The Educator’s Turn in Curating

What does a pedagogically-informed curatorial process look like?

Shaun Leonardo, Primitive Games, performance at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of the Guggenheim’s Education Department’s Social Practice Initiative,  6/21/18. Photo by Paula Court. Courtesy of the artist and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

[This is the second of a two-part text about the relationship between the education and curatorial practice. The first part can be read here.]

As a young museum educator, when I was hired by the Guggenheim Museum to organize its public programs, my supervisor advised me that my job was to support and communicate the curator’s vision. This made perfect sense to me: as a practicing artist who took any authorial urges outside of their daytime job, I was primarily interested  in learning from curators and finding interesting and useful ways to serve the public. I also felt ready for the task: I had been trained to produce all kinds of museum programming, from family workshops to sophisticated academic symposia. I would meet individually with every curator to figure out what kind of education/public program component they wanted. Some of them had fixed ideas of what an education program should be: usually, the classic-form symposium with the top scholars on the subject of the exhibition (with some slots given to scholars whose pride had been hurt for not being invited to write for the catalogue). Those programs, due to both format and content, were anodyne, dense, interminable, with inartful presentations, and often of interest only to a handful of people (mostly other scholars aspiring to be invited to speak at the next symposium), yet I dutifully produced dozens of those in a professional way and in spite of the aforementioned constraints, just as a short-order cook generates the predictable and standard diner’s fare.

But other curators, especially the ones who did contemporary shows, responded differently. Most of them were overwhelmed with the weight of their exhibition, dealing with loans, checklists, copyright, insurance, construction, exhibition design, catalogue production, label-writing, marketing and PR, fundraising and private donors, and internal staffing issues. Education was just one more headache for them to deal with, and sometimes the very last thing in their mind. So it was not unusual for me to hear the curator tell me that they had no idea about what kind of education program to do and ask me for suggestions. That became the best part of my job (which I will elaborate on later).

This pattern continued throughout the three decades I worked in museum education. The larger problem this dynamic generated was that, precisely due to the brutal demand and workload that every exhibition exacts from every curator, they usually could only focus on their own shows and not on how the institution could speak to its publics in a coherent and holistic manner. While I sympathized seeing the weight of the demands on them, the fact was that whenever they also led public programming it tended to be overly academic, fragmented, wonky, and largely unconcerned with the general public.

In 2012, when socially engaged practice was in vogue, some of us thought it was time to do something about it. We recognized that educators would not be given the institutional baton, but we also were aware of two facts: one, that organizing an education program is faster, cheaper and easier than organizing an exhibition; and two, that artists have greater leverage when invited to propose a project in a museum. So our team developed an initiative consisting in inviting artists to collaborate with our education department in order to offer public programs to the public. Our education team knew our publics intimately and how to make programs work; artists pushed us to think outside the box. We would assist artists in connecting with audiences and producing the projects and they would learn from us about methods and procedures — a generative and mutual learning process that resulted in many audience offerings that we had never attempted before, ranging from dinners, peer-to-peer learning experiments, gallery interventions, an alternative café, collaborating with the museum guards to do programs for the public, experimental audio guides, and more.

This led to rumbling in curatorial departments. A curator colleague told me in confidence that they felt we were rouge-curating, which is an unforgivable sin in museums, and she added that many curators were frustrated and jealous that we had such liberty to do such dynamic and practically daily public offerings while so many of them labored for years in putting together a single show. Soon the curatorial leadership started voicing similar concerns. Without explicitly saying so, they wanted us to be curatorially “policed”. Our position was that we wanted to get the curator’s feedback and even work collaboratively in programmatically addressing the fragmentation and conventional academic programming I have previously described. However, the work involved in selecting artist candidates (which included making an informed assessment of their ability to work with audiences, their interest in working with audiences, commitment to a multi-month process, and so forth) was not one that curators seemingly felt invested or even interested in joining: they wanted to direct their energies to the galleries and work with objects, not people.  Mostly, many of them just wanted to go back to the old “order”— meaning, having education serve “short-order” (pun intended) programming for their exhibitions. We then started learning of education directors in other museums working in similar ways and being either demoted, defunded, isolated, or pushed out.  Right around that time, some of these educators (including myself) formed a museum education group that gathered in 2014 in Santa Fe, New Mexico (organized and hosted by the then Director of Education of Site Santa Fe Joanne Lefrak) to discuss the challenges faced by the field as well as ways to carry the practice forward. Some advocated for fostering a culture of “shared expertise” between curators and educators.  In January of 2021 a smaller portion of this group, under the collective name of  Advance Museum Education Now published a manifesto that sought to address, in their words,  the “tragic collapse of mission and a precarious misalignment between museums and their civic responsibilities.”

