MA in Curatorial Practice: the work to be done

The field of curating is in a moment of remarkable urgency. In the United States, as elsewhere, the enforcement of a radical right politics on culture has begun to show its wear on museums and other venues. Many institutions are self-censoring or simply avoid exhibiting works that could bring oppressive scrutiny. Others resist. Artists and curators continue to register every kind of experience, turning to the planet’s crises, engaging in the carnival of what it means to exist in this world. Every artwork is a summary of time, and the pressures of time are all the more present now, since what we leave to those after us needs to include what we refuse to stop making, what we refuse to exclude, what we demand to say, what we go on calling meaningful and true. 

We call this work and urgency a practice, from the old sense of the word to act and to alter, just as it also means to train, to repeat and acquire skills toward ways of making what has to be made for our time and beyond it. Our MA in Curatorial Practice teaches practice in these deeply engaged ways, having always been dedicated to practical knowledge and skills and to the philosophical, historical, and theoretical backgrounds that help us bring introspection to the act of looking, rendering what is, and altering the shape of things that need to be changed. To be outward facing in this way, to think about audience and community, to be with artists toward being with everyone, is a gift of practice, of research and learning, of an immense investment in the power of the senses to uproot what lies hidden in us, waiting to unfold.

Part of this work is to distribute what we come to know through practice. The next volume in our "Thoughts on Curating" series of books from Sternberg Press, by the distinguished museum director and educator Charles Esche, challenges public art institutions to actively refuse the exclusions and erasures on which they were built and to imagine the world otherwise. As well, our online journal, The Curatorial, brings together curators, artists, scholars, and students to write about all that curating entails—theoretical knots to unknot, practical matters, ways to entwine the personal and institutional, to encapsulate, insinuate, stimulate, and provoke. Meanwhile, our ongoing series of panel discussions about AI, the world, and art, titled “The Algorithmic State,” will bring together Guggenheim curator Noam Segal with artists Sougwen Chung and Xin Liu to continue the conversation this spring.

With our program, our panel discussions, our weekly presentations by curators and artists, our publications, and our exhibitions by young curators for a dozen years, we dedicate ourselves to this practice that touches our students and sends them into the art field as professionals, making shows and projects that question and test the world. This is our contribution, so needed in society right now, right here, in this place at the turning of what we have and what’s to come. Our faculty is a community of curators, writers, architects, philosophers, and other experts with practices of expressive, rigorous work that they pass on to the students, to each other, and to the public.

The MA in Curatorial Practice, here at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

—Steven Henry Madoff, PhD, Founding Chair, MA Curatorial Practice