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Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating by MauraReilly, London:

Thames & Hudson, 2018. 240 pages. Hardcover: $32.95 / £22.50

Article in Curator The Museum Journal · July 2018

DOI: 10.1111/cura.12270

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 Curator: The Museum Journal

CURATORIAL ACTIVISM: TOWARDS AN ETHICS OF

CURATING: Maura Reilly.
London: Thames & Hudson, 2018. 240 pages. Hard cover:
£22.50.
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Journal: Curator: The Museum Journal

Manuscript ID 18-04-CUR-BR-005.R2
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Wiley - Manuscript type: Book Review

Keywords:

Abstract:
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Page 1 of 6 Curator: The Museum Journal

CURATORIAL ACTIVISM: TOWARDS AN ETHICS OF CURATING: Maura Reilly.

London: Thames & Hudson, 2018. 240 pages. Hard cover: £22.50.

Reviewed by Emma Mahony

When I was an art student in the 90s, my history of art tutor set an essay question which
required that the class discuss how the statement ‘the hegemony of the white male psyche’
related to Abstract Expressionism. I clearly recall the perplexed faces of my classmates and
how our tutor was obliged to spend the entire class explaining how this statement described a
form of invisible institutional racism and sexism perpetuated by the art world. Until that
moment, I had been completely oblivious to the fact that the art world was not equitable in its
representation of female artists and artists of colour, nor had I thought to question why my art
history textbooks were dominated by white, straight, male artists.
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The instance that I describe above took place 25 years ago. Today there is a generally a
consensus that the art world has finally achieved a post-race, post-feminist, post-queer status
quo. Such an assumption is normalized by critics like Nicolas Bourriaud who asserts that a
new modernity configured to globalization has emerged; one in which artists are as equally
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influenced by art and culture from Africa and Asia as they are by the Western canon
(Bourriaud 2009). Consequently, identity-based exhibitions which focus on ‘queer’, ‘black’
or ‘women’ artists are no longer necessary, because the art world is always already equitable
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in its inclusion of Other artists (1). Isn’t it? Curatorial Activism: Towards An Ethics Of
Curating aims to shatter this consensus with its comprehensive statistical analysis of the
inequities and exclusions that shape the art world. The book’s author, curator and arts writer,
Maura Reilly, approaches the subject from an insider’s perspective having been appointed
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founding curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn
Museum in 2007 where, among other exhibitions, she was responsible for the permanent
installation of Judy’s Chicago’s Dinner Party (1979), and co-curating Global Feminisms with
Linda Nochlin. In 2015 she published Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader.
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Reilly’s book begins by clarifying that, despite measurable strides foreword over the past 30
years, there have equally been disconcerting leaps backwards. Among the positive
developments she outlines is the establishment of the Modern Women’s Fund (MWF) at
MoMA in 2005, which focused on rewriting the male dominated cannon through an emphasis
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on forefronting women artists in the museum’s exhibitions, education and acquisitions

programme; and the appointment of the first ever female artistic directors of the Venice
Biennale the same year: Maria de Corral and Rosa Martinez. 2005 also saw the Moderna
Museet in Stockholm, under the directorship of Lars Nittve, establish the ‘Second Museum of
Our Wishes’, a two-year programme, which called on the government to fund the acquisition
of work by female artists for the museum’s permanent collection. In 2009, the Venice
Biennale, directed by Daniel Birnbaum, featured 43% female artists, the highest tally in its
history, and the same year the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris opened its radical permanent
collection exhibition Elles (curated by Camille Morineau), which replaced the former
permanent collection with a radical women-artists-only exhibition (Reilly 2018, 35-39).

