Quick has been working on a student-curated show on Jasper Johns that will open on May 22 in the Sackler Museum. Quick hopes to go into academia rather than purely curatorial work, but like Shapiro, she appreciates learning about the technical aspects of curation. “What prints should we put there to really draw the viewer in? When a visitor is standing at the far side of the gallery, how can we generate visual interest from that distance?” she asks, gesturing with her hands to communicate spatial orientation in a gallery.
LIVE EXHIBIT
Curators have to be excellent storytellers and capable of remembering an impressive amount about the works and specimens on display. It is all about the way a story is told, and in an exhibit, the plotline of an artist’s life, or the history of a group of people, progresses visually as one walks through the space.
Curators tell their stories by choosing pieces that compliment each other and illustrate the theme of the exhibit. As for more pragmatic concerns, curators must organize the gallery in a stress-free, logical manner. “One of the main challenges of curation is trying to get the pieces to fill a space,” Caraccio says. For example, if a curator wants to maintain the intimacy of certain pieces of art in a very large, open space, he or she might put a small piece of art in the corner of a huge room so that the visitor must walk over to the piece to see it.
If a curator works in the same space for a long period of time, as often is the case with curators employed by a university or an art gallery, he or she has to employ diverse methods to make the space feel different for each exhibit. Some curators choose to work with moveable parts. Caraccio hangs prints on magnetic wires so visitors may purchase particular pieces on display. Shaw uses freestanding vitrines, glass-paneled cases, which she can move around the space to change the organization of the room.
Most significantly, a curator must consider the atmosphere of an exhibit, which entails many aspects a visitor may not consciously notice. It is small things like the texture of the floor that matter when your job is ensuring that visitors are in a comfortable position to receive and appreciate information.
THUNDER AND BIRD SONG
McLaughlin, an associate curator at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, walks through “Wiyopiyata,” the exhibit on the Lakota people. First she points out a large mural over the entrance to the exhibit, drawn by Lakota artist Butch Thunder Hawk. “We wanted to have this here to let the visitors know they’re entering a Lakota Place,” McLaughlin says. Walking further into the exhibit, peals of thunder and bird song pour out of speakers above her head. The sound of the rain and wind creates a hush over visitors. The audio was actually collected from Lakota territory by McLaughlin’s colleagues.
McLaughlin points out other subtle decisions about the exhibit’s organization. The spears and arrows are set into a wall that is painted with a landscape of the Midwest plains to create a sense of a three-dimensional environment. A map of Montana and bits of surrounding states is on the floor, providing an interactive element to the exhibit; a visitor can walk over the site of General Custer’s battle or part of the Oregon Trail.
McLaughlin’s ability to create larger stories from specific artifacts is crucial in curation and particularly evident in this exhibit. The “Wiyopiyata” exhibit focuses on a specific object, a ledger found in Houghton Library’s archives. The ledger, lost and rediscovered in largely unknown circumstances, contains rare paper drawings of the Lakota warriors’ martial exploits.
McLaughlin tells detailed stories while highlighting the important aspects of each portion of the exhibit. There is a group of spoons displayed in a circle in front of a decorated elk hide. When she describes the common Lakota practice of sharing meals and stories, McLaughlin’s voice becomes melodic; she is weaving the story now. She makes sure to mention the specific choice of arranging the spoons in a circle to mimic how the Lakotas would sit during these evening gatherings.
The exhibit has a technological component as well and this raises significant questions for a curator. If an exhibit incorporates technology, the curator must consider where to place the TV or computer so that it is easy to access but does not become the central aspect of the exhibit. For McLaughlin, the answer was putting the TV screen, which shows interviews she conducted with modern-day Lakotas, in a room slightly off to the side of the main exhibit. This way, visitors could sit on a bench to watch the interviews and rest their legs before walking through to the next exhibit.
LABELS VERSUS LINKS
According to urbandictionary.com, “museum legs” is defined as “the aching legs one develops after a prolonged period of slow walking interspersed with standing still, especially when going round a museum.” Instead of a tiring bout of museum legs, we can now effortlessly peruse magnified photos of the masterpieces or click on links to Wikipedia bios of the artists.
As in every profession, there is concern when it comes to keeping up with an increasingly digital world. “I have said, you know, everyone is going digital, so let me hold on to my traditional knowledge,” Caraccio says. “Every student now has the ability to think through a computer, and what they don’t have is the ability to think through their hands.”
A curator’s livelihood is based on preserving a certain awe of objects and presenting them in a particular fashion that, from his or her knowledgeable standpoint, seems most appropriate. The accessibility of the internet allows viewers to look up the objects themselves. Though this means the museum’s reach is greatly extended by this technology, it also changes the nature of typical visitor-exhibit interaction. But perhaps technology does not have to destroy the sanctity of a museum space. Quick, the curatorial intern at Harvard, worked on an exhibit that incorporated an iPad into the display. The iPad was open to the museum’s online catalog so that visitors could scroll through the archives with their fingers. This form of integrating technology brings the internet into the exhibit rather than the exhibit onto the internet.
But some people like Baldinger, curatorial associate at Harvard’s Natural History Museum, whose job includes preserving historical data, find it best to leave technology out of the picture. “The best way to preserve a piece of data is a good piece of paper and a good pen, provided you have neat handwriting,” he says, touring the shelves of preserved species. Thanks to curators, information like this will be available for the next few centuries. Though the labels inside the glass preservative jars in the basement of Harvard’s Natural History Museum may have different handwriting, the knowledge is ultimately preserved along with its artifact.
—Staff writer Virginia R. Marshall can be reached at virginiarosemarshall@college.harvard.edu.