Week 4 | Curatorial Workshop with James Clegg
10 February 2022
This workshop was led by Curator James Clegg.
In this workshop, James shares with us how to curate an exhibition by explaining his examples. As James himself says, he takes us from the initial idea, from no idea what the project is about, all through to the completion of the exhibition, and talks about some of the challenges a curator might encounter along the way.
At the beginning of the workshop, James made it clear that there is a difference between having a solo show with one artist and a group show with a group of artists. And James’ project is a group show.
The first point, unsurprisingly, is that as a curator you have to deal with different people, James uses a German project as an example, even if it was a project to create an intelligent forest (about artificial intelligence and ecosystems), it had to get real funding to do it. You have to have a lot of emotional intelligence to deal with a lot of different people and convince them that you are good at what you do.
Secondly, as a curator, you have to learn to like respect. There are many artists in the group show and respect for the artwork itself is necessary. James says he avoided coming up with a theme when he put together the group show at Talbot Rice Gallery – he wanted the show to be full of different ideas that the audience could get lost in and find new perspectives on.
James then used the story of Pinocchio as an example of how he went from an inspiration, thought and research to actually using it to build an exhibition.
When discussing the artists and curating, James said the first thing a curator should do is to like the artists selected, get to know them as well as possible, know what they are good at and get used to their way of working.
Thirdly, there is the issue of cost. An exhibition includes too many parts, all of which require money, so it is very important to budget well during the planning process. Also how to get financial support, or rather, how to get as much money as possible. Figuring out where you are going to put your money and resources and where you are going to save them to keep the exhibition running smoothly is also something curators need to think about. Here again James says that emotional intelligence is quite important to being a curator. (And I don’t think I have that at all!)
Finally, as a group exhibition, teamwork is essential, with members of the team getting to know each other (usually through workshops, or conversations with each other). Also the curator should have some skills in drawing, making images (showing the collaborating artists as much as possible what kind of a visual space they might get, given the context of the pandemic). Finally, you need to know the gallery you are about to work in very, very well.
James’ presentation showed me very visually what a curator does (although I understand that I don’t have the talent) it was very useful to understand the process of such work.
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