While these developments represent substantive evidence of the art world is moving in the
right direction, they have not succeeded in catalysing an equitable representation of genders
and races. In its 2012 rehang of the permanent collection, the Centre Georges Pompidou
reverted back to its earlier white male biases, where only 10% of the works on view were by
women artists and less again were by non-white artists. Reilly highlights 2013 as a

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particularly bad year. It was the year that Massimiliano Gioni curated the Venice Biennale
which included only 16% women. It was also the year when all the major museums and
galleries in New York exhibited predominately male artists. 2016 didn’t see much, if any,
improvement as evidenced by Tate Modern’s permanent collection rehang in which less than
one-third of the 300 plus artists featured were women and fewer-still were non-white.
Writing in Time Out London in August 2016, the critic Eddy Frankel drew attention to the
fact that of the 14 major solo shows in London that season, all featured male artists and only
one was non-white: Wilfredo Lam (2016, in Reilly 2017). What this combination of positive
and negative developments makes clear is that the revolutionary wheel of the art world is
turning, but like every wheel that spins full circle, there is always a danger that it will revert
back to its starting point, to it sexist, racist and lesbo-homophobic roots. Comment [Office1]: Please change to
‘homophobic’ if you think best
Having presented a chilling overview of the art world’s gross inequities, Reilly’s book calls
on curators to create new and counter-hegemonic narratives that can challenge and subvert
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the hegemony of the white Western, male artist and create a more equitable representation in
the art world. She outlines three extant curatorial approaches or strategies of resistance that
have, since the 70s, sought to make the art world more equitable: they include revisionism,
area studies and relational studies.
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The goal of revisionism is to rewrite the art historical cannon to include previously excluded
artists. It focuses on historical research that brings to light and resurrects previously
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overlooked works of art produced by Other artists and inserts them into the existing cannon.
A paradigmatic example of a revisionist exhibition is Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De
Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976, curated by Norman Kleebatt at the Jewish Museum
in New York in 2008. It inserted 5 female artists – Lee Bontecou, Joan Mitchell, Ann Truitt,
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Lee Krasner, Norman Lewis – into the predominately male dominated territory of Abstract
Expressionism. The second strategy of resistance Reilly outlines is area studies. Its focus is
on curating exhibitions that focus solely on these Other groups. As such, it is predominately a
supplementary approach insofar it seeks to produce new and ‘Other’ cannons that sit
alongside existing ones. Examples here include The Hayward Gallery’s Africa Remix (2005);
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and the Tate Britain’s Queer British Art, 1861-1967 (2017).

Both of these approaches create ‘curatorial correctives’ to past omissions; they promote
‘visibility’, by bringing Other artists to the attention of both mainstream curators and the art
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world in general (2018, 27). Neither approach, however, is without its issues. As Reilly notes,
the problem with revisionism is that it leaves the existing Modernist canonical structure intact
and fails to problematize the biases and the power structures that underpin it (2018, 23-25),
while critics of an area studies approach would argue that by singling out Other artists, it
simultaneously segregates and ghettoizes them, in the process, underscoring their difference
(2018, 25).

There is, however, a third form of curatorial activism with Reilly gives the most weight to:
relational studies. The goal of relational studies is to flatten art historical and canonical
hierarchies by replacing the singular and linear white male narrative of modernism with
multi-vocal and non-linear narratives that exist alongside and talk back to each other. As
such, relational studies’ exhibitions tell the alternative stories and counter-narratives of
modern art (that emanate from all corners of the globe) in the plural. Notable examples
Reilly gives include the seminal exhibition Magiciens de la terre (1989) curated by Jean-
Hubert Martin at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle de La Villette, Paris;

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her own Global Feminisms (2007) (co-curated with Nochlin); and Carambolages at the
Grand Palais, Paris in 2016, also curated by Jean-Hubert Martin (2018, 29-33).

