Instructor (EXPIRED)

The MA Curatorial Practice program is a two-year master's degree, training students in practice, history, philosophy, and theory pertaining to the curatorial field toward professional work. Students are focused in their work on contemporary art and frequently visit New York art galleries and museums.

In the first semester of the program, students must take a seven-week in-person seminar (two hours a week of class time with typically about ten students) that concerns phenomenology. As the current course description states: "In a well-curated exhibition, one can 'feel' that something has been done right (or wrong) through the exchange between the body, the objects in the exhibition space, and the space itself. Understanding this relationship is crucial for curatorial practice, and this seminar offers a philosophical framework for thinking it through rigorously and critically. The phenomenological movement has made perhaps the most important contribution to this discussion, and we will engage various accounts of the body and its relationship to space and the world along with excursions into memory theory, the philosophy of technology, feminist theory, and speculative materialism. This is a philosophy course, not an art history or curating course. Yet the subject of the course should bear directly on your practice as a curator: as every participant in an exhibition immediately enters into this unspoken relationship, the curator must be conscious of the manner in which perception, consciousness, objects, and space are dynamically intertwined."

While there is room to formulate the course somewhat differently than described in this course description, this is the focus. The successful applicant will teach the course during the fall 2023 semester, with the possibility to continue in subsequent fall semesters.

In past academic years, the same lecturer has taught a separate very short course taught via Zoom in August, numbering six two-hour sessions, titled Practicum: Logic and Rhetoric. The course description: "This practicum will be a formal introduction to logic and rhetoric, founded in the classical canon. It is commonplace in art practices to talk about 'conceptualism' and the concepts that are the basis of works of art, particularly in the post-Duchampian era. However, the foundational ideas of what concepts are and the way logical structures and rhetorical arguments undergird the formation and expression of a concept are largely unexamined. Through readings and exercises, students will examine logical rules for concepts, classification, and definition, as well as how to construct arguments using Aristotelian syllogistic logic and modern symbolic systems. By acquainting students with the basics of logic and rhetoric, this course will provide a background that will help curatorial practitioners rigorously address the practice of concept formation as it relates to artists’ works and to their own formulations of exhibitions and other curatorial expressions."

Ideally, the same lecturer will teach both courses, though the possibility is open to have separate lecturers.

The MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is strongly committed to creating a diverse faculty.