Curatorial Methods in an Art Museum

Catalog description

Understanding through direct experience how the rhetoric of the art museum and art exhibition alters, frames and revises art historical arguments, issues, questions and research. In order to do so, each iteration of the seminar will select a particular art historical concept (e.g. ephemeral art; interactive art; gendered art; labor and(in) art; illness and art, and so on) and critically assess how curators can best express an argument about the history and meaning of art within the terms set by the museum. Those terms include both the ideological and practical: education, conservation, collections management, marketing development, publications, visitor evaluation and administration. Students will gain a sophisticated understanding of the methods available to curators for researching, organizing and expressing an art historical question in the form of an exhibition. The Sheldon Museum of Art serves as a lab for this course. Students will follow the path of an exhibition from original proposal to installation, considering the curator's involvement and interactions with all the departments of the museum.