Hunt, A., 2021.

Curator as Zelig

Andrew Hunt argues that it is time to abandon hierarchies of culture and to re-evaluate the past, and more than time for the curator to step back to allow others - the marginalised, the self-taught and the overlooked - to enter the picture.

Over the past two years we have seen a rise in publications about what constitutes the wider role of curatorial practice. This includes online archiving as a productive medium, practical ethics of activism, performativity, radical museology, the decolonising of institutions of all sizes and the wider inclusion of disabled, incarcerated and self-taught artists in a recalibration of art history. This strand of curatorial legacy-making has been developed, in part, by the exhibition and catalogue 'Outliers and American Vanguard Art' from 2018 by Lynne Cooke and 'Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration', 2020, by Nicole R Fleetwood; both projects make important contributions about previously marginalised artists, rewriting previously regarded knowledge and its subtexts.