Week 3 Artist-led culture/Artist-Curator

Lecture Reflection

According to Dan, Deborah & Mulholland (2018), ARIs have small steering committees that operate on a volunteer basis and are revitalised every few years. Regular personnel changes mean that new influences are constantly being replaced. This gives artists more freedom and encourages artistic experimentation. Moreover, it allows a move away from the traditional top-down approach to exhibition-making to a more collaborative and solidaristic approach. Alberta Whittle’s idea of ‘wayward curating’ uses heterodox, subversive and collaborative curatorial strategies, led by marginalised groups, to challenge mainstream curatorial practices and give space to overlooked voices and perspectives (Whittle, 2019). Such curation can be supported by ARIs’ free and equitable organisational culture and spaces that can support resistance to mainstream arts practice. It is possible to interconnect different communities of practice through common local and international networks. Open resources expand the commons through the gift bonding of interconnecting different communities of practice through local and transnational communities (Whittle, 2019). Being large and small, numerous enough and geographically diverse, ARIs can easily generate open and vast resources, unlike traditional arts organisations that are only accessible to a limited number of people.

My Curatorial Project

Street art, the topic of my project, has not yet been recognised by the public as art. Street art exploded after 1990 and has since become ‘a ubiquitous part of the urban landscape’, with people believing that street art belongs and should stay on the streets. (Frederick, 2016) Moreover, the different qualities of street art from the mainstream art world make it suitable for experimental, artist-based ARIs.

Open Close Dundee is a street art, wide city-wide project is underway. The scheme will interconnect communities across the city through a series of high-impact artworks across the city, linking them to cultural attractions and working with local artists and community groups to inform the location, content and design of the murals and foster pride and ownership in the work. (Open Close Dundee, n.d.) This serves the purpose of ARIs’, through its programme of exhibitions, promoting the work of its members and raising awareness of a particular medium.

References:

Alberta Whittle (2019) “Biting the Hand That Feeds You: A Strategy of Wayward Curating”, Critical Arts, 33:6, 110-123, DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2019.1688848, 116-122

Dan Brown, Deborah Jackson & Neil Mulholland (2018) “Artists Running: Fifty Years of Scottish Cultural Devolution,” Visual Culture in Britain, 19:2, 139-167

Frederick, E. (2016). From the Museum to the Street: a discussion of the tensions that arise when street art is institutionalized (Doctoral dissertation, Dissertação de Mestrado. https://www. academia. edu/30929594/From_the_Museum_to_the_Street_A_Discussion _of_the_Tensions_that_Arise_When_Street_Art_is_Institutionalized_Evelyn_Frederick _Art_History_and_Museum_Curating_with_Photography [consultado em 10-02-2018]).

Open Close Dundee. (n.d.). BRINGING STREET ART TO DUNDEE, OPEN CLOSE IS INJECTING LIFE TO THE ALLEYWAYS AND FORGOTTEN CORNERS OF THE CITY, WORKING WITH LOCAL ARTISTS. Open Close Dundee. Accessed on March 17th 2024. Retrieved from https://openclosedundee.co.uk/about