Despite the importance Reilly attributes to relational studies, she doesn’t forefront the role it
can play in subverting artistic value. This latter approach was the preoccupation of Manuel
Borja-Villel during his directorship of the Museu D’art Contemporani, Barcelona (MACBA)
(1998-2007). In additional to diversifying the museum’s collection (12), Borja-Villel
advanced the idea of conceiving of a public art collection in terms of ‘common goods’ (or
what Michael Hardt calls ‘the common’). In Hardt’s (2010) understanding of the term, the
common is the antithesis of property in both its public and private iterations. It is a resource
that cannot be bought or sold because it always already belongs to everyone. When this
concept is applied to the public collection of an art institution, it subverts the manner in
which the third sectorthe state perceives public collections as ‘assets’ that can be capitalized
on, proposing instead that the public art museum be ‘[…] considered a custodian of goods
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that belong to all’ (Borja-Villel 2010, 283). As such, it calls for public collections to be
released from their ‘pseudo-ownership’ by the state and returned to the commons for the
purposes of self-education and, more generally, for the expansion of social knowledge
through culture. Crucially, the conception of the public art collection as ‘common goods’
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refuses the individual cultural or monetary value of one work above another, and places
artifacts, and archival documents such as photographs, books and papers on the same level of
works of art.
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Having defined these three strategies of resistance, Reilly devotes the main body of the book
to a series of case-studies of exemplary exhibition models that variously draw on these
strategies and address the exclusion of female, non-white and LGBTQ artists from art’s
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historical canon. Each of these detailed and thoroughly researched accounts makes reference
to the critical responses these exhibitions received, both good and bad, and how this reflected
the milieu in which they were realized. The critique that arises most commonly among
respondents is thatto exhibitions that include, highlight or forefront Other artists, is that they
are essentialist; that ‘inclusivity’ comes at the price of ‘artistic quality’ or, as asserted earlier,
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that such exhibitions no longer have a place in our post-colonial, post-identity politics world.

The final chapter functions as a provocation to all those curators and art world actors who
still have their heads buried in the sand. Prompted by Reilly’s depressing statistics and
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buoyed by her call to action, I decided to conduct a statistical analysis of some the group
exhibitions I have curated, in the process addressing the question she poses to all curators:
‘What are your [unconscious] biases?’ (p. 224). I started with the first group exhibition I
curated, a UK touring exhibition entitled Air Guitar: Artist’s Reconsidering Rock Music
(2002-03). I was deeply shocked and embarrassed with the results: 19 male artists, 2 female
artists and 0 non-white artists. Skipping forward in time to the last group exhibition I curated
(to see if I had gotten any better), I audited an exhibition I co-curated with another female
curator: Kim L. Pace. The tally for this exhibition: Cult Fiction: Art & Comics (2007-08) was
better, but it still fell far short of being equitable: 17 male artists, 9 female artists and 2 non-
white artists. I have to bow my head in shame and admit to having had sexist and racist biases
in the curatorial decisions I made in the past.

Having taken the decision some ten years ago to abandon the art world (prompted by my
deep dissatisfaction with its incremental neoliberalisation), today I work as a lecturer in
Visual Culture and what is glaringly obvious to me on a day-to-day level (aside from the
neoliberalisation of the public university) is the gender balance in the art school where I teach

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(and it’s fair to say, art schools in general). Everyday my lecture and seminar groups are
comprised of at least 75% women and 25% men (and sadly, in Ireland, a small minority of
students of colour), and it’s not unusual to have a class of women only. How, then, does the
75% of women passing through the art schools become 25% in the museum collections,
biennales, private galleries, private collections and auction houses? ‘Why’, as Linda Nochlin
asks in her seminal 1971 essay: ‘…Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (cited in
Reilly 2018, 22). Reilly concludes that the problem is systemic ‘it lies not in our hormones if
we are women, or in the color of our skin, if we are people of color – but in our institutions
and our education’ (2018, 22). The art system, then, is fundamentally skewed against Other
artists, seeking, as it does, to replicate its white Western, patriarchal values.

While I assume full responsibility for the role I have played in unwittingly perpetuating the
art world’s sexist and racist values, and share Reilly’s position that curators should be held to
account for their discriminatory practices, the blame for the art world’s inequality cannot fall
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solely on the shoulders of its curators who put together (consciously or unconsciously)
exhibitions that omit or marginalize Other artists. In the conclusion, Reilly points to the
culpability of all the art world’s players, but most pointedly to its 1% elite actors, namely its
dealers, its media representatives, its collectors (and hedge fund managers), its patrons and
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donors, its boards, its directors, and its policy writers. The art world’s systemic racism,
sexism and lesbo-homophobia is perpetuated by this 1%, whose best interests are served by
maintaining the status-quo.
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Rielly calls for a number of urgent ameliorative measures. She begins by addressing curators,
calling on them to be better informed, to conduct more thorough research and to appoint
curatorial advisors when looking at artists from geographical regions with which they are not
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familiar. She also calls for the diversification of museum boards, for the appointment of
women and non-white curators to senior management positions, for the monitoring of
museum programmes and collections for diversity, and for commercial galleries to represent
more ‘Other’ artists, so that their collectors have a more equitable selection of works to
choose from. Here, it could be added that both curators and art institutions should regularly
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measure the concordance between their bios (their good intentions) and their logos (their
actual deeds) and act to address disparities as and when they arise. Reilly makes the case that
until equity of representation is achieved, specialized museums (like the Studio Museum in
Harlem), and revisionist and area studies exhibitions still have an important role to play.
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Finally, she calls on Other artist to speak out against their maginalization and to name and
shame curators and institutions (2018, 219-25).

