Editor's Note: Pigeons on the Grass Alas: Contemporary Curators Talk About the Field is published by the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative. Sean Dockray & Fiona Whitton are the founding directors of Telic Arts Exchange and the Public School.
What singular experience, circumstance, or environmental consideration over the past decade has most profoundly impacted the way you approach curating today?
The housing and art market bubbles had the effect of nearly doubling our rent in the span of a year. It was clear that our time was limited and so we wanted to squeeze everything out of that space that we could, and it was during this time that we started The Public School.
By then we'd also moved our program towards more music, performances, screenings, and generally we focused on bringing in artists who worked in public or in the gallery (using the exhibition space as a productive site rather than a terminus). Eventually, our time ran out and we couldn't keep up with the rent anymore so we moved the school into a cheaper basement and got rid of our physical gallery space entirely. It was almost as if our hands were locked, clutching onto that space and when it was finally pulled away, there were new possibilities. We immediately started a video project called the Distributed Gallery with several other small businesses in the neighborhood (Fongs, Ooga Booga, and Via Cafe) as well as a fictional gallery in Berlin, which was experienced exclusively through publicity and media. And since then The Public School has become an international project, with groups of people in ten cities organizing classes.
For whom do you curate? What is the responsibility of the curator to her/his audience?
At first we were surprised at the idea that a curator possesses an audience, but today everyone has an audience, and even those people in the audience each have audiences . . . .
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