When Artists Curate: Contemporary Art and the Exhibition as Medium

by Alison Green

An increasing proportion of exhibitions are curated by artists rather than professional curators, and in this book Alison Green provides the first critical history of visual artists as curators. Green’s curatorial artist emerges as a seemingly contradictory someone who carries a special responsibility for critiquing art’s institutions, for bringing considerable creativity to the craft of making exhibitions and, through experimentation, someone who has changed the way exhibitions are understood to be authored and experienced—but at the same time, someone who is curiously ubiquitous.

Rather than portraying artist curators as exceptional or rare, Green establishes the fact that artists curate all the time and in all kinds of in galleries and in museums, in studios, in borrowed spaces such as shopfronts or industrial buildings, in front rooms and front windows, in zoos or concert halls, on streets and in nature. Seen from the perspective of artists, showing is a part of making art. Once this idea is understood, the story of art starts to look very different. Beautifully illustrated and featuring in-depth explorations of the work of revered artist curators like Daniel Buren, Goshka Macuga, Thomas Hirschhorn, Rosemarie Trockel, Hito Steyerl, Andy Warhol, and Félix González-Torres, When Artists Curate will change the way we think about and look at exhibitions.

296 pages, Paperback

Published June 15, 2018

Reviews

[Anna-maria Amato · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very relevant book, since the widespread pursuit of artists curating their own exhibitions for practical reasons, has perhaps meant that many have lost sight of the theories and development in the professional exhibition world.