Pew Charitable Trust

Pigeons on the Grass, Alas: Contemporary Curators Talk About the Field

Link: Pigeons on the Grass: Pew Center Arts

A new book from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage featuring contributions from Carlos Basualdo, Peter Eleey, Helen Molesworth, Hou Hanru, Rita Gonzalez, Jens Hoffmann, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Ralph Rugoff, Robert Storr, Ingrid Schaffner, Claire Tancons, Nato Thompson, Namita Wiggers, and many more.

Distributed by D.A.P. / Artbook
The book is available to puchase here

Oct 31, 2013

“Wide-ranging, unprejudiced, repeated, protracted, and in-depth looking constitutes the bare essentials of the curator’s craft.” —Robert Storr

“I’m not interested in perpetuating the increasingly artificial distinction between curators and artists.” —Claire Tancons

“Working in the public sphere can allow projects to escape the bracket of art, and often they can simply exist as unexplained phenomena in the world.” —Nato Thompson

In October 2013, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage (the Center) published this pocket-size book, which gathers together interviews with 41 curators to talk about their influences, aspirations, and challenges, offering a candid assessment of the field at this moment in time. Pigeons on the Grass, Alas is illustrated with 24 drawings by Pew Fellow Sarah McEneaney.

Excerpt from the Introduction

“We at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage like to believe that we are experts at convening experts. Almost weekly, we host thought leaders—including artists and cultural producers—from around the world at our headquarters in Philadelphia. They come to participate in round-table discussions, run workshops, and meet with our grantees and other constituents in one-on-one consultations. They collaborate with us on research, helping us to identify and then analyze critical questions in the fields that we fund. They also adjudicate our grants—and are thus integral to the annual distribution through the Center of millions of dollars to support visionary projects from artists, organizations, independent curators, and presenters in our region.

“This book is a convening of experts unlike any other we have organized. Why? Because the ‘convening’ only takes place within its pages, rather than inside our own walls. We started by inviting professional curators—pigeons, as we affectionately designated them in homage to Gertrude Stein—from near and far to respond to an evolving list of questions about their approach to their work—a ‘pigeonnaire,’ if you will. Intentionally general, the pigeonnaire probed such topics as influences, daily practice, issues in the field, artist-curator relationships, and the curator’s responsibility to society at large. Over the course of a year, the pigeons dropped by with their answers, and as they did, we summoned them to roost on the Center’s website. When more than 40 had nested, we decided that it was time to capture the moment in an absorbing little pocket book.

“But we had our own questions: Was there a way, we wondered, to rethink the presentation so that it would be a conversation rather than a series of individual interviews? Could we juxtapose, to provocative effect, answers reflecting distinct viewpoints? How could we construct a situation so that the reader might believe she is witness to a real-time dialogue as it unfolds? We decided to organize the contents not by contributor but according to the questions we had asked in the pigeonnaires. We then strung the questions and answers together in a continuous narrative that reads something like the transcript of a large meeting, or, in pigeon-speak, a kit. In the end, we think grouping the responses around key issues provides a relatively accurate portrait of common ground and fissures in the field of curating now. The pigeons have all been most thoughtful and candid, and we, pigeon fanciers, are deeply grateful to them all.”