Ideas to Exhibitions: Visual language for all communities
When presented with the question, “How does a curator work”, my response is one that is filtered through a multifarious lens. As an artist, educator, curator and art advocate, I often think about the manner in which I can make the exhibition a moment to leverage a dialogue that includes entry points of content that transgresses and transcends the typical rhetoric of art. As a curator, I also try to offer the artist a platform to exhibit from their mind, passion, and purpose to the consciousness of the audience. In my experience, the curator employs a process of selectingobjects, articles, narratives, artifacts, public programming, thematic relevance, and strategic arrangements of art that creates visually an intellectually, academic, and socially contextual balance of content for optimum accessibility. The curator, for museums or galleries is a conduit between the artist(s) and the public, with the goal to present an artist’s work or research into a different design of art that informs, educates, and inspires the community at large while maintaining the presence of the artist(s) at the forefront of the exhibition. “What I learned from ‘Warren Pope: Blood Lines, Time Lines, Red Lines’ an exhibition I curated at the Northwest African American Museum was the important space that the curator creates within museums that can usher in dialogue with the arrangement and context of art about issues in our history, society, and world. In the scope of “Unsettling the Apparatus”, in this time of digital consciousness, denouncing injustice and grappling with historic or contemporary social ills that are ignited by the media regarding banal or exceptional actions of humanity; the role of “Curator” presents a bridge of consciousness between the expansive thinking of artists to the arc of thinking from those within the community. Thecurator’s attention to detail, craft skill and creative intellectual intuitiveness for presenting art and culture, can very well be the lamp unto paths that allow communities to walk together through fields of indifference, discourse, and delight.