From Frieze Magazine, “Dictionary Corner,” December 2010.

curate

n.
[origin: medieval Latin, curatus a person who has a cure or charge (of a parish), from cura: see cure noun, -ate]
1 A person holding a spiritual charge.
Gen: an ecclesiastical or spiritual pastor.
2 A member of the clergy engaged as a paid assistant or deputy to an incumbent in the Church of England or in the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.
3 The priest of a Roman Catholic parish in Continental Europe. A person holding a temporal charge.
4 A curator; an overseer.
5 In Ireland: an assistant to a person selling spirits etc.
A bartender.

For further reading, here is a very concise etymology of the word “curate,” The Curate and the Curator, by Erin Kissane, in which she references another nice critical analysis, The Bias of the World Curating after Szeemann & Hopps, by David Levi Strauss in ArtLies:

Under the Roman Empire, the title of curator (“caretaker”) was given to officials in charge of various departments of public works: sanitation, transportation, policing. The curatores annonae were in charge of the public supplies of oil and corn. The curatores regionum were responsible for maintaining order in the fourteen regions of Rome. And the curatores aquarum took care of the aqueducts. In the Middle Ages, the role of the curator shifted to the ecclesiastical, as clergy having a spiritual cure or charge. So, one could say that the split within curating—between the management and control of public works (law) and the cure of souls (faith)—was there from the beginning. Curators have always been a curious mixture of bureaucrat and priest.

The focus of my research at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry has been artists working in scientific or technological environments during the last four decades (see Chronology of Artists in labs, tech industries, or science agencies). The mid 1960s marked an explosion of interest in cross-disciplinary projects– the paring of artists with engineers, or the placement of artists in scientific environments or industry– as exemplified by Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering, Art & Technology at LACMA, and the Artist Placement Group, all initiated in 1966. Contemporary artists working in scientific domains are heirs to the throne of these historic milestones, and have much in common with the prevailing spirit of the 1960s avant-garde. In her book Greenwich Village 1963, author Sally Banes argues that the work of the ’60s avant-garde had attributes of folk art, including the handmade & the functional, the incorporation of everyday materials, the inclusion of untrained and non-professionals in the creative process, and the refusal to participate in mainstream culture of mass production and consumption.

We call the art of traditional communities folk art– a term that implies not only function and form, but issues of training, subject matter, resources, and distribution. Folk art is embedded in the social process– it is art by the community for the community. Furthermore, it is made outside the sphere of professionalism: it need not compete in the contemporary market, and its makers are not trained toward that end. Whether this art is an object or a performance, it often appears unpolished and lively, since it is handmade and unique… What about the “tradition” forming in the Sixties artists– the avant-garde, which valued innovation over custom (the very opposite of folk art practice)? Is it possible to take folklore forms and folklore context out of their social milieu to consciously create a new American folklore from above, rather than from below?

The institutionalization of artists in scientific or technological environments never happened the way Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver had envisioned when they wrote the first statement of Experiments in Art & Technology (E.A.T.) in 1967.

The purpose of Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc. is to catalyze the inevitable involvement of industry, technology, and the arts… E.A.T. was founded on the strong belief that an industrially sponsored, effective working relationship between artists and engineers will lead to new possibilities that will benefit society as a whole.

My sense is that the practice has mostly moved outside rarified institutions and industries (the relationships were too complex and tied to capitalism and results-oriented economics), and into the hands of individuals and collectives (facilitated by networked communication which gave agency to maker culture, the open source movement, peer-to-peer sharing, crowdsourcing, etc.). From there, the types of activities exploded and yielded a variety of subtypes of Artists/Scientists/Technologists. Over the next week, I’ll fine tune this chart and add definitions, distinctions, and examples of each subtype.

We’re living in Pittsburgh, PA, where I’ve begun my Warhol Curatorial Fellowship at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University. The good folks at the STUDIO have set me up with a desk, a stipend, and a new iMac.

