New Material Culture Course: "Artists As Curators"

Course Title: Artists As Curators

Art 448 section 007
Art 548 section 002
Tuesday & Thursday 1:20-3:50
Professor Laurie Beth Clark
Contact: lbclark@wisc.edu

This is a course for anyone interested in curating as a creative practice.
This is a studio class with curatorial projects as assignments but there
will be substantial reading exploring a range of perspectives within
contemporary curatorial activity. The course will be useful to students of
theory and history who are considering curatorial careers but it will have a
special focus on artists as curators.

More and more artists have multiple identities as critics, curators, and
makers. Artists curate their own work for solo exhibitions and they curate
their friends' work for group shows. Artists may curate shows of their peers
as a way of building a creative community thereby providing logical contexts
for their work.

Artists serve in curatorial roles in biennials and festivals. Artists are
sometimes invited to play with collections (e.g. Fred Wilson and Sophie
Calle). And artists use curation as an artmaking strategy, building works
from collections of objects. Increasingly, there are practices of virtual
curation, where art works are assembled conceptually as lectures or
electronic galleries.

Successful curation involves insight, persistence, and judgment. For a show
to realize its curatorial intentions, judicious selection, meticulous
research, public and private persuasion, and dynamic installation strategies
all come into play. The class will consider these pragmatic aspects of
curating alongside an array of theoretical issues.