Welcome!
The Curatorial begins.
By Steven Henry Madoff
Steven Henry Madoff • 2/1/25
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Welcome to The Curatorial. You will always find in the Abstract a summary of what each section is about, followed by specific details about the essay, transcript, review, video, or portfolio you are about to read, look at, or listen to.
Welcome to The Curatorial.
We’re launching our new international journal, which you can read further about on the About page, with a small number of pieces that will give you the first inkling of what I hope we’ll contribute to your thinking over time: a sense of the cornucopia of ideas around what curating is, roving between the scholarly and practice-based, more whimsical and critically inclined, future-facing and historical.
For example, for the inauguration of The Curatorial, you’ll find two essays more theoretical in nature by members of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN), a global group of practitioners and academics devoted to thinking about curating and curatorial studies. Workshop members also contribute the initial entries in the lexicon we’re developing around crucial terms associated with curatorial practices, with new entries to each term’s definition, along with whole new terms, on a regular basis. They’re joined in the launch by Amira Gad, Conservator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, who writes here about the evolving relationship between digital art in its various forms and cultural institutions. Amira’s piece serves as an introduction to this section of the journal, The Algorithmic State, concerned with the digital realm as it enters more and more fully into artistic and curatorial production. Istanbul- and London-based curator Bige Örer offers a video in the section she has invented for the journal, Walking & Talking, which features her speaking with curators around the world as they traipse through their respective cities and discuss their work. On Site, introduced with a review by Fulbright Scholar Tom Koren, presents critiques of exhibitions, not from the perspective of the art but instead delving into how a show has been curated as a means to share examples and ideas about exhibition-making. And Roulette is what (I hope) it suggests: a roll of the ball on the roulette wheel or a throw of the dice, meaning a more random contribution that may touch on curating in some other way, or perhaps just a cultural topic of interest. The first piece is about curatorial education by the world-renowned Australian art historian and theorist of curating, Terry Smith.
As the ideas build under the various subject banners you see on our entry page, these areas of concentration will deepen. We start with these initial pieces as we invite more writers and slowly augment our offerings—a journal like an herbarium or a grow box under the shine of contemporary insights. Grow with us. Join us.—Steven Henry Madoff, Editor-in-Chief
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Steven Henry Madoff is the editor-in-chief of The Curatorial and the founding chair of the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).