What is Curating Now?

Chicago Tribune: Christopher Borelli, October 4, 2013

When curators looked inward and began questioning the nature of their jobs, changes followed

For two decades — almost from the first day she started as a curator, assembling shows for Baltimore's Contemporary Museum — Lisa Graziose Corrin has been questioning what it means to curate...

Considering how much Corrin has thought about curating (before coming to the Block she was a curator at the Seattle Art Museum, chief curator at the Serpentine Gallery in London and director of the Williams College Museum of Art in Massachusetts — Williams itself being a breeding ground for curators), we asked her to answer a few basic questions. Here is an edited transcript.

Q: What is curation?

A: Depends who you ask. Because it has changed so much. I began curating in my 20s and have been curating now for 25 years, and I've watched it move away from being just about an individual who served as a connoisseur, a kind of guardian of a quality. Not to say a curator doesn't still make extremely thoughtful choices, decide which works are of the highest quality and which are most relevant. But today you are as likely to find trained artists as curators as you are to find trained art historians. Actually, once artists got into curating then people began thinking about how any time you make carefully honed choices you're curating.

More at the Chicago Tribune here.