Curator as Alchemist: Artist-Curators

My love of creating artwork aligns with my passion for curating. Both begin with the same questions: What images do we conjure? Which ones deserve to stay with us, and what stories do they tell once they're placed beside one another?

I don't think of myself as someone who alternates between the two professional or creative identities as both practices are methods of constructing meaning. One is very analytical, the other is innate, yet both are ostensible forms of observation. We can arrange materials on a canvas or we can arrange all variations of 'art' in a room which we call the 'gallery.' Curating allows one to dive behind the spotlight on artistry, working on an alchemical synthesis of artistic voice(s) into a presentation of thought.

If making an artwork is the construction of an idea, concept, image, or moment, curating is the reformulation of those very conversations. One practice asks how meaning is embedded within an object; the other asks how meaning emerges between objects. Occupying both positions has made me realize that neither is complete in isolation. The studio teaches patience, while the gallery teaches responsibility toward context. The artist-curator is not simply someone who occupies two professions simultaneously. Rather, they practice a mode of cultural production in which making, researching, exhibiting, and interpreting become reciprocal acts of knowledge-making.

Artists are founding exhibition spaces, turning their living rooms into open-house galleries, organizing independent projects and pop-ups, writing criticism, and constructing archives along their studio work. Likewise, curators are approaching exhibitions less as static presentations than as a collaborative, experimental sites of research. The boundaries separating these disciplines have become increasingly porous.

The artist-curator type is not a brand new feature of the exhibition world, but it is a unique situation. While curators have been viewed as mediators between the art world, the audience, the artists and their artworks, they also can bring fresh perspective to the dialogue.

For example:

MoMA's Artist Choice exhibition series was created to spur the dialogue of artistic and curatorial perspective. Beginning in 1989, the Museum invites living artists to pull pieces from their collection and mount an exhibition. Throughout the years these have taken various forms. In the first iteration of this exhibition series, Burton on Brâncuși (1989) works by Constantin Brâncuși were selected by sculptor Scott Burton and organized alongside curator Kirk Varnedoe. A relevant component of this show was the encounter of the artwork from the perspective of a living artist. Burton, a minimalist sculptor, paid homage to Brâncuși's modernist approach and vocabulary of geometric or quasi-geometric forms. Concurrently, Burton's sculptures were also displayed, creating a didactic between a non-living and living artist, and their intersection at an institutional level.

By inviting artists to curate from the museum's permanent collection, the exhibition acknowledges that artistic practice itself can function as a curatorial lens. Rather than simply selecting works, artists generate new historical relationships, occupying a productive position between creation and interpretation.

Re-contextualizing a collection or body of work becomes vital to the role of the artist-curator. I think back to my first encounter with this concept- specifically Fred Wilson's 1992 installation Mining the Museum. Wilson was invited by The Contemporary, Baltimore, to create the exhibition using the archives and resources of the Maryland Historical Society. Organized by the Contemporary's curator, Lisa Corrin, the project aimed to address the connections between the art of our time and the world we live in, while simultaneously revisiting or rewriting narratives from the past.

Installation detail From Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, 1993, 167.

Wilson, before working on this particular project, was most recognized for his conceptual installations and assemblage pieces as "mock museums." These usually contained re-productions or fabricated artifacts to insinuate its purpose. Therefore, it was a fluid connection to Corrin's vision, wanting to emulate this artistic practice into a full-scale exhibition that pulled directly from a historic collection. Instead of labeling an object's acquisition, Wilson takes a blunt approach:

Objects Made by Enslaved African-Americans: Water Jug by Melinda, Cockey Plantation: Woven basket, Woodlawn Plantation: Nursemaid's rocking chair, Snow Hill Plantation, c. 1825-50.

Rather than hiding a troubling history beneath the veneer of a museum object, Wilson's intervention demonstrates that the artist-curator does more than rearrange items in a gallery. While some museum's might label a piece "from the collection of" or "Gifted by (insert Contributor), these displays are direct and vocal about the troubled histories of items we have the privilege to see today. By altering the relationships between label, artifact, and absences, he exposes the museum as an author of history rather than a repository of fact. After-all, exhibitions are truly an act of selection, juxtaposition, and correlation. Curating, then, can be its own artistic medium-- an alchemy and process of transmutation. Yet, the object always remains intact; Nothing about it alters except our historic proximity, and its position in artistic and theoretical discourse.

What, then, distinguishes the artist-curator from the artist or the curator alone? Perhaps it is not expertise on its own, but an expanded sensitivity to context. The artist understands the power of creating - which is evident in the initial power of Wilson's 'mock museums' - because these ideas emerge through material experimentation and revision. The curator understands artworks and objects existence beyond the era or moment in which it is concieved. These are materials that acquire meaning through sequencing, social/cultural histories, and ongoing theoretical dialogues. When these perspectives begin to converge, the resulting exhibitions become active sites, pushing and pulling from making to production of knowledge; A gallery made laboratory.

If Burton demonstrates the artist's ability to reinterpret a collection and Wilson reveals the exhibition's power to rewrite a collection, then contemporary practitioners increasingly dissolve the distinction altogether. This is an integrated practice in which art history, artistic production, and curatorial inquiry develop simultaneously.

Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, for instance, is a Nigerian Art Historian, Curator, and Interdisciplinary Artist whose research navigates between all professions. As an artist, he has exhibited internationally and is represented in public and private collections including the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC, and Newark Museum, New Jersey. Currently, he serves as MoMA's Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture.

His curatorial practice, however, is not simply an extension of his artistic study but a reciprocal dialogue with it. Rather than integrating a seperation of research and creation, Nzewi treats both as methods of addressing his own social inquiries. His exhibitions foreground African epistemologies, globalization (African ideas of communalism), while resisting the notion that art history is a fixed or singular narrative. The exhibition, like the artwork itself, becomes a space where histories are questioned, identities are negotiated, and new ways of seeing are collectively imagined.

As I continue moving between the studio and the gallery, I've found it increasingly interesting to move between the two practices. Both begin with observation. Both ask us to slow down and reconsider what we think we know. If the artist gives form to an idea, the curator reveals the conversations that idea can have with the world around it. Perhaps this is what we ultimately gain from the artist-curator: not simply exhibitions organized by artists, but new methods of thinking, where making and meaning become inseparable. Like an alchemist, the artist-curator does not change the material; they transform our relationships to it.

Works Cited

• Burton, Scott. Burton on Brancusi: April 7-June 28, 1989. The Museum of Modern Art, 1989.

• Corrin, Lisa. "Mining the Museum: An Installation Confronting History," in Curator: The Museum Journal, 1993.

• Artsy Editorial (October 5, 2014). "Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi On Curating The African Canon". Artsy. Archived from the original on October 9, 2016.

• Wilson, Fred, and Howard Halle. “Mining the Museum.” Grand Street, no. 44 (1993): 151–72.