I am in the basement of the Natural History Museum at Harvard surrounded by glass jars of eerie creatures, some of which died 150 years ago. There are encased shrimps to my right and left. “This label was written by Louis Agassiz around 1850,” says Adam Baldinger, curatorial associate and collection manager in the invertabrate zoology department at the museum. He takes me to his office and points to a shelf of specimens wrapped in cotton balls and submerged in vials of 70 percent alcohol. “You see that shelf up there? There’s about a dozen new species waiting to be identified.” The possibility of new species seems exciting, even if the creatures are pale, many-legged things that died quite some time ago. Yet for Baldinger, who cares for multiple collections at the museum and can discover up to a dozen unidentified species per year, it is just another part of his job.

On the surface, it may seem that museum curators just manage collections. Curators do oversee the finer points of their exhibits, such as arranging the space so that visitors do not trip over misplaced Indian headdresses, but their role encompasses much more. They must pick the pieces for the exhibit and organize them in a conceptually engaging way.

It is the curator’s job to maintain the immediacy of the work of art or preserved specimens; they must attract visitors even when photos of most artworks and historic objects are available as high definition images online. They bear immense knowledge of the past, but they are also able to present this knowledge in a way that conveys the passion that drew them to the field in the first place. Ultimately, curators’ appreciation for objects allows them to elucidate these artifacts for the public.

UNRAVELING THE FLAG

A curator, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, originated as a word used to describe managers, overseers, and caretakers, usually of minors or lunatics. The definition of curator that we know today emerged in the 1660s when churches recognized the need for a position to maintain relics and other fragile and aging parts of cathedrals and monasteries. Today, curator is a word sometimes used too broadly to refer to any person who is involved in the behind-the-scenes workings of a museum. In reality, there are archivists, curatorial associates, special collections librarians, and exhibit designers who work to put together the layout and content of exhibits.

“We think through what is going to happen at a show, where people will passage, how to make sure people don’t trip over things, what to do with pedestals, what to do with lighting, and all those kind of superficial things about a show,” says Kathy Caraccio, who owns a small gallery in New York City. But curators are also responsible for collecting the works of art, sometimes flying to multiple countries to acquire works from other museums. Their tasks also include  compiling catalogs, keeping track of the history of the pieces on display, and organizing their exhibits in a way that engages the public.

Archivists occupy the niche that most closely resembles the original definition of the word “curator.” They assess, collect, organize, and preserve objects of value. “Sometimes it’s things the alumni brought back from World War II, like an 18-foot Nazi flag, but also objects such as a brick that marked the grave of our first African-American graduate,” says Diane Shaw, the director of special collections and archivist at Lafayette College.

Universities can collect an amazing breadth of objects in their lifetimes; at an institution as old as Harvard, some collections are older than most universities. “What you see on exhibit here is less than one percent of our collection,” says I. Castle McLaughlin, associate curator of North American ethnography at Harvard’s Peabody Museum.

DINING ON CASSATT

The word “curator” is not a word that a child generally learns to speak before age ten. Therefore, it is tough to imagine a kid saying, “I want to be a curator when I grow up,” with the same sincere enthusiasm as a child might say, “I want to be a firefighter,” or, “I want to be a rock star.”

And indeed, curators arrive at their careers in a variety of ways. Caraccio is primarily a master printer, which means she receives etchings from professional artists and produces their prints by manually rolling a large metal wheel over paper, pressing ink into the indentations. Caraccio became a curator because she needed to display prints in an attractive, coherent manner for her customers. Now artists contact her from all over the world to ask if she will display their work at her gallery. Caraccio also teaches student interns at the National Academy School of Fine Art how to curate in her “hit-and-run tutorial program.”

Some curators start as history majors in college. Shaw became a curator and archivist by working at her alma mater, Emory University, in the Special Collections department. Then there’s Barbara Shapiro, who arrived in her line of work as a curator for the Boston Fine Arts Museum by offering to volunteer at the museum.

There are paintings and prints covering every wall of Shapiro’s apartment, many from artists she had worked with in the past. One wall is devoted to her alphabetized collection of art books and art catalogs. She also has an impressive collection of painted bowls and plates, some by the artist Mary Cassatt. Shapiro is able to recall without pause the story behind each object. One print was purchased at an auction; another was a gift from a friend. Judging from her devotion, it is hard to believe she was nearly barred from entering the field.

In the 1950s, Shapiro asked Harvard’s Fogg Museum if she could volunteer; she had a longtime love of prints and paintings. At the time, Shapiro, a mother of three, was turned away and was advised to stay at home with her children. Undeterred, Shapiro volunteered at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, took print-making classes at Radcliffe College and eventually got a masters degree in art history from Wellsley College. “By the time I went to Wellesley, Harvard was opening up for women, both married and single,” she says.

Shapiro’s story stands in marked contrast to how people—male and female—become curators today. Harvard is now a very welcoming place for curators to learn. Jennifer Quick is a Ph.D. student here and interns at the Fogg Museum, the same place Shapiro tried to volunteer 50 years ago. In fact, the Fogg Museum is primarily a teaching museum.

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.