Aspiring CU curators get hands-on experience

When Columbia students talk about their future careers, some occupations are more popular than others. They often want to be doctors, lawyers, or policy makers when they grow up. Becoming a museum curator is a less frequent aspiration. However, just as CAVA, the Columbia Area Volunteer Ambulance, serves as an extracurricular training ground for the legions of pre-meds at Columbia, there are opportunities on campus that allow prospective curators, both undergraduate and graduate students, to discover whether or not museum work is right for them.

For undergraduates looking for an on-campus opportunity to curate, there is the Postcrypt Art Gallery—a campus group that uses the basement of St. Paul’s Chapel as a venue for student-curated exhibitions of student artwork. The experience of curating at Postcrypt is very “hands-on work,” said Matt Hamilton, SEAS ’11, who has been involved with Postcrypt both by submitting art and by helping to organize shows.

Curators not only deal with the concepts and content of exhibitions but also help to physically assemble the shows and to generate buzz among the student body about upcoming projects. The success of a show “hinges largely on publicity,” Hamilton said.

He was quick to highlight that an innovative concept is important and that “you need a theme that speaks to people so you can bring in visitors and artists who can relate to it.” No matter how good a theme is, however, Hamilton insisted that “advertising means a lot” both for attracting submissions and for generating attendance.

Graduate student curators mounting exhibitions at the Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, located on the 8th floor of Schermerhorn Hall, are also involved in publicity for their shows, but promoting an exhibition is not their foremost responsibility. According to the mission statement on the gallery’s Web site, the space serves as a “resource in which teaching and research can be explored within the context of exhibitions” as well as offering “a forum for inquiry into issues and methods informing curatorial practice.”

Sally Weiner, director of the Wallach Gallery, highlighted that Ph.D. students working on their dissertations often curate exhibitions. One recent exhibition—“Revolutions: A Century of Makonde Masquerade in Mozambique”—was the presentation of a doctoral candidate’s completed dissertation. A show therefore represents the culmination of years of study. Successful scholarly contributions and visual arguments are the primary focus of shows at Wallach.

However, it also allows those students “interested in museum or gallery careers” to “gain valuable experience.” The Wallach gallery allows curators—often first-time curators who are graduate students or faculty—to try their hand at mounting exhibitions. Furthermore, each show is accompanied by a published exhibition catalog that details the scholarly ramifications of the project.

Leah Dickerman earned her doctorate in art history from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) in 1997 and is now a curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. During her time at Columbia, she curated a show at the Wallach Gallery. The 1996 exhibition, “Building the Collective: Soviet Graphic Design from 1917-37, Selections from the Merill C. Berman Collection,” explored how “posters were critical to the enterprise of the new Soviet state,” Dickerman said.

Weiner noted that it was evident when working with Dickerman that she would go on to become a professional curator. “Leah was really involved with every aspect of what was going on [with the exhibition]. She was the one who was really driving the project,” she said. According to Dickerman, “The resources were there, but you had to figure them out. They were there if you scratched.”

Postcrypt and Wallach are only two of a number of on-campus opportunities for student curators. In Dodge Hall (home of the School of the Arts), the basement of Avery, or the Barnard Mail Center, student-mounted exhibitions are on display daily.

However, in the end, what makes Columbia a great place for future curators is its location. Dickerman credits studying in New York City as the driving force that set her on a “track that builds into museum work.” As a student, she worked as a curatorial assistant and then a research assistant in the photography department at MoMA in addition to working at the art gallery Pace/MacGill.

“Just being in New York let me find those opportunities,” she said. During her time at Columbia and working at these institutions, she “caught a bug” and learned that “working with objects is a wonderful thing.”