Summary：

This open toolkit aims to help learners develop curatorial writing skills through direct engagement with a contemporary artwork. By observing, questioning, and rewriting, participants learn how visual evidence and contextual knowledge shape interpretation. The process emphasizes interpretation as construction, not as finding a correct meaning.

Learning Outcomes:

After the session, learners will be able to:

1. Describe an artwork using concrete visual evidence.
2. Identify how context (cultural, historical, curatorial) changes meaning.
3. Write a concise curatorial text (100–150 words) that combines observation and context.

Step 1: Initial Response (2 mins)

Learners look at a selected contemporary artwork (image, film still, or performance documentation), observe it quietly for 30 seconds, and write a brief passage recording their first impressions or feelings.

We take Santiago Yahuarcani’s artwork as an example:

Santiago Yahuarcani, Sin título (Untitled) 2021, natural pigments and acrylic on llanchama, 60 x 87 cm. © Santiago Yahuarcani. Photo: CRISIS Galler.

To activate intuitive response and learners articulate immediate affective and visual reactions.

For example: Pink dolphins dance with people, it seems like a festival.

Step 2: Seeing Otherwise (3 mins)

Shift from subjective experience to objective observation, identify observable visual elements in the image (e.g., figures, objects, poses, colors, materials) that can be described and repeated. Use noun + verb descriptions.

For example: Dolphin embraces a human figure/ golden particles spray from the mouth.

Step 3: Using Prompt Card: Seeing Through a Lens (3 mins)

Learn to observe with questions, experience different frameworks of interpretation. Choose one of the four types of prompt cards:

1. Relations & Perspective
2. Context & Background
3. Form & Visual Language
4. Display & Experience

Considering the existence of students who have had no previous art education and students who have studied curatorial studies, there may appear differences between them.

Therefore, I have prepared two versions of my prompt cards: one containing only simple prompts, and another featuring some guiding questions.

1. Relations & Perspective

• For curation students: Look at the relationships and the way of viewing within the work.
• For new art students: Who is in control and who is being observed? / What does the positioning or scale in the image reveal? / From whose perspective is this work meant to be viewed?

2. Context & Background

• For curation students: What is the origin of this work? How does its background shape its meaning?
• For new art students: How is this work connected to the cultural, historical, or narrative contexts you know? / Would the meaning of this work change if it were set in a different time or place? / Does it address a particular social issue or belief?

3. Form & Visual Language

• For curation students: How does the work ‘speak’?
• For new art students: Which forms, colors, materials, or sounds stand out the most? / How do repetition, rhythm, or contrast affect your feelings? / Do these forms suggest a metaphor or emotion?

4. Display & Experience

• For curation students: Imagine how the work is displayed or experienced.
• For new art students: How would you display it if you were the curator? / Can space, lighting, and placement affect understanding? / What role do viewers play in the work?

The four categories represent four perspectives of curatorial thinking that the question is more important than the answer.

Step 4: Text Reading: Contextual Insight (4 mins)

Learners read a short curatorial text and highlight the key terms.

For example, for this artwork Santiago Yahuarcani, Sin título (Untitled) 2021, I will paste the readings below.

“…the work Untitled (2021) which shows a series of pink river dolphins embracing mermaid-like creatures. The dolphins have symbolic value in Uitoto culture but become predators in Yahuarcani’s painting, reflecting the “deceit and danger of outsiders with exploitative behaviour”, says a wall text, which explains that colonial violence at the time of the rubber boom re-shaped elements of Indigenous cosmology.”[1]

“The waves play gently on the water, and in the moonlight dolphins dance with creatures that are part-human, part-fish. Two of the dolphins provide the music; one shakes the maracas, the other strums a guitar. It’s a scene that’s dreamlike, fun – and hopeful. It suggests a gentle and fluid world we can all enjoy together: nature and humanity in harmony, making music and enhancing one another’s existence.”[2]

Step 5: Compare and Reframe (3 mins)

After reading a curatorial text about the artwork, learners revisit their own earlier question and compare it with the curator’s interpretation. They identify one difference or surprise, and write a short reflective note or a new question.

This stage helps learners see that interpretation is not about right or wrong, but about perspective and framing, preparing them for the final writing task.

“Curators display objects… along with associated images and texts, and thereby produce interpretations for visitors; meanwhile visitors deploy their own interpretive strategies to make sense of the objects, the displays and the experience of the museum as a whole.”[3]

Step 6: Text Writing: Integrate and Rewrite (5 mins)

Learners reflect on how their own questions relate to the curator’s framing. They choose whether to agree, diverge, or combine perspectives, and write a 100–150 word curatorial text from their own point of view.

The goal is not to reproduce an existing interpretation, but to articulate a position informed by both personal observation and contextual dialogue.

[1] Gareth Harris, “From a Football Feast to Deceitful Dolphins: Three Art Exhibitions Not to Miss at the Manchester International Festival,” The Art Newspaper, July 4, 2025, accessed November 18, 2025, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/07/04/from-a-football-feast-todeceitful-dolphins-three-art-exhibitions-not-to-miss-at-the-manchester-international-festival.

[2] Anna Moore , “Dancing with Dolphins: The Amazonian Images of Santiago Yahuarcani – the Tablet,” The Tablet, August 28, 2025, accessed November 18, 2025, https://www.thetablet.co.uk/arts/dancing-with-dolphins-the-amazonian-images-of-santiago-yahuarcani/.

[3] Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000): 124.