One of the projects showing two walls of layout and the exhibition title.
A few Wednesdays ago, fellow curator Shannon Pueschner and I had the pleasure to host a Leadership-level members event we dubbed The Curator’s Tool Belt. One of my favorite parts of the job is our visitors’ inherent curiosity about what it is a curator does. Our Wednesday conversation afforded Shannon and I the opportunity to offer members a ‘peek behind the curtain.’
Projects waiting for curatorial inspiration to strike.
While we each explored a few features particular to our positions, we touched on some overarching themes that are relevant to us both—things like narrative, design, and layout. (You can read more about this in an earlier blog I wrote here….). Fresh off our mini-training in how to think like a curator, we put our members to work.
Pulling from the checklist for the upcoming collection exhibition “Myth and Folly,” participants received six cut-to-scale artworks. They were tasked with choosing one of three possible wall colors and deciding which artworks to include on their gallery walls and in what order. In addition to the art, members received the exhibition title in vinyl, and were asked to (tortured by?) our request to weed and include it in their displays. The creative mixtures between artworks and vinyl and the intuitive connections that members pulled out between different paintings, prints, and photographs were insightful and a pleasure to see arrayed in miniature form.
One of the South Galleries to scale.
And who knows? Maybe some of those ‘mini’ inspirations will sneak into the exhibition so I can point other curious visitors to a new crop of curatorial minds.
Another layout ready for the miniature gallery.
