This book present a model to help you to make sense of exhibitions your museum has curated. Whether implicit or intentional, decisions made about interpretive focus, curatorial power, and curatorial intent indelibly shape the resulting exhibition and determine who will be best served or disenfranchised by it.
Ann Rowson Love is Associate Professor and Director of the MA/PhD program Museum Education & Visitor-Centered Curation in the Department of Art Education at Florida State University. She has more than 30 years of experience as a museum educator, curator, administrator, and scholar in art museums. She presents and publishes widely on collaborative curation, art museum interpretation, visitor studies, and feminist systems thinking. Her co-edited books include Visitor-Centered Exhibitions and Edu-Curation in Art Museums and Systems Thinking in Museums: Theory and Practice. She serves as Vice-Chair of the Curators Committee (CurCom) Professional Network of the American Alliance of Museums.
Pat Villeneuve is Professor and Director of Arts Administration in the Florida State University Department of Art Education and a 2021 Fulbright scholar to Belgium. She has had lengthy careers in museums and academe and has published and presented extensively on art museum education, edu-curation, visitor-centered exhibitions, paradigmatic change, and the Dimensions of Curation model. Pat developed the graduate program (MA and Ph.D.) in edu-curation at Florida State University and published Visitor-Centered Exhibitions and Edu-Curation in Art Museums in 2017 with Ann Rowson Love. She keynoted the ICOM International Committee for Education and Cultural Action conference in Leuven, Belgium, in 2021.
A must-read publication for museum professionals and advocates, Dimensions of Curation: Considering Competing Values for Intentional Exhibition Practices offers a critical and dynamic approach to the assessment of curatorial practice. Villeneuve and Love demonstrate a unique understanding of the nuanced relationships that drive and govern cultural institutions. Rather than presenting a one-size-fits-all narrative, featured essays - from an impressively diverse range of practitioners, scholars, and emerging professionals - illustrate the variety of institutional and communal considerations shaping exhibition development in the twenty first century.