This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on how creativity can inspire in challenging times.
Ask Helen Han why museum visitors should take seriously an exhibition curated by teenagers rather than by experienced museum professionals, and she sums it up this way: a show like the one she helped curate at the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art offers more, not less.
The 17-year-old senior at University High School in Irvine, Calif., talks about the diligent work that went into “Piece of Me,” an exhibit within the museum’s larger biennial (through Jan. 4). Organized by 15 members of the Orange County Young Curators program, it started with surveying the museum’s collection, choosing a theme and selecting work, then collaborating with in-house conservators, designers and installers, and finally composing the wall text.
But more important, she said, the group created something the staff could not: an authentic, teen eye on art.
“I feel like this is bringing an insight into the teenager’s mind, something you might not have necessarily seen before,” Han said in a phone interview, explaining the exhibit creation process. “So, that’s something audiences should definitely consider.”
That combination of authenticity and rigor is driving several museum shows this fall — including at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — each curated by young people with guidance from the museum staff. All three aim to be equal to any other exhibition at their institution.
These shows fit within a broader cultural trend, in which institutions invite outside, nonprofessional curators to help organize exhibitions as a way to democratize their storytelling. This practice has been gaining steam, with the Tucson Museum of Art last year publishing a tool kit for peer institutions interested in what they call community-based curation.
“It’s a real show and we ran it through our full museum process,” said Chris Atkins, the director of the Center for Netherlandish Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, who coached five high school students from the museum’s Curatorial Study Hall through the creation of “Curated by Teens: Death as a Constant Companion,” which runs through Nov. 30.
“Death” is installed in the center’s Gallery for Innovative Scholarship, a space for changing exhibitions usually programmed by guest curators from a regional university, like Yale or Brown. “But this time we skipped a level and went from graduate students to public high school teenagers,” Atkins said.
The Curatorial Study Hall, which started in 2019, is an internship for five juniors and seniors who meet Wednesdays during the school year, culminating in an exhibition.
Previous experience in the museum world is not a requirement, and “their level of art history is not high,” as Atkins described it.
But the students are put through the paces. In this case, they started with a deep dive into the museum’s vast holdings of Dutch and Flemish art and conversations with Atkins and other staff members about how a show might come together. After culling through numerous images of hunted animals, butcher shops and skulls — all frequent still-life subjects in Dutch and Flemish art — the students chose death as their theme.
Then they did what curators do: they developed a checklist, arranged the order, oversaw installation and wrote wall text.
Atkins said the curators’ confidence grew throughout the school year, as hours of mentoring instilled such confidence in them that they pushed the museum’s usual boundaries. For example, they insisted on including one work with deteriorating paint, badly in need of restoration.
“Like most museums, that’s not the type of picture we would normally put on the walls,” Atkins said.
The teens argued that there was precedent in the museum’s galleries showing the art of ancient Greece and Rome, where fragments of statues were on display routinely. So why not put a damaged object into their show? That was a “completely logical question,” Atkins said. The curators got their way.
A similar curatorial autonomy animates the Clyfford Still Museum’s “Tell Clyfford I Said ‘Hi,’” a show organized by children of the Colville Confederated Tribes in Washington state, which runs through May 10. The original plan, according to Bailey Placzek, the museum’s curator of collections, and Nicole Cromartie, the director of education and programs, who organized the project and worked with the students on the curation, was to have each of the 100 student co-curators select a single piece of art.
Some kids decided not to choose any, and some chose two or three. One 7-year-old insisted that nine of her choices, which she grouped together on a wall during a mock setup of the show, get into the final event.
“Her name is Vivian, and she was very upset that she could only choose one,” said Placzek, who let Vivian have her way. “We documented that wall, and we have completely replicated it in the exhibit.”
The exhibition was, they said, nearly 10 years in the making, including time spent by the museum introducing itself to the tribes, getting to know families and community leaders and eventually figuring out how to create an exhibit in Denver.
The museum was driven by Still’s own history. Years before he became a well-known Abstract Expressionist, he was a student at Washington State College (now Washington State University), not far from the land where the confederated tribes live. He spent time on their reservation, eventually working with Worth Griffin to found a summer art camp there in the late 1930s, the Nespelem Art Colony.
Still made many sketches of the landscape and people that are now in the collection of the museum, which has long had a goal of connecting the work to the present-day tribes.
Part of that process involved showing replicas of the work at tribal gatherings as a way of introducing the museum. “And they started to see all of these images of their grandparents and great-grandparents,” Placzek said. “It was this moving moment where they were like, ‘I don’t know who you are, but I know who this is.’”
For the current show, Placzek and Cromartie collaborated with children, ages 3 to 14, from three schools and their teachers. They showed them copies of both the sketches and Still’s later abstract paintings and encouraged the children to choose works they connected with — no matter the bond.
Nikolai Kolb, 11, chose a 1936 village streetscape, dominated by a large, white building in the center.
“I picked it because it reminds me of a Chinese restaurant that I always used to go to when I was a kid,” he said during a video interview the day of the show’s opening, which many of the curators and their families attended as the museum’s guests. (The trip included a Colorado Rockies baseball game).
That might not be the usual curator way of speaking, but that is the point. The Still has worked hard to widen the concept of expertise over the painter’s work and it has, in recent years, relinquished curatorial control for individual shows organized by other artists, Still’s daughter and even Denver-area residents under the age of 8.
Letting children of the Colville Confederated Tribes pick the works, then decide how to arrange the exhibit, choose wall colors and contribute to the audio guide is way of expanding that mission — and of giving museum visitors an alternative way of seeing Still’s abstract art.
“They don’t have all these ideas that you need to have expertise, like so many adults do,” Placzek said of the students. “So it’s really an exciting and joyful process to see young children experience this work, which intimidates so many people.”
For the Orange County Museum of Art, getting a youth perspective on things meant starting an entire new program with its Young Curators group, said Courtenay Finn, the chief curator. Last year, the museum was preparing for this year’s California Biennial and wanted to include a section that captured the experiences of young people at the current moment.
“But we realized we couldn’t make a show about what it means to be a teenager without inviting teenagers to speak for themselves,” said Finn. “We actually delayed the opening of the Biennial so that we could launch the program.”
The museum’s curatorial and education staff put together a framework and spread the word among local schools. They asked applicants to prepare essays reflecting on their own lives and responding to a work in the collection. More than 140 applications arrived, and 15 juniors and seniors from 12 Orange County municipalities were selected, Finn said.
The students met weekly for two semesters.
“We told them do whatever you want to do. If you want to make a show about climate change or gardens or portraits, the collection is there for you,” Finn said.
Ultimately, they chose to do a show about the pressure of growing up in a social media world where everything is posed, public — and scrutinized. They built their checklist around Alison Van Pelt’s 2004 “Britney,” an oil and graphite portrait of Britney Spears, whose life under the microscope mirrored their own experiences, Finn explained.
Interestingly, all of the objects in “Piece of Me” were created before the curators were born, though they all stay on theme. One example is Ed Templeton’s 1999 “Teenage Smokers,” a grid of 24 small photo portraits of young people with their cigarettes. It has an Instagram feel.
And there is that little bit extra for visitors, a sincerity that only comes from giving up authority — as the museums in Denver and Boston did — and trusting outsiders.
“I think the fact that we were given the platform to communicate our voices in this day and age was really important,” the curator Han said. “I’m a firm believer that everyone should be heard, no matter what.”
The post One Way to Shake Up Museum Curation? Hand the Keys to the Kids. appeared first on New York Times.
