Nineteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Curatorial studies in the sphere of contemporary art is a relatively recent development in the academy, with the first curatorial schools stemming from the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study program in the late 1960s. Two decades later L’école du Magasin opened at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain in France in 1987, and was followed by numerous programs emerging in the mid-1990s. In Canada, it was not until 2001 that a graduate program in curatorial studies was started at the University of British Columbia. As a result, only in recent years have scholars actively begun to interrogate and theorize what it is that curating in the field of contemporary art does. There is even less work that is specifically about curatorial methods. In this paper, we will explore the intersection of curatorial methodology in contemporary art and sociological ethnography through an exhibition developed collaboratively between us—a curator and a sociologist—entitled Articles of Faith. We discuss how a three-year, multi-sited ethnography that investigated the burgeoning relationship between visual art and religious innovation in Canadian Christian communities led to an exhibition of contemporary art exploring Christian hegemony, and what that process made clear about discursive gaps in how curation is understood as a method.