What does a curator actually do?
Budgets, admin and manage difficult artists it turns out
— In partnership with Smartify
Hello.
It’s Wednesday, which means it’s ‘views and interviews’. You’re welcome.
Ask someone what job roles there are in museums, and nearly every response will be ‘a curator!’ Ask them what a curator does, and the answer might be a bit hazier. So for this week’s Big Interview I speak to contemporary art curator Lara Goodband to ask: what does a curator actually do??
In contrast, the Ashmolean Museum has looked to an artist outside of the institution to conceive of their latest exhibition. In the 250 Take, photographer Bettina von Zwehl explains the fresh eyes artists can bring to museum collections.
And my Hot List features a history-making exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay, and a new book exploring art and it’s bedfellow: money.
Let’s dive right in!
— maxwell
— In partnership with Smartify
Don't forget these valuable voices
If you visit lots of museums and galleries (and you do, because you're reading this!) then you'll know that the people who work there are a GOLDMINE of info on their collections. Their passion is palpable.
You'll also know just how rich, varied and valuable responses to art and culture from people outside the sector can be.
So it's no surprise to me to learn that Smartify and the Sainsbury Centre decided to put a range of voices from the museum and beyond at the heart of their new audio tours, Living Art and Sharing Stories.
It’s also the reason that young visitors are guided around museums by other kids, in the family experiences that Smartify creates.
In fact, Smartify have produced countless other tours and digital experiences based on co-creation like this. They're experts in using a range of voices and perspectives in their content. They're experts in creating together.
If your venue could do with fresh new collaborative and creative experiences for visitors, then find out what Smartify could achieve for you.
The 250 Take
Today’s 250-word opinion column is by photographer Bettina von Zwehl, whose new exhibition is a direct response to the collecting history of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. Here she explains the value in institutions asking outsiders like her to cast a critical eye on their collections and displays.
💬 Don’t let the dust settle. Let outsider artists like me see collections afresh.
“For my exhibition The Flood, I’m re-imagining the lost and dispersed zoological specimens that were once part of the Ashmolean founding collections to spark conversations around our relationships with animals, conservation, extinction, climate grief and climate activism.
As an artist collaborating with museums, I bring my vision, imagination and personal history into the dialogue. I work intuitively to challenge the expectations and display politics of the institution. Artists have the freedom to create an experience for visitors beyond labels — where museum objects can be seen in a new unfamiliar light, and where things clash and evoke a sense of wonder.
Creating a nonlinear flow of questions within museum spaces is important for engaging young visitors. Through unexpected encounters, I aim to bridge categories, cultures, and time, merging science and art with the unknown. It happens when you mix things up strategically and generate new conversations between historical objects and contemporary things.
My experience at the Ashmolean has taught me to channel the power of Wunderkammer display strategies into my work through close collaboration with curators and technicians.
Using the magic of museum stagecraft, I’ve applied the radical historical model of the Wunderkammer to create an installation that’s associative and interdisciplinary.
Museum objects have their own energy and stories to tell. It takes time and patience to tap into this undefined space and to let it unfold. I feel a responsibility to amplify voices that have been silenced or overlooked to prevent the dust from settling around the stories we’ve been told.”
Ashmolean NOW: Bettina Von Zwehl — The Flood opens at the Ashmolean Museum on Friday and runs until May 2025. Entry is free.
The Hot List
My curated round-up of what’s new to see, do, watch, read and more. From the UK — and around the world.
*Purchasing through links in this section may earn me a valuable affiliate commission
EXHIBITION
1️⃣ The World of Tim Burton | the Design Museum, London
600 items from the iconic director’s personal archive go on show in the UK for the first time. The vast retrospective also features costumes such as Michelle Pfeiffer’s black latex Catwoman suit.
opens 25 October | discover more
FESTIVAL
2️⃣ Bristol Photo Festival | venues across Bristol
The second edition of the international photo showcase has the theme ‘The World a Wave’. It features photographers investigating the global flux in social, political and environmental issues, through exhibitions across the city.
opening week begins today | find out more
TV SHOW
3️⃣ Portrait Artist of the Year
The hunt for the UK's best portrait artist returns. The series launched with celebrity sitter Hannah Waddingham, and this year’s winner will paint Lorraine Kelly and be exhibited at the National Galleries Scotland: Portrait.
