Curating.info

Opening tomorrow at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, Texas is a show that has been curated by the public.

"Gems of the Collection: Community as Curator" was "curated" by local residents by answering a survey that the museum had produced.

...it presents 80 exceptional artifacts — paintings, gems, minerals, textiles, furniture, gowns and one-of-a-kind objects — that have stayed in the memory banks of loyal Witte supporters.

The Witte opened in October 1926. That's a lot of memories for visitors, and some of them are plain weird — from shrunken heads to a stolen diamond. [...] It's all about nostalgia, revelation, enlightenment and wonder, according to organizers.

It's a stretch to call curating by survey curation at all. In this case I think it is more accurate to call the "community curators" selectors or respondents. Naming issues aside, since it is a celebration of the museum's 80th year of operation, it is a PR-friendly move to have a community oriented exhibition.

Read the full article, including quotes from the "community curators", here.

Curator Dianne Vanderlip is featured in this Denver Post story.

Vanderlip has brought more than 7,000 works to Denver on an acquisitions budget of exactly zero. It's something nobody mentioned when she was hired.

"I was in Philadelphia and Denver kept calling and calling," she recalled. She'd never been to the city, but her husband, an architect, had a meeting in Fargo, N.D., and, thinking it was nearby, she decided to fly here to check out the job.

"I got out of the taxi and I saw that building," she said of the daring Geo Ponti-designed art museum, "and I thought to myself, 'Anybody that had the chutzpah to put up a building like that, well, I wanted to build a contemporary art collection for that city."'

Only after she took the job did she think to ask about the acquisitions budget. "You have to raise it," they said.

(via Artkrush)