The Oberlin Review
<< Front page Arts October 13, 2007

A Day in the Life of a Curator: Derstine Explains

In place of a cubicle, Andria Derstine has a museum. Instead of a fax machine, she has stacks of prints. While most people spend business trips locked in a conference room, she spends them shopping in New York’s art galleries.

Derstine is the curator of western art at Allen Memorial Art Museum.

Being a curator is not just about knowing how to hang a painting. Curators are in charge of conservation, planning exhibitions, acquiring new pieces, research and museum publications.

Even with frequent visits to various museums and pilgrimages to certain pieces of art, most people rarely think of the orchestrator, the curator. Maybe that is because the curator works to let the art speak for itself in order to allow the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions.

Even Derstine herself downplayed the more glamorous aspects of her job.

“A lot of it, like anybody else’s job these days&hellip;is answering e-mails&hellip;.I’m sitting at the computer and I’m not necessarily every day spending eight hours, by any means, with the art.”

But there are days when she does.

The basement of the Allen holds its permanent collection, keeping more than 12,000 works under lock and key.

When planning an exhibition, a curator will first go through pieces the museum already owns to see what can be built from there.

All of the works currently on display are from the Allen’s permanent holdings.

Over the past 90 years, Derstine and her predecessors have worked to expand the collection to where it is today. Although many pieces have been donated, often by Oberlin alumni, curators are constantly looking out for new pieces of interest.

This is where trips to New York come in.

“New York is certainly where we would go visit galleries and dealers,” she said. “But it’s also the case that a lot of dealers, especially dealers with works on paper, travel; they make these trips through the Midwest. So we have a lot of people bring things through that we can then look at and decide on.”

Although exhibitions are rarely planned around a recent acquisition, the inspiration can come from a particular piece.

One of Derstine’s exhibitions currently on display, The Modern Landscape, started with Claude Monet’s The Garden of the Princess (1867). Although usually prominently displayed in the sculpture court, the painting was requested for a New York exhibition. The painting was shipped eastward and Derstine filled the empty space with a painting of the Pont Neuf by Camille Pissarro. Because of this change, the rest of the show seemed to speak to the Pissarro rather than the Monet.

“So when the painting came back,” Derstine admitted, “I actually just didn’t want to have to take it all down, everything I had just done there.”

Stephanie Wiles, the Allen’s director, suggested a special exhibition to highlight the Monet.

“From that, it sort of led on to this idea of what would look good, what would make sense. So I literally went down into storage and pulled out all the painting racks and found as many landscapes as I could find. [I] tried to find the ones of the best quality and make a coherent show around this idea of the modern landscape,” Derstine said. “But it all came about because this Monet was coming back and we wanted to put it somewhere prominent and kind of give it a new context.”

Although this is one of many ways that curators at all museums come up with ideas for their exhibitions, particular to college museums such as the Allen are teaching exhibitions.

Whether at the request of a professor for a specific class or simply for the curator to learn a bit more about the collection, teaching exhibitions are a constant aspect of the museum.

Once a curator has an idea for an exhibit, says Derstine, it can take drastically different amounts of time before the paintings are on the walls, the sculptures on their pedestals.

“It depends on how hard you’re willing to work and how fast you’re willing to work,” said Derstine. “It is true that if you’re working with works in your own collection, obviously you can do things much more quickly than if you need to borrow something from someone else and work partially with their schedule.”

Even with an extensive permanent collection, a curator may decide that the exhibition would truly benefit from one particular piece, explained Derstine. After doing curatorial research, he or she would write a letter to the particular institution that has that piece. If the request is approved, a whole series of specific instructions must be followed to pack and ship the piece.

Since the Allen has so many works in storage, it often receives requests for loans as well.

“So we kind of make that same decision — the piece that they want to borrow, is it really, really necessary for the show? Is it going to say something new or is it just that they want any work by that artist? And in that case, we’d be obviously less likely to lend because&hellip;you are subjecting [the artwork] to wear and tear and to potential problems.”

So far, the pieces loaned by the Allen have not been seriously damaged.  Also, Derstine notes, “Because we have so many works, a lot of them actually are in storage, and if it’s just going to be sitting in storage, no one’s going to be seeing it anyway. That’s a reason that we might want to lend.”

The size of the collection relative to the size of the Allen inevitably leaves many works unseen, though the curators work to cycle through the pieces.

This isn’t so different from a larger museum, though, where seven galleries can be committed to one exhibit. “At any museum, you have a limited space to work with. And that’s just something that you keep in mind while you’re pulling the works out, kind of arranging them around,” said Derstine.

But then again, this isn’t any museum.

“That’s the beauty, I think, of being here, at a college art museum,” Derstine said. “I feel like I’ve got all the benefits in my job of being a curator at an art museum, which I am, but also working with students and the [capability] to teach.”

She paused.

“So for me, it’s really the best of both worlds.”


 
 
   

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