Wednesdays at 20:00 on Sky Arts in the UK, or stream on NOW \ watch here
EXHIBITION
4️⃣ Elmgreen & Dragset: L'Addition | at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris
For the first time, the Musée d’Orsay’s sculpture nave has undergone a radical transformation, devised by the artists Elmgreen & Dragset. The intervention features artworks hung upside down, to explore contemporary masculinities.
now open until 02 February 2025 | find out more
BOOK
5️⃣ Money in Art: From Coinage to Crypto | by David Trigg, foreword by Mark Carney
Money makes the art world go round, just look at Frieze. But what do the artists think? This new book focuses on over 80 artworks — from Pop Art to the present — that tackle the theme of money, with many featuring real money in the work.
published by HENI | buy your copy here
The Big Interview
Teachers educate children. Doctors cure people of ailments. Plumbers fix water pipes.
But what do curators do?! Curate things??
Many of you reading this will be curators, so you will know the answer all too well. But in the wider world — hell, even in the wider museum world! — few people really know what a curator’s role actually involves day-to-day.
So after 6 years of writing this newsletter, it’s time to finally shine a light on the work of curators, which, for better or worse, really is the only museum job the public at-large can readily identify.
To lift the lid — or should that be, the glass case? — this week’s interview is with Lara Goodband, Contemporary Art Curator at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery in Exeter (RAMM). She has over 25 years’ experience as an art curator in galleries, museums and other unusual places and spaces. Much of her career was in Yorkshire before her move to Devon, but she’s worked internationally too.
We speak on the eve of the opening of the latest major RAMM exhibition that she’s curated. Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape explores the famous evocative landscape of the Devon moorland through photography, film and Land Art. On display will be the work of 18 artists and photographers — including influential conceptual Land Art by the iconic Richard Long — which span 1969 to 2024 and which collectively demonstrate Dartmoor’s enduring attraction to artists.
So here we get into the whole spectrum of what a curator does, from budgets, acquisitions, difficult artists…and lots and lots of admin.
***
Hi Lara. So, I think it’s fair to say most people actually don't really know what a curator does day-to-day. So in your words, what is a curator?
It really depends on where you are working, and of course what you’re curating.
I work with living artists who are often in the process of making new work, so I’m caring for them and their working process. In my role at RAMM, I’ll select the artists for a specific exhibition, or suggest possible artists for commissions or projects. I also organise and manage the call-out and process of selecting the artists we work with, show and commission. Then, I’ll make studio visits and select specific work for display in consultation with the artist and also the exhibition team at the museum. Or, I’ll support and guide the process of making new work for display at RAMM.
I’ll also write interpretation and other texts about the artist and their work. And I also come up with ideas for exhibitions that link to RAMM’s collections. The first exhibition I curated at RAMM was Sea Garden linked to RAMM’s pressed seaweed collections originally foraged by women in the nineteenth century.
What's often the most common frustration when curating an exhibition? Budgets? Admin? Managing artists?
Strangely, despite having been a curator for nearly 30 years, the frustrations aren’t as shared or common across projects as you might imagine. There are always new surprises.
Since I always start with a budget, that’s rarely frustrating because it’s known and fixed. Probably for me it’s the admin, particularly in a show where you’re working with lots of artists and lenders, and you need to keep everyone updated on specifics.
Group shows are fraught with trying to keep all the artists happy. Once, one artist thought others were getting more space than them and more money spent on their frames and sent me a rather barbed, out-of-character email on a Friday afternoon. Fortunately, I’ve seen it all before so I didn’t reply and by Monday they were writing lovely emails and pretending they’d never written it. Everyone has their moments on the creative journey. So long as all 18 artists don’t have these moments at the same time, I can cope!
On the size scale, RAMM is on the smaller side compared to many of Britain’s most well-known venues. What impact does that have?
Officially RAMM is a ‘medium-sized museum’. There’s 25 spaces which includes galleries, meeting rooms and stores but the number does indicate that it’s not that small. Last week I was showing an artist round who was saying, ‘wow, this place is massive’. The thing about RAMM is that it punches well above its weight. It won Museum of the Year in 2012 and is the only museum and art gallery in Exeter. It’s got over a million objects across disciplines in those as various as geology, local history and fashion.
