Chicago Reader: How do art exhibitions get made? For major institutions like the Art Institute of Chicago, entire teams of people can spend months or years putting a show together. From the ideation phase to the time an exhibition opens, the work must be transported and installed, programming has to be planned, materials have to be written, a marketing strategy has to be laid out, among the many tasks that typically go on behind the scenes. For exhibitions that happen at smaller venues, all this work still needs to happen, often with little to no resources behind them.
2 comments:
For a long time, my dream career was to be an museum curator (and, frankly, even now it's not off the table). I love art, but the only thing I love more than art is learning about and discussing art, and encouraging other people to do the same. I'm a big research hound who loves all things obscure and strange, so the work of curating artworks to encourage conversation and contemplation is absolutely up my alley. I loved reading about these curators from Chicago and their often winding paths towards figuring out how they can take their passion for art and combine it with their other skills. I was especially intrigued by Zola Rollins and their guerilla, unconventional artistic spaces like warming shelters and chiropractor offices -- because who said that art has to be on plain white walls in the empty spaces on the first floors of office buildings?
It’s really interesting for me to get to know more about what it’s like being a curator. I’ve always loved art exhibitions and museums, but in all honesty, I never really had much of an idea what was going on behind the scenes to make it possible. I really enjoyed hearing from all of these curators and getting to know a little about their own personal backgrounds and tastes. I’m particularly drawn to Cristobal Alday’s story about being a curator since childhood, and also how he used the pandemic to have exhibitions in his bedroom. I feel like that’s such a clever way to find your footing and continue to engage with an audience during a time when that should have been impossible. To me, it seems like being a curator is almost just a different form of being an artist. I imagine all of these people who were interviewed bring a very unique touch to their exhibitions.
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