But I don’t think she goes quite far enough. She leaves out one key area of discrimination
that shapes the art world: class. The straight, white male actors who sit on its museum boards,
write its policy papers, runs its auction houses and commercial galleries, and write for major
newspapers, are also predominately middle or upper class. The art world perpetuates this
class inequality by limiting access to those that do not possess the requisite cultural capital to
be part of the art system. In Europe this has been perpetuated by the increase of student fees
in many public universities making it more difficult for working class students in particular to
justify studying art when there is little prospect of being able to pay back the mountain of
debt they will accrue in the process (£30,000 for a bachelor’s degree fees in the UK).
Achieving a truly equitable and egalitarian art system, then, requires dismantling the art
world’s classist institutions alongside its, sexist, racist and lesbo-homophobic ones and by
encouraging the participation of the whole of society.

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Such a radical proposition is made by the Irish artist Kerry Guinan in Liberate Art (2016), an
artistico-political action in which she adopted the persona of a politician and ran in the 2016
Irish General Election as an independent candidate. Her single-issue campaign focused on
‘liberating art from class’ (Guinan 2016), and her electoral promise was to replace all class
based art institutions – including arts councils, museums, galleries, public art commissioning
bodies and art schools – with accessible, egalitarian and publically funded art facilities for all.
Within her political programme art schools would be replaced with bottom-up, learner-led
local art training programmes that, by guaranteeing access and financial support for everyone
who wants to be an art worker, would obliterate the skewed system of current provision for
the arts and its resultant divisions. While Guinan’s proposition is doubtless a utopian one, it
points to a fundamental issue that needs to be addressed: if we are ever to achieve an
equitable art system, there needs to be parity of access for all (regardless of race, sex or class)
and that can only come about through a bottom up, peer-led value system.
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Reilly’s book represents an important handbook for young curators (and for old ones that
need to change their ways), but it’s also vital reading for everyone who works within the art
world whether they comprise it’s 1%, or what Gregory Sholette (2010) terms its ‘dark
matter’. It will doubtless shape my future teaching and enter my compulsory reading lists.
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Notes
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(1) Reilly uses the term ‘Other’ artists’ to refer to artists that do not conform to being either
straight, white or male.
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(12) Manuel Borja-Villel focused on acquisitions by artists from regions like Latin American
(including Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and the Tucamán Arde collective), and Eastern Europe
(Maja Bajevic, Danica Dakic and Deimantas Narkevicius), but also by looking to artists
working within the West whose work deviated from the linear trajectory of modernism
(Philip Guston, Antoni Tàpies and Brassaï). Another strand of his acquisition’s policy sought
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to emphasize crossovers between art, poetry and theatre (including figures like Henri
Michaux and Samuel Beckett), narratives that had largely been ignored by the modernist
cannon because of the perceived ‘impurity’ of their interdisciplinarity.
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References

Borja-Villel, M. 2010. Manuel Borja-Villel: Director, Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina
Sofía, Madrid. Artforum, Summer: 282-284.

Bourriaud, N. ed. 2009. Altermodern: Tate Triennial. London: Tate Publishing

Guinan, K. 2016. Liberate Art (press conference), Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin,
February 15.

Hardt, M. 2010. The Common in Communism. In The Idea of Communism, C. Douzinas and
S. Žižek eds., 131-144. London/New York: Verso.

Reilly, M. 2017. What is Curatorial Activism?. ARTnews, November 7, 2017. Accessed April
5, 2018. http://www.artnews.com/2017/11/07/what-is-curatorial-activism/.

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Sholette, G. 2010. Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. London:
Pluto Press

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