Professor Margaret Woodcock
Current Trends in Gallery/Museum Exhibition Selection, Display and Enhancement of Public Participation
Type B Sabbatical Leave-Spring 2014
Report Submitted: October 20, 2014
Abstract
During Spring 2014 semester, I conducted my Type B, 50% sabbatical. The purpose of my sabbatical was to conduct research and analysis of current trends in gallery and museum management and display. In doing so, I hoped to inform our department strategies for running the new gallery and offering a gallery management program for our students.
My project for the sabbatical had two components. First, I wanted to investigate printed or published materials that focused on 1) gallery/arts management issues, 2) curatorial philosophies and 3) methods for exhibition design or display. When I wrote the curriculum for our first Gallery Management course, I realized that although I had experience exhibiting as a visual artist, I had not given much thought to the philosophies or approaches that have been used or evolved around the activity of art curation and exhibition. I knew that Museum Studies and Arts Management/Administration are relatively new graduate degrees, but did not know what that might entail. I was able to develop an extensive bibliography for curatorial issues, some resources for exhibition design as it applies to the arts and a few texts for arts management concerns and approaches. I will share the bibliography with art faculty.
For the second focus of my sabbatical, I wanted to interview people responsible for directing and/or curating a gallery space, folks who install art and those who publicize or market the art for an exhibition. I also wanted to develop a sense of how public, not for profit and commercial art exhibition may differ in their approach. In doing so, I wanted to compare what I was researching with what was happening on the ground. Essentially, I wanted to find out how do galleries and museums make decisions and how do they function from day to day? And especially, how do they engage the public in the activity of viewing and engaging with art? I was able to make a number of meaningful connections with arts administrators, gallery directors and community college colleagues. I also found that as the sabbatical evolved, I focused more on community college venues. The CRC Art Gallery was almost completed and our department needed to know how other community college programs manage and use their spaces for their programs.
In my report, I will address these two components separately. I will summarize concepts that I found useful for the CRC Art Gallery management and I will discuss concerns or issues that I think need to be addressed to make our gallery a success on the CRC campus.
Sabbatical Leave Report
Research:
For my research I emphasized three areas related to gallery/museum work: Arts Management, Curatorship and Exhibition Design
Arts Management
According to Ellen Rosewall in ARTS MANAGEMENT: Uniting Art and Audiences in the 21st Century, some operating characteristics of an arts organization are that 1) their art function must work with an existing administrative function, 2) they utilize unskilled workers as volunteers, 3) they tend to have an informal operating structure and 4) they have both administrative and artistic duties. This made me think about how the CRC gallery will operate. What do we need to do to function or manage more effectively because we will share many of these characteristics?
The fact that most US states and cities have a variety of arts organizations today, has encouraged many colleges and universities to offer Arts Management or Arts Administration degrees. Professor of Arts Management, Ellen Rosewall, from University of Wisconsin-Green Bay published her book in 2014 as a possible textbook and reference for students and artists interested in arts management. In the arts management area, I did not find many published texts, many were outdated. But Rosewall’s book was a starting point for me to examine issues that we will encounter in managing the CRC Art Gallery and in analyzing how public and non-profit spaces operate in our community.
Some galleries are for profit, but many are public venues or not for profit yet all must have leadership and organizing principles, a budget to work with, and the ability to market or publicize their product. Both Ellen Rosewall in her text and Meg Brindle in The Arts Management Handbook: New Directions for Students and Practitioners (2011) agree that the most successful arts organizations adopt policies and goals that allow them to transition from year to year and through changes in administration, artists, staff or boards.
Arts management is a complicated job that entails coordinating people, engaging the community, developing and sustaining an audience, tracking finances and planning artistic programing. This means that the CRC gallery director must have skills in aesthetic judgement, personnel relations, money management, fundraising and/or grant writing, marketing, and technology as well as leadership skills. For the arts manager to lead, communicate and motivate, the organization needs to define clearly its purpose and its goals to provide a compass. Strongly suggested by both authors is a clear mission and vision statement for the organization.
I sat down and based on conversations with other art faculty, I created a draft mission and vision statement. I also reviewed mission/vision statements from various college art galleries. Here is the result.
DRAFT Example:
Mission Statement:
The mission of the CRC art gallery is to sustain and promote the visual arts through quality exhibitions and educational programing that serve our local community and the greater Sacramento region.
