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Re:Public-Considering the Audience in Curatorial Practice
by Stuart Reid
Date: 17 July 2005
Event: Banff
Stuart Reid
Born in Dundee, Scotland, Stuart Reid immigrated to Canada in 1967. He studied art and art history at York University in Toronto (BFA 1986.) From 1990 to 1992, Reid was an associate curator at the Craft Gallery of the Ontario Crafts Council in Toronto. From 1992 to 2001, Reid was curator of the Art Gallery of Mississauga. In 1997, he was a guest of the British Council on a study tour of contemporary art in Northern Ireland. Since 2001, he has been director and curator of the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery in Owen Sound. Reid is an alumnus of the J. Paul Getty Trust’s Museum Leadership Institute (2002) at the University of California at Berkeley. Reid is an active curator, critic and writer; recent exhibitions include Kevin Yates: My ex-girlfriend is a slut, Lorna Mills: Reality Show and The Limestone Barrens Project: a creative residency exchange between Ontario, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Ireland.
Abstract
From the perspective of a Director/Curator working within a regional public gallery in Ontario, this paper, discusses the act of considering the audience, and what impact this process has on curatorial practice. Art galleries are public spaces, places where people come together for valuable exchanges and experiences around visual art. The curator is in a powerful and responsible position, the catalyst in this chamber of elements. The curator has the opportunity to put forth new ideas, to choose the focus, to bring the audience together with artists, setting off the chain reaction of questioning and response, thereby stimulating dialogue. The curator's interface with the public is key to broadening understanding about potential for art and artists to change thinking, to effect cultural and social change.
As a curator, I work in a community-engaged public galley, at a distance from a large metropolitan center. It is challenging to put together a program of exhibitions that addresses issues in the immediate artistic community, but also offers some contribution to the dialogue around contemporary art on a national and international platform. As a curator, I am also considering issues of community responsiveness, how the institution addresses cultural diversity and issues of access, utilizing a broad definition of "public."
Art in a museum has no impact without an audience and there is no contemporary culture without a public. Curators make decisions about exhibition constructs to serve an artist's work, but with an idea of a public in mind. There are many sub-groups within the concept of "public" including museum colleagues, artists, students, educators, members, volunteers, tourists, the media and donors. We must also consider secondary audiences beyond the people who walk through the front door: readers of our publications, visitors to touring shows and web site visitors, for example. Defining the target audience or audiences for a project informs decision-making relating to writing and research, the exhibition's presentation format, content and didactic messages.
In the process of defining the audience, one may consider many statistical factors, but demographic profiles are not enough - we need to be able to understand the audience's experience, their level of engagement, and their interest. Audience surveys, feedback forms, evaluation tools are all utilized in grappling with this responsibility. This information should not lead to reductive or prescriptive impulses in our output as curators, but, instead should make us better prepared to find points of access into the artists' works in our exhibitions, collections and programs.
As a Director and a Curator, I also deal with issues of audience engagement imposed by funding agencies: municipal, provincial and federal. There are explicit expectations that public art galleries should be actively developing new audiences. These pressures definitely affect administration, marketing and education departments, neither are curatorial decisions about exhibitions and programs ever entirely immune from these influences. As curators working in this climate, we must assume new skill sets and a fresh vocabulary around the value and relevancy of the project's engagement with the audience, getting beyond attendance numbers as the marker of success. New performance measures should gauge impact and resonance with the intended audience and the broader artistic community. This paper will discuss creative models of exhibitions and programs that pro-actively engage diverse audiences in meaningful ways.