WEEK3 THE ARTIST CURATOR: FRAN COTTELL
Week 3’s seminar on Fran Cottell’s multifaceted practice as an artist and curator profoundly changed my understanding of curating as a site of radical collaboration and institutional critique. Cottell’s work—spanning four decades of exhibitions, interventions, and participatory projects—challenges the traditional hierarchies of art institutions while redefining the curator’s role as both creator and dismantler of systems. For my own curatorial practice and our collective’s collaborative endeavors, her approach offers a blueprint for transforming constraints into catalysts for creative resistance.
Central to Cottell’s philosophy is the idea that “the exhibition and the artwork displayed have their own agency” (Week 3 Essential Reading). Inspired by her House Projects (2001-17), where domestic spaces became platforms for critiquing museum stasis, I’m reworking my initial gallery-based plan into a nomadic format. By hosting installations in community centers and private homes, the project now mirrors Cottell’s disruption of public/private boundaries, inviting audiences to confront diasporic memory in intimate, contested spaces.
Fran Cottell. BACK to FRONT, 2011.
Fran Cottell’s career resists easy categorization—part institutional critique, part community ritual, part archival sabotage. For my practice, this means embracing curation’s “sprawling generality” (Steven Henry Madoff) while anchoring it in specific acts of solidarity. Our collective now approaches each project as both exhibition and excavation, asking: How can we, like Cottell’s Forced Entry (2017), wedge open spaces for those excluded by art’s gatekeepers? How might temporary interventions, such as her Lil Sullivan collaborations, seed lasting structural change?
Fran Cottell. Forced Entry, 2017.
References
Deepwell, Katy. “Walking/Working through Fran Cottell’s House.” 2021.
Doubtfire, Joseph, and Giulia Ranchetti. “Curator as Artist as Curator.” Curating the Contemporary, 2015. Accessed February 4, 2025. https://curatingthecontemporary.org/2015/04/30/curator-as-artist-as-curator/.
(http://www.francottell.com/artwork/still-live)
