Graduate Seminar

The Logic of the Curatorial: Topics in Contemporary Art

Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice
Graduate Program in Fine Arts
California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA
2020, 2021

This seminar studied experimental methodologies of exhibition-making by focusing on three general areas of inquiry—the archive, the curatorial, and the contemporary.

A series of graduate-level assignments—readings, digital exhibitions, projects, group critique, and discussions—offered students opportunities to contemplate new modes of making work as they relate to research, knowledge production, aesthetics, and curating. The seminar sought to broaden dialogue on the expansive possibilities of the exhibition form, issuing new debates on aesthetics as they relate to turns from the sensual to the cognitive in contemporary art. The course problematized and raised questions about what is at stake in the field of art when artistic research mimes the methodologies of and aligns itself with other fields of scientific inquiry and academic knowledge production.

Reading and analysis of texts by theorists and curators combined with a close study of artworks and exhibitions, the Logic of the Curatorial lent students a vocabulary to situate their practice within current debates in contemporary art while potentially imagining new forms of participation in the field.

Syllabus