Guest Curator Intervention

Imagine that you have been appointed guest curator at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. The museum director is eager to increase visitor engagement with the museum’s permanent holdings of African, Greek and Roman, Medieval, European, American, and Mesoamerican art in the Wilson Pavilion. They invite you to write a proposal for a contemporary intervention within The Collection Galleries, rotating installations featuring the Nasher Museum’s extensive collection of historical art.

Part of a larger strategy the museum uses throughout The Collection Galleries, the placement of contemporary artworks within the historical collection galleries disrupts traditional narratives and creates new conversations. For more on previous contemporary interventions at the Nasher Museum, read this short article.

As neither the budget nor staff time allows for a complete reinstallation of the gallery, your proposal should not be a drastic reconfiguration of the space and its artworks. Instead, your task is to select one historically and/or culturally distinct artwork currently not on display to insert into the existing layout of The Collection Galleries.

How you choose and place that artwork within the gallery is up to you — be creative and think imaginatively, expansively, and purposefully about: what objects you’ll put into dialogue; what your intended outcomes are for the contemporary intervention; and how different audiences might understand and learn from your decision. You may also want to include a wall label (~200 words) that communicates the main idea of your contemporary intervention and the connection(s) it makes with the artworks around it.

To select your intervention, use the Nasher Museum’s collection to search by artist, cultural group, medium and/or time period.