Curating.info

In this interview, Bill Arning, the curator of exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Patricia Fuller, curator of public art, discuss MIT's public art collection. The collection was recently named one of the ten best campus art collections in the United States by Public Art Review.

The interview is brief, which makes the comments on conservation of public art stand out in their frequency. I suppose it is a classic problem, that new acquisitions are sexy and are relatively easier to find funding for, while the maintenance and preservation of acquired works is a harder line item to sell to a donor or funder. Of course the ways in which art is funded varies widely from country to country, so we need to analyze this situation in an American context. What is made clear in the interview is that the List Center could use more money for conservation, and what is made clear by looking at the map of MIT's public art (link to the map below), is that they have many pieces, which must have required a great deal of money to acquire. We can make some assumptions based on that, I suppose.

Read the article here: List Curators Discuss Evolving Face of Public Art.

You can download a map of MIT's public art pieces by clicking here.

Curator Dianne Vanderlip is featured in this Denver Post story.

Vanderlip has brought more than 7,000 works to Denver on an acquisitions budget of exactly zero. It's something nobody mentioned when she was hired.

"I was in Philadelphia and Denver kept calling and calling," she recalled. She'd never been to the city, but her husband, an architect, had a meeting in Fargo, N.D., and, thinking it was nearby, she decided to fly here to check out the job.

"I got out of the taxi and I saw that building," she said of the daring Geo Ponti-designed art museum, "and I thought to myself, 'Anybody that had the chutzpah to put up a building like that, well, I wanted to build a contemporary art collection for that city."'

Only after she took the job did she think to ask about the acquisitions budget. "You have to raise it," they said.

(via Artkrush)