This Sunday, 21st September is #AskACurator or #AskaMuseum day so, in the run up do comment below with your questions for our curator or for any of our friends at museums in Kent!

#askacurator #askamuseum #Curator #Collections #Museumlife #museumcollections

Our latest newsletter is now out with details of our Piers Ottey ‘West Coast, Cannery Row to Yosemite’ exhibition from 3 October.

Limited intimate PV’s over the weekend of 3-4 Oct available.

Also we are taking part in #AskACurator 2020 ...

#AskACurator - Gallery curator, James Stewart, is on hand today to answer your questions.

Ask him anything, but hopefully art or gallery related!!

See his blog answering some of the questions raised last year:

https://www.zimmerstewart.co.uk/post/askacurator-2020

James Stewart, curator at Zimmer Stewart Gallery answers a selection of the 2019 #AskACurator questions in his latest Blog post.

See this online now & for the #askacurator2020 reply with your questions which James will answer here & also add to the...

Tomorrow we will take part in @AskACurator 2020.

This is your chance to ask me anything & I will answer.....#AskACurator

See our website to view the artists we represent & our online shop to see more works that we also deal in:

https://www.zimmerstewart.co.uk/ #contemporaryart

My timeline is currrently half the Supreme Court case and half @TheMERL doing #AskACurator. So what's @themerl's favourite court case involving livestock?

#AskACurator Apologies for going on longer than a TED talk. /22

#AskACurator The knowledge in museums have been historical vested in curators, & it will be curators & museum staff & invested scholars and members of the public, working with collections, who must & are & will challenge assumptions & decolonize & democratize that knowledge. /21

#AskACurator In short, directors (such as my former director) who have little or no experience in collections think exhibitions displaying community curating or decolonization are enough. /20

#AskACurator That's what's happening at @michiganstateu, and it's sadly undermining the production of knowledge. And, in a surprising way, that potentially undermines the work of decolonizing and democratizing museums. #museumsarenotneutral /19

#AskACurator So many museums are redefining curators as "content specialists" which is such an exhibition-focused definition it ignores how the important work within collections provides interns, volunteers, researchers, & the public with varied & important ways of knowing. /18

#AskACurator If folks are wondering why emeriti curators are listed on museum websites, it's because they remain important sources of knowledge. (It's thus unfortunate that my former director isn't thinking this way at all.) /17

#AskACurator So Twitter users didn't ask a question, but a museum intern in real life did, and I as a curator-without-a-collection thought I would share the answers and some thoughts about the experience. /16

#AskACurator The Latin root of "curator" is "to see" (understanding knowledge) and "to care." Curators are keepers, but they are also knowledge gatherers and knowledge brokers, part of a world system based on collections (and not only exhibitions). /15

#AskACurator As much as curators work with objects, they also work with people who have educated themselves about objects and with people who want curators to teach them with and about objects. Curators work with registrars and collection managers to make all that happen. /14

#AskACurator And when a curator leaves a collection that sort of connecting knowledge goes with that person. If I were a research scientist I could take my lab with me and continue on with the research. More difficult to do that as a curator. /13

#AskACurator But I wish to point out that for curators, collections are like scientific laboratories. We create systems not only to record human thought and action (makers, donors, users), but to test hypotheses and present findings using other aspects of material culture. /12

#AskACurator At this point you may be thinking I'm taking advantage of a timely hashtag to humblebrag. [Okay, a little.] /11

#AskACurator After some more discussion the intern looked at me and said "I really need to tell you that I wanted to work with you on my senior thesis. I am so sorry about what happened to you." [Insert ugly crying here.] /10

#AskACurator The intern experienced that "AHA!" moment and we began discussion how understanding collector intent links objects one to another in interesting ways and how that understanding informs the decision to take the collection, cataloging, and exhibition. /9

#AskACurator (I know my late friend David Jaffee would have been happy to work with this collection; his analysis of such goods made it easy for me to take in this collection.) /8

#AskACurator Fruit carved from marble. Boxes and furniture of cheaper woods grain-pointed to look like walnut and tiger maple. Pewter in silver forms. Imitative representations of fashionable and expensive goods. /7

#AskACurator .@michiganstate doesn't offer material culture courses, so the student had a problem with conceptualizing what tied these objects together. I gave him a clue: the collector was interested in the "middling sorts," not the elite. /6

#AskACurator We had a great discussion about the collection of faux-grained boxes and furniture, pewter, and stone fruit--seeming disparate subcollections, but I asked the intern to think about what the collector may have been thinking when he decided to buy these objects. /5

#AskACurator I had taken in a marvelous late 18th-early 19th century collection (from a donor who is still upset at why the director made the decision to terminate me) and the intern will be undertaking the collection's initial skeletal cataloging. /4

#AskACurator It was a bittersweet experience, to say the least, but a promise is a promise, I love my now-former colleagues, and I've the collections and curatorial skills and knowledge of this specific collection necessary for this student's success. /3

#AskACurator Today I returned to the @michiganstateu Museum collections center to supervise unofficially a History major to whom I had promised an internship. /2

#AskACurator I'm a curator without paid employment for the moment, having been let go without explanation by a new director at the @michiganstateu Museum. /1

Well, since the Museum's website is down, now's a good time to participate in #AskACurator! I'm happy to answer any questions you have about curating the Makeup Museum (even though I'm not a real curator and the Museum doesn't actually exist.) 😆

Oh yay, #AskACurator Day! This is when I note that I describe, transcribe, & encode (TEI-XML) manuscript fiction from during the age of print (~1750-1900) for a database (RDF fields will be in @18thConnect) Examples in your collection? Let me help make them more discoverable!