In 2019, I had the opportunity to step into the role of curator for Wilson’s Cooley Gallery. At the time, my experience with curation had been limited to working with live arts productions and festivals. I had not curated a visual exhibition at that point, but the practice fascinated me for its implications in both my practice-led and academic research and social activism, and the practice also provided an opportunity to serve Wilson College in a new way.
For the most part, people usually view curationism (the act of curating) as a purely academic pursuit. And, that is understandable. The kind of investigative work that curators often have to do, coupled with the kinds of writing that we do (in terms of writing catalogs or exhibition copy, etc.) is very academic in nature. The part of the work that the lay person often doesn’t see is the ways in which the curator utilizes their academic research to inform their artistic decisions. Those decisions range from thematic development for an exhibition; the selection of the artist or artists that will be featured; the selection of the works that will be exhibited; how the exhibition space will be utilized (including the pathways that viewers will walk through as they experience the exhibition), and the spatial relationships between objects in the room and where people might stand to examine any given single item in the collection or how they might view the entire collection, among other creative choices.
Those choices, together with the content, help determine the success or failure of an exhibition. In fact, I view my curatorial role as that of a storyteller. In particular, in the college setting, my responsibility as a storyteller is to facilitate dialogue. Often, though certainly not always, that responsibility may focus on helping the campus have difficult conversations. A prime example of that is the exhibition I curated for Tia Blassingame that opened just before the pandemic forced to close campus. Blassingame’s work as a printmaker, poet, and book artist for the exhibition focused on her experiences as a Black woman in America. The content addressed three categories: communal history, personal/private experiences, and contemporary stories of violence against Black people in America. I divided the gallery space into three distinct sections so that as one stood to explore the most personal of the objects in the exhibition, the attendee would find themselves looking across communal history, and being confronted with a reminder of the contemporary violence.
Recent Curated or Co-Curated Exhibitions
Curating Dramaturgies
During the Wilson MFA’s Summer ’24 Intensive, I taught a course on site-sensitive artmaking where the students examined the intersection between curation and dramaturgy. As part of that course, the students and I co-curated a gallery exhibition of new work that my colleague, Philip Lindsey, created during his sabbatical in Spring 2024. In that process, we created a gallery catalog that is out-of-the-box when compared to most approaches to catalogs. I assigned each student to write about an individual work in the collection, and I gave them fairly wide latitude in terms of how they wrote. The results run the gamut from creative nonfiction to poetry, but they all provide the viewer / reader with a unique lens through which to view Philip’s work as individual pieces and as a cohesive collection.
The opening event for the exhibition included an interview with Philip led by three of the graduating students in the MFA. Two other students also created a performance in the gallery, drawing on the major themes in Philip’s work.
[Clicking on the file below should open the catalog in the browser window. To download, click the button.]
Our First Catalog
The gallery catalog below is the first that we created for the Cooley Gallery. I developed this with my collaborators Kendra Tidd and Adam DelMarcelle for two back-to-back exhibitions in the Cooley Gallery in Spring 2022. The flipped design allowed us to cover both exhibitions in distinct ways. I also used the catalog and the associated events we created around the exhibitions to begin educating our campus community about what curation is (and isn’t), and the responsibilities of being a curator. [Clicking on the file below should open the catalog in the browser window. To download, click the button.]
Recent Curated or Co-Curated Exhibitions