At the time it appeared that the powers-that-be in museums would never agree in that the kind of education experiments we were doing were effectively responding to a real institutional need to think beyond traditional silos in order to better engage publics. However, at the same time and in spite of continued institutional pushback, similar initiatives began to spread as other museums started creating artists-in-residence programs (the Guggenheim’s Social Practice initiative, and the MET’s museum Civic Practice Partnership, to name a few). And later on, and most importantly, in recent years we saw a new and telling phenomenon which I am surprised is not acknowledged or discussed more in the art press, and sometimes I wonder about how many people have even noticed. In the United States over the last 5 years several past museum directors of education ascended to executive director positions, all of them women and most of them women of color: the list, which is long, includes Sandra Jackson Dumont (previous director of Education at the MET, now Executive Director of the soon to be inaugurated Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles), Kim Kanatani (past Director of Education at the Guggenheim, now Director of the Langson Institute and Museum of California Art at UC Irvine, Jaqueline Terrassa (who led Education at the Art Institute of Chicago, now Director of the Colby Museum in Maine) and Sally Tallant, who led the education initiatives at the Serpentine in London before moving on to lead the Liverpool Biennial and now leading the Queens Museum. Each has brought their expertise in education to expand their museum’s community engagement role (see this week’s New York Times article highlighting the Queens Museum’s more socially engaged artist in residence initiatives).

Leonardo leading a workshop in preparation for Primitive Games, 2018. Video still by Giacomo Francia. Image courtesy of the artist and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

This previously unseen phenomenon represents not only a paradigm shift, but also a legitimate  “turn” of disciplines with institutional consequences that the “education turn in curating” had heralded a decade but did not ultimately deliver. In many ways, this shift was a natural development: directors of education have a nuanced understanding of museums’ missions, know how to work collaboratively, are experts at fundraising and familiar with executive leadership.  What these hirings further signaled, I will posit, is that museum boards across the country understand the urgency of having professionals at the helm with moral standing that do not merely pay lip service to social responsibility and who can lead the way to make museums truly fulfill its role of cultural interlocutors in the public discourse, and that a museum that does not meaningfully engage with its cultural context by engaging all publics inside and outside of the art world will quickly fall into irrelevance. It is a truly positive and hopeful development which shows the changing notions not only  of what museum leadership should be, which requires a revision of the relationship between curatorial and education areas.

I was again facetious with the title of this column (admittedly, only to provoke a bit). In truth, the most important question for art institutions (and institutions overall, such as biennials) is how they can attain a sound governance structure that will allow them to produce the best engaging, and most informed, exhibitions and programming.  The best museums and biennials often fail under rigid and old-fashioned hierarchical systems that simulate neoliberal corporate culture; under these systems, individuals with expertise and good ideas are sometimes set aside and ignored while others who are empowered might implement an agenda that does not put their specific kind of expertise at the center. For that very reason, the solution is not to simply perpetuate the same hierarchy by placing educators at the top —which is something that I am certain all the new museum directors I mentioned perfectly understand (and I recognize that an education-led curatorial process might sound like an oxymoron to some and even produce nearly irrational phobias and unfounded nightmares about “edutainment”). Instead, what a non-hierarchical research process can generate when one uses the values and methodologies that are often used in education, which are in essence collaborative.

Very briefly summarized, some (albeit not all) of these areas might include the following:

Collective recognition of uncertainty. As I mentioned in my conversation with the stressed-out Guggenheim curator, the humility of now knowing what to do is a very positive start for a research collective process.  Some of the best projects I have worked on were extensive research processes where every member of the group contributed elements in different areas, and the product was not laden with a preordained result but rather the result of attempting to answer particular research questions.

Context mapping. Giving ample time to a group to do field work to articulate the many historic, social, cultural angles of a subject in an exhibition, including not only the existing debates around that topic and the artists and writers who have addressed it in the past, listening to the concerns and ideas of all publics (informed and not-art informed) before the beginning of the project.

Advanced planning: the less time, the less chances of producing an experimental and innovative project.

How group research is conducted. In past occasions I have written about the way that research is physically structured in museums, but is also applicable to biennials. Productive collaborative dynamics is an area that education theory has given us great tools that should be used.

In the case of new project commissions, how to productively challenge, and learn from, the artist. In the artist projects I previously described, the collaborations were not easy, primarily because we wanted the artist to understand the social context they were working with, which our team knew intimately. The artist had to teach us how to see that context differently, and their work often made us reimagine relationships and test assumptions. This was the most difficult step and the one that got us in most trouble as we advocated for the artist to the museum and then advocated for both the museum and its publics to the artist, and yet the most rewarding when it worked.

Setting aside terminologies and trends, what we have learned over the last decade and a half is that no art institution can produce meaningful contemporary art programming if it is mired in the hierarchical ideas and approaches of the past. The true “turn” is not a new hierarchy but the humility of shared uncertainty in an ongoing process consisting of dedicated group research, understanding our social context, vigorous internal critical debate, testing things out, reviewing mistakes—and repeat.