Vision Statement:
Through Cosumnes River College Art Gallery exhibitions and attendant educational programing we strive to:
•Sustain and promote the visual arts.
•Enhance visual literacy and critical thinking while encouraging high standards of visual art.
•Establish Cosumnes River College Art Gallery as an important arts destination for citizens of the Greater Sacramento Area, thereby stimulating active public awareness, support, and participation in the arts.
•Provide a free and accessible exhibition facility to display work which not only reflects but celebrates the rich ethnic, cultural and philosophical diversities inherent at Cosumnes River College and the surrounding communities. (To provide a free, publicly accessible venue for art made by regional and national artists as well as the distinguished faculty, staff, students and alumni of Cosumnes River College.)
•Draw attention to the creative educational resources available at Cosumnes River College.
•Introduce Cosumnes River College art students to art professionalism through juried exhibitions and visiting artist-led workshops.
•Offer Cosumnes River College art students hands-on training in all aspects of gallery management, providing them practical job skills in order to gain employment in the art field and in their own artistic career.
Curatorship
As opposed to arts management, much recent and ongoing scholarship is occurring in the field or curatorship. Curatorship is the activity of making selection and meaningful presentation of artistic work. Terry Smith, in his collection of essays, Thinking Contemporary Curating, discusses curatorial thinking as encompassing a mix of principles, values, ideas, rules, and ethical necessities. Curating an exhibition is an extremely responsible act.
Examination around the definition, philosophical approaches, function and responsibilities in contemporary arts exhibition is abundant. According to Jens Hoffman in his edited collection of essays, Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating, the accepted notion of curating being “displaying artworks in a space in a meaningful way according to a particular concept” is being questioned. His ten fundamental questions include What is a Curator?, What is the Public?, Why Mediate Art?, What About Responsibility?, What to do with the Contemporary, etc. These questions suggest that art exhibition is more than just displaying art and trying to give it meaning by where and how it is displayed. Some authors suggest that that notion is a carryover from the art collector, patron values of the 19th Century in which particular tastes were transmitted. Jessica Morgan in her essay, “What is a Curator?, sites that many new professional curators come from fields outside of the art history, museum and art collections venue. For example, they come from theater, film, economics and poetry fields. This, she says, offers the opportunity to rethink collections and how we understand the past. In her text, Why Mediate Art?, Maria Lind questions the New York Museum of Modern Art’s didactic model of “educated consumer spectatorship” where the audience is considered a consumer who needs to be trained in what is good design and even offered items for purchase so as to possess that taste. The problem with this model was that the museum and director had strong ties to industry and those items being consumed. Museum educational departments still carry over some of this model by offering definitive catalogs, posters, functional items for sale, etc. What Maria Lind suggests is that the new educational model is “the entertained consumer” where, for example, audio tours are available or digital interactive games/activities are set up within the exhibit.
What is most relevant to me in this set of essays is the questioning of the role of the curator. In our gallery, we will be curating; how we do it will direct in some way the viewer’s experience. According to Robert Storr in his essay, “Show and Tell”, published in Paula Marincola’s collection of essays, What Makes a Great Exhibition, “ Curators should do nothing to encourage and everything to interrupt information-gathering, art-obliterating choreography” and he specifically attacks audio guides and too much text on display for the exhibit. To Storr, the curator’s responsibility is to sensitively display the work to encourage interaction and thought, not to spoon feed or distract. “The exhibition makers job is to arrange this encounter between people and what puzzles them in such a fashion that they will derive the maximum benefit and pleasure from it- that is, from the particularities of the work, their own uncertainty, and their innate drive to exploit to the fullest extent their own imaginative and intellectual resources- and make something out of the new experience.” (Marincola, 24)
I see Storr’s insight as a good standard for directing our curatorship. This approach encourages our students and our community to pursue their aesthetic sensibilities and intellect when coming to the CRC gallery. How much do we offer to the visitor to help them understand, but also encourage questioning and personal resolution to the discomfort of not knowing “for sure”? This is what art education is about.
One of the visions for the CRC gallery is to provide “quality” exhibitions, to promote a high standard of what is on display. We envision a variety of medium, styles and approaches to visual art even trying to plan for multi-media art with sound, image and movement components. Most students define art as traditional sculpture, painting and anime. Our gallery curator needs to have a broad knowledge and acceptance of the dimensions of art and its potential for display because it is their job to make art public.
