Featured Image: part of the Animal Life series by Leigh
02 Jan 2020
So I’ve settled on my structure. Lovely. Now what about the rest of the question?
Didn’t finish…
I could not finish this research in the set amount of time. There was a lot more that I could have done that I didn’t manage to do. For example, I could re-code my interviews to strip out data per topic – venue, evaluation, funding, etc. to get even more data from the transcripts.
My question has three parts and I only really answered the first part. I’ve barely scratched the inspiration part of the question, and I have even less data to cover the social change action question. The few scraps of ‘inspiration and social change action’ info that I got were primarily from my interviews.
Janine Francois and Shasti Lowton both talked about different ways in which they ‘lived’ the changes they wanted to curate by infusing all aspects of their events/exhibitions with the changes they wanted to see e.g. Lowton’s side by side placement of Eastern and Western photographers in Illuminating India (Lowton, 2019, pp.3-4) and Francois’ open door exhibition policy and fights for fair pay for Black female artists (Francois, 2019, pp.3,11). Lowton also states that she likes to,
“inspire somebody to think of things from a different point of view, or look at things through a different lens. I think if you can get someone to do that then it starts like a knock on effect in getting them to change other aspects of their life or their behaviour or their thinking.” (Lowton, 2019, pp.4)
There is some evidence of all three curators getting active response from their audiences but I can only guess at the motivations behind those audience members’ actions. I have not done enough research to fully understand what turns a passive viewer into an active participant.
All of which leads me to…
Further Investigations…
In order to get the most out of my chosen structures and the gaps in the answers to my research question, I will need to explore the following concepts further:
- What is my curatorial purpose?
- How does art inspire its audience?
- How can art create an active response from its audience?
- How does art create social change?
- How do I measure and evaluate the social change impact of my exhibition?
- What is the best way to attract my target audience to my exhibition?
- Which art charities and artist support organisations share my artistic and curatorial goals?
- Which funding organisations share my artistic and curatorial goals?
- What is the best way to select art and artists given my exhibition objectives?
- What is the ‘best’ size exhibition to effect social change? At what point does the audience get saturated?
- How to write a top-notch exhibition proposal?
- Now I know my preferred exhibition structure, what is my ideal exhibition curation process?
- How do break my exhibition vision down so it specifically addresses each point in the Social change definition from the ACF (The Appalachian Community Fund, 2014)?
Moving forward…
I think I’ll –
- Definitely keep journaling, though probably all in my notebook as opposed to the online blog as it’s not for submission.
- Work to maintain the connections I’ve made with my interviewees. Great people to know and learn from. Always keep people around you who make you walk taller and reach high!
- Indulge in more YouTube Eurekas & TEDx binging for sure!
- Consider interviewing a few more social change curators for completeness
- Approach some of the organisations in my Contextual review to learn more about how they achieve and measure their social change impact
—
References
Francois, J. (2019). Social Change Curation. 4 Dec. Available at: Workflow [Accessed 19 Dec. 2019].
Lowton, S. (2019). Social Change Curation. 25 Nov. Available at: Workflow [Accessed 19 Dec. 2019].
The Appalachian Community Fund (2014). Social Change. [online] Appalachiancommunityfund.org. Available at: http://www.appalachiancommunityfund.org/social-change/ [Accessed 20 Dec. 2019].
