Category Archives : Curating People Symposium – April 2011

Curating People: Post-Show Paraphrase

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My own notes are my personal interpretations of points raised by our speakers, but here is an attempt to share a few paraphrases of some of the things that made me do some extra scribbling. Others should feel free to add phrases and paraphrases that they remember—or correct mine.
Angela Mattox: how can different organizations make use of each others’ resources to support an artist?…there is an art to the practical…
Erin Doughton: representing the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art not of contemporary art…When we talk about ‘community,’ I mean “us” as part of that community. Community isn’t a codeword for something else… our Time-Based Arts festival abbreviates to TBA…our theatre tech crew all came from working on ships.

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Curating People: Post-Show Reflection

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It is hard to believe that it has been a week since the Curating People conference. Like most participants, I left our day of reflection to return to the mayhem of this week’s obligations, and it has been hard to come up for air.
Since I am writing during a moment that can only be described as “stolen,” I will not try to summarize the pages and pages of notes that I took during all of the thoughtful and energetic sessions. Instead, I will very quickly put out some clustered thinking around ideas and hopes that I heard expressed in the room. I would welcome any feedback, responses, revisions, or expansions on any of the below. So in no particular order, not in complete sentences, no footnotes (hard for an academic), let me offer the following:
1) How to un-silo communities of arts and culture: Milk Bar-like occasions for artists to casually and convivially curate work for each other. Artpractical and ARC “Picks” that run the gamut of arts programming.

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Curating People: Lisa Wymore

This entry was posted in Blog Curating People Symposium - April 2011 and tagged performance curating people experimental artist confessions on by .

Confessions of an experimental artist who has also become an academic and a dance/performance educator and mentor
Like many who are part of this symposium, I wear multiple hats in one day. I am both an administrator of a dance program within a university and an artist who manages, runs, and creates for my own dance company. My choice to make artistic work within an academic institution has provided me with distinct types of support and opportunity. I can make work with students and improve upon my own artistic process. I can educate about dance and deepen my understanding of dance practice and pedagogy.

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Curating People: Erin Boberg Doughton

This entry was posted in Blog Curating People Symposium - April 2011 and tagged curating people theater presenting learning community on by .

I came to PICA through a performance background in theatre, dance and music. Starting on the ground floor of a new organization I was part of a small team working with artists in both visual art and performance. With each project I learned a new set of skills, generally related to connecting artists with the human and/or physical resources they needed to make their work happen, teaming them with designers, technicians and thinkers in our community as well as spaces, materials, and tools.

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Curating People: Kristan Kennedy

This entry was posted in Blog Curating People Symposium - April 2011 and tagged community engage past curating people confessions PICA on by .

I do not come to this symposium with a pedigree. Somehow through hard work and the investigation of ideas, I have gotten to where I am today. I am an artist who also calls herself a curator. I sit within an institution working on behalf of artists. I also attempt to teach, to write, to arrange objects and humans – in rooms and in theaters and in storefronts and on the street. In my role at PICA I have often said yes. I have rarely had to say no. This feels like a privilege. I want to pass that along to the artists I work with. I want them to feel free to make what they want how they want where they want.

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Curating People: Michele Rabkin

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Why I want to be in on this conversation…I am excited to be involved in organizing the “Curating People” symposium because it allows me to re-visit issues that I explored when I was a practicing artist—or to be more accurate, a student artist.
I first encountered the siren song of performance art in the mid-1980s at San Francisco State, and more specifically at its Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Art, where Ellen Zweig, Christine Tamblyn, and Lynn Hershman were teaching.

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Curating People: Leigh Markopoulos

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I joined the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition department in 1991, becoming one of a staff of around 70 in the visual arts arm of London’s multi-disciplinary South Bank Center (SBC). At the time there was a very clear-cut distinction between our remit and that of the SBC’s other cultural, mainly music, programs. This distinction was based not solely on different media, but on the assumption that art audiences would never equal concert goers in their numbers, or paying power, and that the Hayward Gallery’s role consequently might not be as vital or valuable.

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Curating People: Constance Lewallen

This entry was posted in Blog Curating People Symposium - April 2011 and tagged performance curating people commercialism on by .

Performance emerged as a new genre in contemporary art at the end of the 1960s. Alongside other new forms, such as video and installation, which developed contemporaneously as aspects or off shoots of Conceptual art and concurrent with the radical politics of the time, it was conceived as oppositional to the increasing commercialism of art and a way to break down boundaries between artist and audience, art and life, and to de-emphasize the art object in favor of the process of creation.

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Curating People: Susan Miller

This entry was posted in Blog Curating People Symposium - April 2011 and tagged curating people experimental work support arrange on by .

Top Ten Things Every Curator Should Know about Supporting Experimental Work
1) Being a good curator is more than having good taste or knowing how to arrange things.
2) If supporting experimental work ONLY requires facilitating the production of it, the title of curator is probably overstated. Facilitator, coordinator, producer is probably more like it. (See next.)

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Curating People: David Henry

This entry was posted in Aesthetics Blog Curating People Symposium - April 2011 and tagged past curating people confessions hybrid museums on by .

Over the past 30 years I have worked in five different art museums including one photography museum, two encyclopedic museums, and two modern/contemporary museums. I came to the field through the back door—a government grant to better engage visitors gave me and three fellow MFA students our first museum jobs – – leading tours and creating public programs.When the grant ended I went behind the scenes in a different museum as a preparator and curatorial assistant.

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