Curatorship

Abstract

What do curators do? What hands-on skills should a graduate student acquire in order to prepare for a career working in museums or similar cultural heritage archives? How do the theoretical debates within various humanities and social science disciplines connect to the practical work that curators and other museum or archives professionals pursue? Complementing other Indiana University—Bloomington courses concerned with (1) museum history and theory, (2) museum exhibitions, (3) nonprofit administration, and (4) informal education. Curatorship is a graduate seminar aimed at concurrently teaching fundamental skills basic to curatorial work and exploring the ways that theoretical, ethical, and methodological problems are worked out in the day-to-day work of museums of art, ethnography, archaeology, and history, as well as in the kinds of archives and media repositories that serve a range of humanities and social science disciplines. The course will include hands-on activities, seminar discussion, and original research opportunities. While exhibitions will come up in the course of seminar meetings, the foci of the class are all of the other areas relevant to professional curatorial work in museums, particularly those domains related to the larger place of systematic collections in museum practice. These span a range of topics from donation and purchase to collections care, research, and deaccession. Such matters as the problem of authenticity and the role of museums in art markets will be taken up in the context of the practical challenges (and pleasures) of curatorial work. Along with practical curatorial skills of wide relevance, the course will explore issues of common concern not only for museums, but also for related kinds of heritage archives, including ethnographic sound archives, archaeological repositories, and folklore collections.