Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating

Reilly (Women Artists) delivers a fiery rebuke of the exclusionary art world and charges museums and galleries to be more intentional about amplifying the voices of women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. Reilly opens by detailing a slew of dispiriting statistics regarding the underrepresented groups of people in museum collections: for example, of the 410 canonical works on permanent view at N.Y.C.’s Museum of Modern Art, only 16 are by women. The bulk of the book then chronicles several dozen groundbreaking exhibitions from the mid-1970s through 2016 that intentionally countered the predominantly white, straight, and Eurocentric hegemony of the museum and gallery world, such as Jean-Hubert Martin’s Magiciens de la terre (Magicians of the World), which was a “postcolonial exhibition that eliminated any sense of hierarchy between the 50 Western and 50 non-Western participants,” and curator Dan Cameron’s Extended Sensibilities, held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1982, which was “the first attempt by a U.S. museum to reflect the concerns of the homosexual community.” The book concludes with a chapter detailing specific courses of action to amplify the voices of marginalized artists—for example, media outlets could conscientiously devote more coverage to them, and museum boards could be more diverse. This is a timely and prescient call to action aimed at art world insiders. [em](Apr.) [/em]