The Curator as Scholar and Public Spokesperson

Curators have a primary responsibility for the acquisition, care, display, and interpretation of works of art. … As museums face new and challenging realities, curators must work with their institutions to develop programs that maintain the integrity of collections and exhibitions, foster community support, and generate revenue.

(AAMC & AAMC Foundation Strategic Plan 2009–2012¹)

The above statement from the Association of Art Museum Curators reflects a commonplace in museum studies: the primary role of museums is to preserve and interpret works of art. It also reflects the reality of museums in today’s society, the need to increase community support (usually measured by the number of visitors) and find the financial resources that museums need to sustain themselves. The changing reality of museums—and, by extension, curators—mirrors the very changes that are leading JEMAHS to host this Forum on alternative careers to academia; the widespread reassessment of the utility of humanism in education has led to reductions in public interest and funding as well as the diversion of private resources to other no less worthy and important causes. Though the present discussion may be a symptom of the current state and status of the university in American society and culture, it also signals a healthy acknowledgement by the academy of the reality facing graduate students (a shortage of tenure-track jobs for young scholars) and a no less healthy (and welcome) acknowledgement of the value of non-academic careers.

Curatorial work is one such career but to the degree that curators take part in the same scholarly discussions and explorations as academics, it is possible to describe the curator as a museum-based scholar and the professor as a university-based scholar. The nature of curatorial scholarship, however, is often quite different from the scholarship of contemporary university art historians and archaeologists and demands a different sensibility. Curatorial scholarship is typically focused on the objects under the curator’s care either permanently (in his or her museum’s collection) or temporarily (in exhibitions). Connoisseurship and iconology, therefore, are crucial to a curator’s training, although they are areas that many academic programs neglect. It is also helpful for a curator to have an understanding of how objects change over time as well as at least a familiarity with the underlying principles of the preservation and conservation of objects. As part of their exploration of objects, curators often address—or can address—the same issues as their university colleagues, but the type of scholarship that the museum environment encourages typically begins and ends with the object; in between the beginning and end, the scholarship can range from arguments over the role of a Mithraic relief in creating the Roman military’s esprit de corps to the significance and nature of a hobby horse and what it might mean to display a hobby horse (or a urinal) in an art museum.

While curatorial scholarship, like that of a professor, often results in an article, it more visibly—or at least more publicly—manifests itself in the displays of objects in a museum and temporary exhibitions (Fig. 1). Both these formats present their own challenges to the scholar, although generally only the exhibition—because of its written catalog—is treated as a work of scholarship. For a collection display, a curator is largely limited by the contents of an institution’s holdings supplemented with what can be borrowed, hopefully on a long-term basis. Permanent displays rely on a curator’s understanding of his or her field (an understanding largely formed by academic training) and the type of stories and narratives the curator chooses to make from the available objects. Other factors can influence display, especially the nature of a museum’s audience and a museum’s understanding of itself and its purpose; for instance, a university art museum may feel its primary obligation is to the campus community and, therefore, create displays focused on the needs of students and faculty while a public art museum may orient itself toward school-age children or toward the interests and desires of its donors. Objects within a display are identified with labels that, at...