Thinking About Exhibitions

An anthology of writings on exhibition practice from artists, critics, curators and art historians plus artist-curators. It addresses the contradictions posed by museum and gallery sited exhibitions, as well as investigating the challenge of staging art presentations, displays or performances, in settings outside of traditional museum or gallery locales.

"Presents a multidisciplinary anthology of writings on current exhibition practice by curators, critics, artists, sociologists and historians form North America, Europe and Australia. It marks out the emergence of new discourses surrounding the exhibition and illustrates the urgency of the debates centred in and fostered by exhibitions today. Texts have been grouped ... in sections which focus on the history of the exhibition, forms of staging and spectacle, and questions of curatorship, spectatorship and narrative. These writings ... investigate exhibitions in settings outside of the traditional gallery as well as innovative work in extending cultural debates within the museum ... fully ilustrated with over ninety black-and-white photographs and includes a bibliography on the subject of art exhibitions"--Page i.

An anthology of writings on exhibition practice from artists, critics, curators and art historians which address the contradictions posed by museum and gallery staged exhibitions, and the challenge of staging art presentations and displays.

What if museum critics were challenged to envision their own exhibitions? In Curatorial Dreams, fourteen authors from disciplines throughout the social sciences and humanities propose exhibitions inspired by their research and critical concerns to creatively put theory into practice. Pushing the boundaries of museology, this collection gives rare insight into the process of conceptualizing exhibitions. The contributors offer concrete, innovative projects, each designed for a specific setting in which to translate critical academic theory about society, culture, and history into accessible imagined exhibitions. Spanning Australia, Barbados, Canada, Chile, the Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States, the exhibitions are staged in museums, scientific institutions, art galleries, and everyday sites. Essays explore political and practical constraints, imaginative freedom, and experiment with critical, participatory, and socially relevant exhibition design. While the deconstructive critique of museums remains relevant, Curatorial Dreams charts new ground, proposing unique modes of engagement that enrich public scholarship and dialogue.

How curating has changed art and how art has changed curating: an examination of the emergence contemporary curatorship. Once considered a mere caretaker for collections, the curator is now widely viewed as a globally connected auteur. Over the last twenty-five years, as international group exhibitions and biennials have become the dominant mode of presenting contemporary art to the public, curatorship has begun to be perceived as a constellation of creative activities not unlike artistic praxis. The curator has gone from being a behind-the-scenes organizer and selector to a visible, centrally important cultural producer. In The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), Paul O'Neill examines the emergence of independent curatorship and the discourse that helped to establish it. O'Neill describes how, by the 1980s, curated group exhibitions—large-scale, temporary projects with artworks cast as illustrative fragments—came to be understood as the creative work of curator-auteurs. The proliferation of new biennials and other large international exhibitions in the 1990s created a cohort of high-profile, globally mobile curators, moving from Venice to Paris to Kassel. In the 1990s, curatorial and artistic practice converged, blurring the distinction between artist and curator. O'Neill argues that this change in the understanding of curatorship was shaped by a curator-centered discourse that effectively advocated—and authorized—the new independent curatorial practice. Drawing on the extensive curatorial literature and his own interviews with leading curators, critics, art historians, and artists, O'Neill traces the development of the curator-as-artist model and the ways it has been contested. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) documents the many ways in which our perception of art has been transformed by curating and the discourses surrounding it.

"'Thinking contemporary curating' is the first publication to comprehensively explore what is distinctive about contemporary curatorial thought. In five essays, art historian, critic, and theorist Terry Smith surveys the international landscape of current discourse; explores a number of exhibitions that show contemporaneity in present, recent, and post art; describes the enormous growth world-wide of exhibitionary infrastructure and the instability that haunts it; re-examines the phenomenon of artist-curators and curator-artists; and assesses a number of key tendencies in curating - such as the reimagined museum, the expanded exhibition, historicization and recuration, infrastructural activism, and engaged spectatorship - as responses to contemporary conditions." -- book cover.

Systems Thinking in Museums explores systems thinking and the practical implication of it using real-life museum examples to illuminate various entry points and stages of implementation and their challenges and opportunities. Its premise is that museums can be better off when they operate as open, dynamic, and learning systems as a whole as opposed to closed, stagnant, and status quo systems that are compartmentalized and hierarchical. This book also suggests ways to incorporate systems thinking based on reflective questions and steps with hopes to encourage museum professionals to employ systems thinking in their own museum. Few books explore theory in practice in meaningful and applicable ways; this book offers to unravel complex theories as applied in everyday practice through examples from national and international museums.

Curating Lively Objects explores the role of things as catalysts in imagining futures beyond disciplines for museums and exhibitions. Authors describe how their curatorial collaborations with diverse objects, from rocks to robots, generate new ways of organising and sharing knowledge. Bringing together leading artists and curators from Australia and Canada, this volume addresses object liveliness from a range of entwined perspectives, including new materialism, decolonial thinking, Indigenous epistemologies, environmentalism, feminist critique and digital aesthetics. Foregrounding practice-based curatorial scholarship, the book focuses on rigorous reflexive accounts of how curating is done. It contributes to global topics in curatorial research, including time and memory beyond and before disciplinarity; the relationship between human and non-human across different ontologies; and the interaction between Indigenous knowledge and disciplinary expertise in interpreting museum collections. Curating Lively Objects will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of curatorial studies, museum studies, cultural heritage, art history, Indigenous studies, material culture and anthropology. It also provides a vital resource for professionals working in museums and galleries around the world who are seeking to respond creatively, ethically and inclusively to the challenge of changing disciplinary boundaries.