TRANSLATING PRINCIPLESÂ FROM ART CURATING TO ART THERAPY PRACTICE
THE RESEARCH STUDY
This research study was designed to answer the following question: Is it possible to identify principles from current art curating practice and translate them into art therapy practice? The purpose was to provide an art-based lens to conceptualize art therapy practice for art therapists who wish to use current art practice as an alternative framework for their work. I used a grounded theory methodology within this study to guide me through the data as I discovered and generated the five principles of curating located through this research.
OVERVIEW OF THE RESEARCH PROCESS
This section explains the steps of the grounded theory research study beginning with the initial interviews and concluding with the creation of the website.
Following IRB approval, I contacted three art curators to participate in semi-structured interviews.
I emailed the informed consent letter and a questionnaire to each curator prior to our interview.
I created a piece of art prior to each interview to prepare and to visually represent what I knew about the curator and her setting of practice (images 1-3 above). I gave these images to each curator after our interview.
I interviewed each curator for one hour in the setting in which she practiced and audio recorded the interview. I observed the setting where each curator worked while taking field notes about my observations.
I had the audio interview material transcribed into writing.
I read each interview transcript and reviewed the field notes then I created an art piece to visually represent the material and explore it on a deeper level (images 4-6 above).
I hung the transcribed text and the art piece corresponding to each interview on the wall. I coded the data line-by-line using action codes then bunched the codes into categories (Charmaz, 2006).
As categories arose from the data I used memo writing to clarify my ideas. As an extension of the memo writing process I created an art piece to reflect my evolving understanding of the emergent themes (images 1-3 below).
I consolidated the codes from each interview until I felt that I had arrived at saturated themes.
I grouped the themes from the three interviews and discovered five curating principles that reflected the most prevalent codes that emerged from the data.
I linked the five principles of curating to quotes in the interview material and to concepts in the art curating literature.
I translated each curating principle into art therapy by linking the principle to concepts and practices in the art therapy literature, and then described each principle in terms of art therapy.
I illustrated the translated principles by writing vignettes from my own art therapy practice.
I audio recorded each vignette then created a video to illustrate each story using my artwork and photos.
I created this website to share the five principles and their connection to art therapy practice.
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The contextual essay, available on this site, provides a more thorough description of the methodology, method, data collection, and analysis.
INTERVIEW PARTICIPANTS
This section describes each interview participant, their setting of practice, and themes from the interview material. The descriptions are accompanied by the images I created to reflect on the themes that emerged from the curator's interview material. The curators I selected for the research interviews were selected due to my interest in their area of practice as well as my belief that their practice and setting could offer useful information to my study. I chose to interview three curators because it was a manageable number for my initial study. I chose curators who worked in the Midwest because I wanted to be able to conduct the interviews in person and observe their setting of practice. The curators that participated in the study were all Caucasian women, between the ages of 35 and 65. The demographic, geographic, cultural bias and limitations of this study are discussed further in the contextual essay.
CURATOR 1: MUSEUM EXHIBITION
This curator worked within a fine art museum. Her work encompassed overseeing a permanent collection and creating special exhibitions from the collection. Her primary audience was visitors to the museum in a large metropolitan area.
The curator focused her interview responses on creating special exhibitions inspired by the museum collection. The themes from this interview were in regards to constructing an exhibition and the experience of the audience. In the interview this curator revealed the joy and creativity she finds in her work constructing exhibitions. She described a detailed storyboarding technique she utilized to envision the entire exhibition including the art and objects, the spatial elements, and the flow of the story. Her work focused on expanding the knowledge and current relevance surrounding the museum’s permanent collection. She shared that she hopes that visitors leave her exhibitions feeling as if they have been transformed as a result of new insights gained from being immersed in the show.
CURATOR 2: HOUSE MUSEUM
This curator’s primary work is overseeing the collection at a house museum. This term refers to a historical property that has been preserved and repurposed as a museum. This house museum and its contents is a collection of fine art and other objects donated by an artist. She also curates exhibitions of other artist’s work within this museum and at other exhibition venues. Her primary audience is students, faculty, and the public who visit the museum to study the collection. I selected this curator due to her focus on nonmainstream art and the importance of collecting, hoping that her perspective would offer useful material for the study.
The themes from the interview included, the importance of juggling multiple histories in a single space while maintaining the present as the time of significance for visitors. This interview stressed the importance of everyday objects and the human urge to collect and organize within our own homes. This curator explained that she hopes that visitors to the collection leave with an increased understanding of the intersections of life and art and how multiple histories can operate simultaneously within a single space.
CURATOR 3: TEACHING GALLERY
This curator oversees a teaching gallery within a college setting. The gallery divides its time between student shows and special exhibitions focused on socially engaged art practices. This curator has worked in other museum settings and in a variety of socially engaged community practice settings. Socially engaged art practice is defined as art that is socially engaged, where the social interaction is the art and is a reaction to the extremes of individualism prevalent in the art world (Finkelpearl, 2013). I selected this curator because of her lengthy experience working as a curator in multiple settings both in and out of institutions. I was also interested in including her perspective of curating socially engaged art practices because of prospective similarities with art therapy. The curator saw potential parallels within social art practice that I had not posed in my questionnaire, including the difficulty measuring the effectiveness of art when it is applied to social issues. She described challenges of finding funding for socially engaged art and the suspicion that sometimes surrounds the unmeasurable transformative process of art. The data from this interview focused around the challenge of trusting the artist’s process to problem solve social issues when the process is not predictable or linear.
