I once spent an afternoon on a beach in Mexico looking through a pile of small sea-shaped stones that clumped together above the tide line. I picked them up one at a time looking for the prettiest or most unique or most interestingly shaped. I went through hundreds, maybe thousands, finding ten or so I liked. Suddenly I realized that here even, here in Mexico on vacation, I was curating.

For a group show, the curator decides on a theme and then selects work that fits under this umbrella. This is harder than it looks. One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen by beginning curators do is to come up with a great theme, only to find out there just isn’t enough work that fits it to make a decent exhibition. Good themes occur best out of the work the curator has seen. This means looking at thousands of art works by hundreds of artists. Thematic threads will appear to you. “Aha, these people are all working around the issue of __________” It can be subject matter like nudes or still lives. It can be some aspect of the treatment of the subject, like overt sentimentality or gothic darkness. It can be some technical aspect of the production, like web sites under 100K or sculptures made on the computer. Or it can be some combination, like interactive artworks referencing biological systems.

Even an exhibition of the work of a single artist needs curating. Someone must choose the best and most illuminating works that cover an artist’s career. Not too many to give the audience an overload and not too few, either.

Then the work needs to be displayed properly. What order will provide the audience with a continuing revelation about your theme? Very important is the need for clear and illuminating statements about what the theme is about, what each individual piece means and what they share with the others. Proper didactics can open up the mind of the viewer to ideas they might not arrive at by just looking at the work.

Ultimately it is all about the audience. A good curator takes the audience by the hand and tells them a story about art, clearly but quietly, never getting in the way of the story each artwork tells on its own.