The curator position has become increasingly professionalized, and many of the top jobs now go to curators with Ph.D.s.—barring many people who lack the time or funds to fulfill this kind of study. And upon graduation, many fledgling curators and art professionals will work for years for very little pay or job stability, requiring them to rely on familial support to get by, a 2017 ArtSy article found (Windmuller-Luna, a Princeton Ph.D., actually exemplifies this. Her position with the Brooklyn Museum is technically a part-time role). These factors shut out many people who don’t already have money or deep connections to the art world.
But for black curators in particular, the art world’s insular circles and lack of diversity can drive feelings of isolation and disenchantment, with little recourse. The net result is that the vast majority of the country’s artistic spaces shut out black people as curators, even as black artists create more and more of the art featured in them.
As one black curator told The Root for an earlier report, curators shouldn’t be forced to specialize in areas specific to their background—that insistence would effectively shut out black curators from specializing in Renaissance art, for example. But black American and Latinx curators are underrepresented across the board in the art world, (which effectively remains a majority-white space) making such comparisons moot. Black curators don’t get those opportunities; white curators do.
Until the art world addresses its equity issue—and confronts the many barriers to entry people from marginalized and underrepresented communities face in telling their own stories and collecting their own art—the conversation about who gets to curate what isn’t going anywhere.
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