Artist Curators

Class Date: April 6th, 2011

Today in class we explored the extrmely unique talents of artist curators. The term curators employ gestures or emotions of assembling objects together in a certain way. One of the leading artist curators we discussed is Fred Wilson. He uses collections of paintings, crafts, or artifacts to create extremely unique collections. He is most famous for his incredible work "Mining the Museum." This artwork assembled various artifacts to highlight the history of slavery. The physical location of the items in these collections portray his emotions. For example, shackles were placed between golden goblets to distinguish the difference between high society and the horrors of the slave trade that once existed in America. Another work of Fred Wilson is his creation of black tear drops made from glass. This work is extremely creative because glass is actually just an extremely slow moving liquid just as tears pour down one's face.

Another artist curator we discussed was Mark Dion. The best way to describe Mark Dion is an archeologist, environmentalist, explorist, and scientist all rolled into one man. He is best known for making art out of his archeological digs. Mark would analyze an artifact or fossil found during his fieldwork and then focus on recreating it to make it look as authentic as possible. He was very interested in how people formulated opinions about the environment.