So, space can be an issue but it makes everyone nimble and means there’s always something lively going on. We get over 210,000 visits a year with nearly 100% of our visitors saying their experience was good or very good.
It’s so difficult to get national press coverage partly because the press won’t or can’t travel, but we did have success with national press coverage for the contemporary art show Earth Spells: Witches of the Anthropocene which featured new commissions by Emma Hart, Florence Peake, Grace Ndiritu and Lucy Stein all inspired by RAMM’s collections.
What tasks and responsibilities would people be most surprised a curator needs to do?
That’s a tough question because it’s so normal to me now. I have had many volunteers and assistants during my career who started by imagining it’s all reading books about art and hanging out in artists’ studios or travelling around to all the international biennials. If only!
There’s a lot of admin, a lot of communicating across teams and internal advocacy for an idea. You also need to be able to manage budgets, raise funds and use Excel. In fact, people with a financial and fundraising background are in high demand right now. Thinking practically about how your visitor is going to view and understand the artwork when it’s still being made and what the technicians need to plan for the display mechanism can be tricky. It’s all important though.
You also make art acquisitions in your role — how do you know what to acquire, and what are you looking for when you do?
RAMM has a clear collections policy so that guides our decisions.
We can’t and don’t purchase in an area unless we have a policy: we couldn’t acquire photography until we had a specialist member of staff employed for 6 months through a scheme with Art Fund and shared with the V&A in 2019. Once that policy was in place and the exhibition Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape programmed, it meant we could actively look to acquire a work by Dartmoor-based camera-less photographer Garry Fabian Miller which will be displayed in the show.
RAMM is an institutional member of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS), and when it was our year to make a purchase it coincided with RAMM commissioning Joy Gregory to make new work for the major exhibition In Plain Sight: Transatlantic Slavery and Devon. We were able to make the case for CAS to support the acquisition of her new work The Sweetest Thing. I’m very pleased we’ve been acquiring more work by women contemporary artists in the last few years including by Susan Derges, Janet Sainsbury, Michelle Sank, Amy Shelton and most recently, through a partnership with the National Gallery’s artist-in-residence scheme and CAS, Celine Condorelli.
RAMM doesn’t have a budget for ‘collecting’ so each time the whole team has to think very carefully about whether it’s the right time to pursue a purchase as it takes so much staff capacity and fundraising. Also, we’re not an art museum, art is just one element of what RAMM does, so acquisitions are happening across all the collections.
What’s been your career journey into your current role?
I grew-up in Liverpool and was reviewing the art exhibitions at Tate Liverpool for my local paper The Crosby Herald when it first opened. I was really lucky to be growing-up in a city that was celebrating visual art for everyone. My first position was as Exhibitions Curator at York Art Gallery after my MA in History of Art from Manchester University. I had been a volunteer at the gallery.
When the permanent full-time job was advertised, I got it. Later I was freelance in Yorkshire for 10 years and it gave me the opportunity to work with so many different types of organisations in different buildings and locations. I absolutely loved working in Bradford and Keighley with the teams at Bradford Museums and Galleries who would regularly ask me to curate projects across their venues. I’m thrilled the city will be City of Culture next year — it’s going to be brilliant.
I moved to Exeter at the end of 2017 with my family because of my husband’s new academic post at the university. As well as being Director of Exeter Culture (which was a great introduction into the cultural life of the city) I also worked freelance to commission the artist Bedwyr Williams for RAMM’s 150th birthday celebrations. So, when this new role, funded by Arts Council England, came up I knew I wanted to work with the team at RAMM. I’ve been here for 6 years now.
What are your top three tips on how to become a curator?
Volunteer to get experience in different roles — and not just with curators. You will get an overview of how an institution operates. But I’m worried that people without financial support or family homes near places with museums and galleries are being priced out of this opportunity. At RAMM we run a range of opportunities for people interested in working in museums including The Future Skills programme. We’ve also had year-long graduate training positions. I was able to recruit a Curatorial Assistant through this scheme which was excellent for the contemporary programme. It’s worth noting that for this position we had 183 highly-qualified applicants so it’s a very competitive industry. I volunteered at York Art Gallery between my BA and MA through a special training scheme with financial support. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to afford to live in London to gain experience.
