︎

Practicing Curating: Parsons NYC

Fall 2025



Weekly Reading Responses




What was especially interesting in my reading was how contested the definition of “curating” remains. How does this uncertainty help us understand the role of curating? I believe Hoffmann resists the “dilution” of the term curating, and instead ties curating only to exhibition making as craft, as if the exhibition is the last bastion of discipline. Contrastingly, Lind stretches “the curatorial” into a methodology exceeding the gallery model, an understanding that has the potential to shape contexts as much as art itself. I took this as less of a disagreement and more as evidence of curating’s instability (the refusal to conform to a single mode)

I found Higgs' argument quite fascinating; they insist that art, not curatorial frameworks, drives exhibitions. While it is a modest claim, it is also remarkably radical; if art alters exhibition creation, then the curator’s power is always secondary, reactive, and contingent. This flips the hierarchy that Hoffmann defends, and yet Hussie-Taylor’s reminder of the word’s roots, “care of souls,” reframes curating in words that dissolve the opposition entirely. Here, care is about relation, not frameworks or formats; how can we retain conditions in which art and audience meet?

Together, these readings have presented the ideas that curating is neither a fixed art nor an expansion, BUT a mediation of negotiation. The value of curating lies in allowing space for tension between artists and institutions, object and audience, ritual and experiment. The ambiguity of curating is not necessarily a problem to be solved, but something to be acknowledged. Curating, then, is not about creating coherence but about sustaining the friction that makes art public in the first place




I quite enjoyed reading about Triple Candie's unauthorized David Hammons retrospective; in a way, it makes absence productive and underscores how much of our art history filters through reproduction, rumors, and institutional structure. Contrastingly, Morgner's essay on art fairs demonstrated how presence is "overdetermined", how art fairs (once peripheral) are at the center of the art world. Art fairs notoriously thrive on the network structure, creating space for dealers, collectors, and institutions. For me, this raises two pillars: absence as critique and presence as spectacle. What is an exhibition supposed to deliver? Heinich and Pollak deliver an intriguing conversation on curatorial authorship. Is curating able to continue acting as a critique? Is curating now just authorship and creativity? Theatrics? What does curating as custodianship look like now? Which produces more meaningful exhibitions: the professionalization or deprofessionalization of curating? Koh's Singapore Art Archive Project makes him both the archivist and curator. He doesn't just preserve materials, but he actively stages them, creating installations with his own framing. This, to me, is an example of professionalization, where Koh takes the reins and role as caretaker + creative author in his curatorial choices. His shows aren't neutral documentations; they carry his signature in how material is presented and contextualized. Opposingly, the Manifesta positions exhibitions as archives that speculate on the future, or curating as a future-based practice (constructing "the future's past, "archives in reverse).  I found myself in disagreement with this, as it feels flattening to the role of viewers, institutions, and audiences in deciding what survives. I believe Koh's SAAP is a rebuttal against the argument made in the Manifesta. Koh demonstrates that archiving can be a personal, grassroots process that remains unreliant on institutional infrastructures.