, and students’ memories and cultural histories to evoke from their interstices a plurality of discursive encounters, alliances and emissions. The curatorial contingencies of that curriculum will be conceptualized in contiguity with the following theoretical constructs: the movement-image and time-image of Gilles Deleuze as they activate thinking standardized figurations of curricular scope and sequence differently; thinking historical discourse as a curatorial plurality according to Michel Foucault’s notions of heterotopia and genealogy differently from hegemonic curricular constructs; and, the implications of Paul O’Neill’s concept of the curator as artist in thinking curricular creation in terms of curatorial performance.

This article discusses the need for formal training in critique, exhibition and curatorial practice for becoming K-12 art teachers and students. Formal curatorial training can better prepare art teachers to educate their students in aesthetics, criticism and art as a form of public discourse. Through an examination of personal experience as artist/educator/curator the author makes a case for teaching curatorial skills to K-12 learners and pre and in-service art educators; suggesting some possibilities for how formal training might take place.

This article presents a descriptive and analytical account of a semester-long partnership between museum educators and high school students piloting the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards Visual Arts Model Cornerstone Assessment. To mentor the students through their task of curating a themed art exhibition of their own work at school, museum educators modelled curatorial strategies, best practices, and lines of questioning that the students later adapted and applied to their own exhibition planning process. The resulting collaboration reveals the deeply authentic, if under-recognized, relationship between curatorial practice and art education practice and offers a compelling case for breaking down traditional barriers between curators and museum educators in order to create a generative space in which to cultivate student curators across multiple disciplines.

Questions come to mind when investigating the interconnecting roles of curator and art educator. In two recent service-learning experiences university students stepped into the position of curator/art educator as they accessed, encountered, made and presented art for the engagement of children or older adults within the context of the dispersed museum. In one case the university students used imagery from a current exhibit to engage with older adults diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia. In a second study university students introduced classes of elementary students to a travelling exhibit on display at their university’s art museum. In both cases curating and art education played integral roles. This article investigates the interconnections between curatorship and art education and explores the dual role that university students assumed in their service learning experiences as part of a special problems art education class.