Visit lots of museums and galleries — it’s a bit like wanting to be a poet but never reading any poetry and yet expecting to write work that people want to read. If you don’t visit exhibitions, then you can’t see what works and what doesn’t for the visitor.
Practice writing about art, and I don’t mean academic articles (although that’s helpful to further your name and career in other ways). I used to teach writing interpretation at Hull Uni and it’s a very particular way of writing that avoids jargon.
You're about to open an exhibition dedicated to Dartmoor and its landscape. Why do artists have an enduring fascination with Dartmoor?
I think it’s the wide, open moorland where you seem to be able to walk for miles without meeting anyone else, and the small sections of temperate rain forest-like Wistman’s Wood which is so striking and unusual. Plus, in the past, buildings were cheaper and you could work in large home-studios within a larger community of creatives. I think Garry Fabian Miller whose work we’ve acquired and are borrowing from the V&A puts it well when he says, ‘People want to spend time here because it creates the opportunity for them to discover things about themselves, to develop a relationship with the landscape, which is quite ancient, which has a sense of a peopled history that have had a relationship to this place, which is powerful and intense.’
You've commissioned two new works for the show. Tell us a bit about how that process works.
RAMM is fortunate that it’s an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, and as part of the funding that comes with that, we can support artists to create new work inspired by the collections. In this case, our Dartmoor-related collections.
The first one came through an open call out with a specific remit with a selection panel which included photographer Jem Southam and independent photography curator Kate Best and me. We asked for an expression of interest and then from the long list selected three artists who RAMM paid to present their idea. We selected Alex Hartley whose work The Summoning Stones has become the lead image for the show’s marketing. I was thrilled Alex applied. He’s got such an international reputation and hasn’t shown his work in Devon before, despite having lived for 14 years in east Devon and climbing on Dartmoor at every opportunity.
The other artist is Ashish Ghadiali who was selected by the RAMM team from a long-list of artists whose work is informed by a critically-engaged view of the British landscape. Ashish has been inspired by our magic lantern slides.
In both cases, the artists spent time in the stores with specialist assistant curators looking at a range of objects. They both had their own ideas before they came into the stores, based on what they could see of RAMM’s collections online, so there wasn’t that much guiding in this case. I have though, in the past, been known to literally make the artist’s work!
Why focus on photography and not other mediums?
Photography has been used in many different ways on Dartmoor — as a record or document such as in Richard Long’s Land Art, or as the artwork itself.
I’ve been working with independent curator and consultant Kate Best on this who was a curator of photographs at the V&A, so her specialism has been important. Exeter and the region have really high-quality practitioners working in photography for a number of reasons including that when there was Exeter School of Art (before it was subsumed into Plymouth Uni) it had brilliant photographers like Jem Southam teaching on the course who attracted students who then stayed in the area.
The landscape of Dartmoor has also attracted artists — only Nicholas JR White in the show actually grew-up on Dartmoor. And, as a result of our new Photography Collections Policy we had acquired Susan Derges’ Eden 6 in 2020 and were keen to show it with its companion pieces from the V&A collections. Dartmoor also seems to be a microcosm of some urgent issues in England today such as climate break down and land rights.
Finally, as a curator, which other roles in a museum make your life the easiest!
I am so lucky to be working with really lovely people who are all enthusiastic about their jobs. But I’d have to say the technician is always your best friend, and if they’re not, you’d better make sure they become so! They make everything a reality.
The tech team at RAMM are real stars and all have their own specialisms, such as Adrian and lighting – he’s literally the best in the business.
And, then the exhibitions officer Anne Starkey at RAMM is just fantastic and I feel so lucky to be working in an organisation that has this role. I couldn’t do my job though without my colleagues who care for, document and interpret the collections that inspire artists.
It wouldn’t be a museum without collection curators, would it?
Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape opens at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery Exeter (RAMM) on Saturday, and runs until 23 February 2025. Book tickets here.
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