The STUDIO's mission is to support creation and exploration in the arts, especially interdisciplinary projects that bring together the arts, sciences, technology, and the humanities, and impact local and global communities.

My 17 minute ‘on foot’ commute from Wilkins Avenue is heavenly. We’re renting a wonderful three-story (plus finished basement) furnished home from two computer scientists who are living abroad. As such, we’ve got an elevator, full gym, water bed, dart board, outdoor grill, and a jacuzzi that’s sadly off limits (but perhaps could perform as an ‘encounter zone’). Just kidding, landlords. :)

My fellowship here is an outgrowth of the exhibition, 29 Chains to The Moon, that I curated for Miller Gallery in 2009. The exhibit title is a reference to Buckminster Fuller’s first book, 9 Chains to the Moon, – the title itself a metaphor for cooperation toward solving socio-economic woes. The exhibit considers how artists can contribute to rethinking the production of food, shelter, transportation and energy for a rapidly increasing global population. During my fellowship, I’ll develop a traveling version of the exhibit, and oversee a book sprint (more details on that later). The notion that overpopulation can be addressed before imminent catastrophe is gleamingly optimistic, and nods toward Fuller, and his radical ideas for improving the quality of life for all humankind via progressive design and maximization of the world’s finite resources. I’m also interested in understanding that same sort of humanistic, utopian aesthetic brandished by 20th Century World Fairs, the NASA Space Art Program, and poetic gestures like the Voyager Golden Record.

"Bernal Sphere" space colony, Gerard K. O'Neill, 1977

The first part of my fellowship will be a getting-to-know-you series of meetings with interesting people doing interdisciplinary projects on campus at Carnegie Mellon. I just met former STUDIO fellow, Axel Straschnoy, whose project here involved working with The Robotics Institute to create The New Artist or “art done by robots for robots.” It was fascinating to hear how Axel’s abstract concept (a robot creating art for another robot) was embraced by The Robotics Institute and approached as an empirical problem that could be solved using scientific inquiry. Axel is going to introduce me to the resulting robots this week.

From STUDIO for Creative Inquiry Flickr site: "The New Artist" is a project to develop art by and for robots undertaken by Ben Brown, Garth Zeglin, Geoff Gordon, Iheanyi Umez-Eronini, Marek Michalowski, Paul Scerri and Sue Ann Hong and Axel Straschnoy. It is being produced by Piritta Puhto.

As for Carlos, he’s been working at The Waffle Shop (an artist-run restaurant and TV show) and bringing home delicious wraps from their adjacent Kubideh Kitchen. He’ll be hosting a bi-monthly, yet-to-be-named TV show about music. Certainly, shades of his former KPFT Pacifica radio show, Moontower Radio, will be present.

Carlos' first go of it as a talk show host at The Waffle Shop.

Photos courtesy Aurora Picture Show, Melissa Hung, and Andrea Grover (me!)

During the ten years that I was with Aurora Picture Show, I hosted at least 300 visiting artists, and gave almost that many tours of Houston. Like an old cabbie, I have fine-tuned these trips into a scripted tour that features folk art environments, underground tunnels, celebrity grave sites, art cars, urban bayous, museums, mega churches, and art chapels. Imagine my gravelly voice coming through an old p.a. system as I humbly present to you, “Grover’s Guide to Houston, Part I.” Read this post on Glasstire.com.

Thanks to my friend Bree Edwards for suggesting I write it all down!

“Indirect Collaboration” is a blog that I and my indirect collaborators, i.e.,  SXSW co-panelists (Joe Alterio, Tim Lillis, Riley Crane & Josh Glenn), will be posting to in the lead up to SXSW Interactive. The theme of our panel is “The role of crowd-sourced input on the creative process.” I was invited to represent the art exhibition side of the equation, namely my involvement in organizing Phantom Captain: Art & Crowdsourcing at apexart, as well as a Never Been to Tehran, Never Been to Houston, and TxtMeL8r – all exhibits with works generated by the crowd. (Both of the Never Been exhibits were co-organized with artist Jon Rubin, my hero.)