Public programs are essential to increasing accessibility and engagement with the arts. These initiatives – from artist talks and workshops to community-led interventions – create opportunities for people to engage with art beyond traditional exhibitions. By encouraging participation, these programs foster dialogue and deeper understanding, transforming the experience of art from a passive encounter to a shared social process.
One of the great strengths of public programs is their ability to break down institutional barriers. Museums and galleries can sometimes feel insular, but well-designed programs can engage a wider audience, including those who don’t typically engage with the arts. Educational events provide valuable learning experiences that help people develop creative and critical thinking skills. More importantly, they build connections between artists and audiences, across communities, and between art and everyday life. As Claire Bishop (2012) points out, successful participatory projects do more than just include people; they reshape the dynamics between creators, subjects, and audiences.
I learned a lot from the lectures and reflected on them during my curatorial project in a farmhouse in Yudong Village. Rather than simply adding a public program, the exhibition itself became a public program—a space that not only welcomed participation but was structurally rooted in it. The stove paintings in the kitchen, live demonstrations of bamboo weaving, and interactive paintings with villagers were not just artworks, but forms of dialogue. The house itself, full of traces of daily labor, became a site of what Kwon (2002) calls “situational specificity”—meanings derived from local context and public use rather than externally imposed.
Importantly, this project helped me rethink the role of curator. Instead of playing the role of selector or mediator, I became a facilitator of co-creation. This shift echoes Bourriaud’s (2002) theory of relational aesthetics, which defines art as a social interstitial—a space where people gather, interact, and temporarily co-create meaning. At Yudong, this interaction is reflected in slow and sustained interactions: stories told by elders, spontaneous workshops hosted by local artists, and the transformation of the house into a living archive of rural creativity.
References
·Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. London: Verso.
·Bourriaud, N. (2002). Relational aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel.
·Kwon, M. (2002). One place after another: Site-specific art and locational identity. Cambridge: MIT Press.
·Simon, N. (2010). The participatory museum. Museum 2.0.
·Curtain, A., & Spring, M. (2019). Curating the rural: Art, ecology and space. Edinburgh University Press.
31 March 2025 at 12:06
Since the last round of feedback, you have written posts reflecting on exhibitions visits in Glasgow, the event with CAP students, collective discussions and group work at Summerhall, and an update on developments in your individual curatorial project proposal development.
Whilst these posts do evidence reflection on course activities, there is still very limited engagement with curatorial theory relevant to your project in your blog at present (flagged in previous round of feedback). The learning outcomes for the course (and which are the criteria against which your work is assessed) specifically require that you research and engage with curatorial theories and methods, locating your own practice in relation to the expanded field of curatorial theory and practice and this is something to address before submission. In the first round of blog feedback, I shared links to resources on the rural as site of cultural production and these remain relevant resources to aid your engagement with theory.
We discussed the developments to your own project detailed in the Week 9 blog post in last week’s tutorial so I won’t go into detail in the feedback here. However, to reiterate the key points of this, there is a need to clearly articulate the role of artists in the exhibition. In conversation in our tutorial, it seems that you are still unclear on who would make the work on show and whether these works are traditional examples, contemporary commissions that respond to the traditional practices, or a mixture of the two. We also spoke about being clear on the aim(s) of your exhibition.
Your posts on the field trip to Glasgow describe some of the exhibitions that you engaged with. Your section on the exhibition Digging in Another Time evidences a depth of engagement with Jarman’s work. However, in the context of this course, a greater engagement with the curatorial aspects of the exhibitions you have engaged with would be beneficial and better demonstrate how you are meeting the learning outcomes.
Be careful too to ensure that key details are correct. You refer to the Sulter exhibition as You Are My Soulmate but the exhibition title is You Are My Kindred Spirit.
In your blog post on the event with CAP students, you discuss four works by four students. When writing about artworks, ensure that you include enough of an introduction to what the work is to ground your discussion of it. For example, when you write about Huang Yi’s work, you reference an AI-generated resume but it’s not clear how this is part of the work and how it relates to the focus on marine pollution.
Another thing to be mindful of is the difference between artistic practice and curatorial practice. When writing about Ju Keyi’s work, you refer to their curatorial approach. However, as an artist, this would be an artistic, not curatorial, approach.
Your blog consistently shows your engagement with the course activities but ensure that you consider the learning outcomes against which your work will be assessed.