Exhibition Design
Exhibition designer, Philip Hughes says, “The job of the exhibition designer is to orchestrate an environment that connects with the visitor and transforms a collection of exhibits into an “inspiring” experience”. In his text, Exhibition Design, he addresses the myriad of issues involved in designing an exhibit; site evaluation, audience, strategy of flow, storyline, lighting, signage, publicity, etc. It is a practical book that outlines the process from initial idea to fruition of the exhibit with many examples from his and others designs, what has worked and what has been problematic. His overriding principle is that exhibition design is a thoughtful, planned process.
Thinking in much the same vane, Polly McKenna-Cress and Janet A. Kamien in their book, Creating Exhibitions, discuss the collaborative aspects of successful exhibitions. Today, the curator of a museum or gallery rarely works alone. Most institutions have a variety of departments that need to work together, for example, the curatorial department, the education department, the installation department and the marketing or publicity department. Designing the exhibition requires interaction and an interdisciplinary approach. This action of working with others to produce a rich and meaningful experience for the visitor takes time and particular skills. The authors address this by dissecting the various interests/points of view on the proposed exhibit and how to affect a productive interaction and focus as well as evaluation of the end product. They provide many examples of successful collaborations.
The exhibition design is the link to the visitor. It is much more than just hanging a picture on the wall or a sculpture on a pedestal. For the CRC Gallery, a concept for the exhibition design needs to be addressed in all is ramifications. First, a decision needs to be made about what to show and why show it. Who makes that decision and why?Who is the primary intended audience and the secondary audience that is an extension of the primary target? The exhibition space including the square footage, the flow, size and number of pieces to be displayed in the space, lighting and mounting systems all need to be considered for each exhibition. The gallery director is the focal point for this. That individual needs to know design principles, the space and its potential, and work with the art department to keep on track with the mission and vision of the CRC Art Gallery. The expectation is that this person can work collaboratively with all involved with the gallery.
In conclusion, looking at these three aspects of running a gallery space, arts management, curatorship and exhibition design, it is evident that the individual responsible for the CRC Art Gallery needs to be a multi-talented individual. As I began to interview individuals who are directing gallery spaces, it became clear to me that it is a very time-consuming endeavor. Not only does it take time to plan ahead for the exhibition calendar and keep track of the process of getting ready for an exhibit, each individual exhibit presents its own challenges for the use of the space, the actual installation and the audience. It entails mental focus, aesthetic judgement and foresight, initiative, time-management skills, communication skills, and good overall multi-tasking skills; it is a many faceted job. To be a success, a gallery needs a devoted individual who shares a vision for the space. I compiled a job description for a CRC Art Gallery Director by looking at existing position descriptions and reviewing requests by other colleges. I have attached that job description in my Appendix.
Interviews
The second focus for this sabbatical was to interview a number of people who were responsible for directing a gallery, curating exhibits and installing work in a gallery. For larger museums these tasks are assigned to different departments of individuals which is the current trend. In educational settings, for example university and community college galleries, one individual does most or all of the work. This is also true of most non-profit gallery spaces depending on the size of the organization. Commercial gallery spaces are usually owned by an individual who has management and curatorial responsibility but may delegate the installation and publicity duties to employees.
In my original proposal, I thought I wanted to interview equal numbers of commercial, larger museum and smaller college, non-profit or for profit gallery directors and staff. As I got more involved, I realized that it was much more pertinent for the CRC Art Gallery for me to get information that was relevant to our concerns as a gallery in an educational institution. As a result, I focused more on small non-profit spaces and community college art galleries. Most interviews were in person but some were via email or phone. The interviews, on average, took longer than my original plan of an hour, closer to 2 hours. Individuals were eager to share their space and their experience with me. I made 29 on-site visitations, primarily San Francisco Bay area, north San Francisco Bay area and greater Sacramento area. I had 7 phone conversations with gallery directors, 4 email exchanges and 6 online site visits. I did not make a trip to Los Angeles because of time constraints and opening hours during the days I had available, but I did explore online sites to get information if available.
These are the questions that I directly or indirectly asked the gallery directors or responsible individuals.
Interview Questions:
Exhibition Planning
How are decisions made regarding exhibition ideas or calendar?
How much time do you allot for planning an exhibition from initial concept to installation?
How do you contact artists?