Deck the Walls: The Art of Curating
An art historian by training, Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan is currently Assistant Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York. She holds a BA from Harvard, three master’s Degrees, and a PhD from Columbia, and has taught classes on art at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Pratt Institute, and Columbia University, where she was one of the top-ranked instructors of the introduction to art history, “Art Humanities: Masterpieces of Western Art.” A regular critic for Artforum, her writing has also appeared in periodicals such as Art in America and Art Journal, and in catalogs published by museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center.
Overview
Take a break from your holiday decorating to watch Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan explain how museum curators select and arrange masterpieces. Focusing on both aesthetic and conceptual principles, this lecture offers some concrete advice for decking your own walls, too!
As someone who loves art, and has visited many art museums, I often wondered what went into selecting the paintings/images/objects that make up art exhibitions. This talk, by a talented speaker, pulls back the veil and gives the viewer a peek into the enormously complex process of curating (and exhibiting and protecting) the art that the public sees. You might not agree with the decisions that curators make (and I have often disagreed, and wondered why they think that certain pieces of art are worth our time), but after listening to Tina Ryan’s presentation, you can’t fail to be impressed by all the work that goes into creating and staging an art exhibition. I can’t wait to visit another art museum!