Curatorial Research Bureau
A bookshop, learning site, exhibition and public program uniting education and consumerism inside a contemporary arts institution.
Directed by James Voorhies
Yerba Buena Center of the Arts
701 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA
September 4, 2018–May 8, 2020
Designed and built by Nate Padavick
Contributions by Ute Meta Bauer, Bik Van der Pol, Julia Born, Emmet Byrne, Yann Chateigné, Céline Condorelli, Janet Delaney, Allan deSouza, Elena Filipovic, Simon Fujiwara, Shoghig Halajian, Amanda Hunt, IN-FO.CO (Adam Michaels and Shannon Harvey), John Kelsey, Na Kim, Suzanne Lacy, Maria Lind, Nancy Lim, Josiah McElheny, Metahaven, Aleksandra Mir, Shahryar Nashat, Frances Richard, Sarah Rifky, Zoë Ryan, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Marianne Wex, among others
Made possible with funding and support from California College of the Arts and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; realized within my responsibilities as Chair of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts
Located inside Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Curatorial Research Bureau was a two-year platform of exhibitions, academic seminars, visiting-artist projects, and public talks.
Bookshop
As a bookshop, the CRB responded to the increasing hybridization of contemporary life, where a “bookshop/screening” or a “coffee bar/artist talk” conflates the consumption of material and immaterial culture as equally valuable modes of cultural exchange and experience. Using this fuzzy line between audiences and consumers, the CRB bookshop sought to provide new possibilities for intersections among art, exhibition and education.
Programs
Offering informal discussions, slide shows, readings, and performances, CRB was a forum where students, faculty, and the general public convened for collective learning. The objective was to bring audiences closer together—physically, in public space—for frequent and informal engagement with art and ideas. To that end, the program offered three program models.
AfterWord was a series of intimate, by-invitation-only gatherings with visiting arts practitioners following larger public events at CCA and nearby institutions. The purpose was to involve graduate students, faculty, invited guests in focused engagement with visiting practitioners, giving them a unique opportunity to delve deeper into topics touched upon in larger public presentations.
Call + Response was a rather open invitation to Bay Area cultural producers in the fields of design, architecture, humanities, civic affairs, and urban planning to work with the CRB to foster dialogue among audiences. The format drew on the long history of democratic participation, civic gatherings where speaking and listening are valued as essential parts of public discourse.
Open Seminar created opportunities for CCA graduate academic seminars to step into the public realm, with faculty, students, and visiting practitioners deciding how to transformed the typically reserved seminar format into an open program with invited attendees from the arts and culture scenes of the Bay Area.
Exhibitions
Case Studies identified a book to unfurl into an exhibition of archival materials, photographic reproductions, periodicals, ephemera, sound, and text that amplify ideas explored by the featured publication.
Case Studies shape-shifted on a monthly basis. This program drew on the CRB book inventory as a vital resource for the practice of curating (identifying, collecting, organizing, repositioning, juxtaposing, and mediating) in the public realm.
Pedagogy
Curatorial Research Bureau became was a hub of learning for CCA’s curatorial practice program. The situation provided an unparalleled environment for training curators with graduate seminars held at YBCA, offering an immersive learning site where students connected with continually evolving book inventories, participated in programs, and intersected with visiting practitioners from the Bay Area and globally.
Documentation
