"We are all curators"

Joseph Beuys, a German artist from the 20th century, was of the firm belief that “we are all artists.”

As organizers of this exhibition, we wanted to take that quote one step further, to challenge the notion of what it means to put together an exhibition, or what is appropriate enough to be included in one. Therefore, “We are all curators” was born, a project which sought to dismantle the traditional expectations of what it means to be a curator, or how much one must know about the specific discipline to be qualified as one.

Subsequently, we reached out to several people within the Gainesville community of various ages, backgrounds, ethnicities, and fields of interest. Each of them received a formal invitation—which you can find displayed next to this text—to participate via the submission of ANY object of their choosing, whatever they believed deserved to be put on display. Furthermore, participants justified their choices by answering questions inspired from Muntadas’ 2007 Project, aimed at unpacking the “meaning, process, development, and completion of a project, resulting in an overlay of different levels of reading.”

The beauty of “We are all curators” lies in the diversity of our participants, how each of them approached answering the questions differently based on their backgrounds, with some being more technical in their writing, others more anecdotal. On display are a wide array of objects, some more traditionally classified as “art,” whereas others push the limits, conveying their meaningful connections to their objects in the stories that they shared. As John Hennigar suggests, it is not only about objects, it is about how those objects reflect who the people are, what their lives are like, how they thought, what they valued, and the context from which people come from.

Laura Rincon Rodriguez & Maria Kuran

Address

1523 Union Road

Website

Grinter Gallery Website