Activism is having a renaissance. We live in the age of zeitgeist movements like #OscarsSoWhite and #Metoo, of millions thrumming the streets in support of the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter and March for Our Lives.
Curatorial activism is the art world’s equivalent. “It’s the practice of organising art exhibitions with the principal aim of ensuring that large constituencies of people are no longer ghettoised or excluded from the master narratives of art,” says curator Maura Reilly. Its mission is to get the art world to understand that issues of gender, race and sexuality require urgent attention.
Equal representation for non-white, non-male and LGBTQ artists is still alarmingly out of reach. At the reopening of Tate Modern in 2016, of the 300 artists represented in the rehang of the permanent exhibition, 32% were women and 29% were non-white artists, according to research conducted by Reilly. Meanwhile, a 2013 survey by East London Fawcett found that of the 134 commercial London galleries surveyed, less than a third of the represented artists were women.
While the role of curator may not be an obvious path for young people coming up in the arts, it can offer an opportunity to turn frustration at this unrepresentative system into action. “If you are intent on instituting change, then curation can be a powerful tool,” says Reilly, author of Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating. She calls on young people to agitate. “If you feel excluded then speak up, take action, right the wrongs and demand a place for yourself,” she says.
Reilly has spent her career railing against the “traditional” definition of artistic greatness. In 2007, she co-launched Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art at the Elizabeth A Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the inaugural exhibition in the first public programming space in the US devoted entirely to feminist art.
Rozsa Farkas, co-founder and director of south London gallery Arcadia Missa, has also chosen to reject the status quo. “I had just graduated from art school and wanted to set up a space to showcase my friends and peers who were artists who maybe weren’t being shown elsewhere,” she says.
Arcadia, which is nestled in a Peckham railway arch, has established a reputation for its collaborative, communicative approach to working with artists. This holistic practice produces a diverse and exciting display of art, but for Farkas, showcasing artists is less about meeting a quota and more about personal taste.
“From very early on people were noticing that my gender balance was quite equal and it was more diverse,” she says. “But I had to explain to people that it’s not an agenda, I wasn’t championing this work because their identity fits an MO; it’s because their work is better than every next straight white male that’s trying to get a show.”
As well as the diversity of artists, the space in which their work is displayed is also a form of resistance. “Traditional art galleries can feel quite alienating,” says London-based curator and writer Fatos Ustek. “They all have a code of conduct and an immediate authoritarian manifestation through the architectural styles or the configuration of the space.”
But in the last 20 years, commissioning artwork for public or common spaces has become more fashionable – and Ustek is part of that shift. In 2017, she curated London’s second Art Night, the largest free contemporary arts festival in the capital. Modelled on Paris’s Nuit Blanche, it takes art out of the institution and into unusual venues and historic sights.
“Thirty per cent of the audience were people who didn’t hear about Art Night but were already in the area and joined in,” she says. She believes curators have the agency and responsibility to make art public. “They are its immediate communicators.”For the message to really take hold, these curators say their audience needs to feel they are participating. Charlotte Keenan, curator of British art at the Walker gallery in Liverpool, believes it’s important to use her platform to provide alternative histories to those told in British galleries.
“As a curator, that means not saying anything sometimes, and letting others speak instead,” she says. “In our recent exhibition, Coming Out, we left a gallery without any artworks displayed in it and invited audiences, community groups, artists and activists to use it to tell their stories and histories.”
Ethical curation helps form the building blocks to a fair and representative art world, but its ability to break beyond the gallery walls is potent. Keenan believes in the “power of museums to help promote good and active citizenship, and to act as agents of social change”. Reilly goes further: “Today, artists, activists and curators are coming together under groups like Artists Against War and We Make America creating objects and images to inspire and empower people to be critical thinkers and to engage as active participants in democracy.”
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