An illuminating guide to a career as a museum and art curator written by acclaimed journalist Holly Brubach and based on the real-life experiences of an expert in the field—essential reading for someone considering a path to this challenging, yet rewarding profession. Go behind the scenes and be mentored by the best to find out what it’s really like, and what it really takes, to become a curator. Esteemed journalist Holly Brubach takes readers to the front lines to offer a candid portrait of the modern curatorial profession. Brubach shadows Elisabeth Sussman of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to reveal how a top curator actually works. In Becoming a Curator, Brubach reveals the path to becoming a curator in today’s ultra-competitive art world, from education to exhibition. Sit in on acquisition meetings, plan a splashy new show, go on a studio visit with an up-and-coming artist, and attend an opening at famed David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea. As museums step into the 21st century, the role of curator is changing and more crucial than ever. For those passionate about art, culture, and museums, this is the most valuable informational interview you’ll ever have—required reading for anyone considering this dream career.

An illuminating guide to a career as a curator written by acclaimed journalist Holly Brubach and based on the real-life experiences of an expert in the field—essential reading for someone considering a path to this challenging, yet rewarding profession. Go behind the scenes and be mentored by the best to find out what it’s really like, and what it really takes, to become a curator. Esteemed journalist Holly Brubach takes readers to the front lines to offer a candid portrait of the modern curatorial profession. Brubach shadows Elisabeth Sussman of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to reveal how a top curator actually works. In Becoming a Curator, Brubach reveals the path to becoming a curator in today’s ultra-competitive art world, from education to exhibition. Sit in on acquisition meetings, plan a splashy new show, go on a studio visit with an up-and-coming artist, and attend an opening at famed David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea. As museums step into the 21st century, the role of curator is changing and more crucial than ever. For those passionate about art, culture, and museums, this is the most valuable informational interview you’ll ever have—required reading for anyone considering this dream career.

This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring more than 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.

Now that we ‘curate’ even lunch, what happens to the role of the connoisseur in contemporary culture?

Drawing on his own experiences and inspirations - from staging his first exhibition in his tiny Zurich kitchen in 1986 to encounters and conversations with artists, exhibition makers and thinkers alive and dead - Hans Ulrich Obrist's Ways of Curating looks to inspire all those engaged in the creation of culture. Moving from meetings with the artists who have inspired him (including Gerhard Richter and Gilbert and George) to the creation of the first public museums in the 18th century, recounting the practice of inspirational figures such as Diaghilev and Walter Hopps, skipping between exhibitions (his own and others), continents and centuries, Ways of Curating argues that curation is far from a static practice. Driven by curiosity, at its best it allows us to create the future.

An updated edition of this essential practical handbook for all those involved in or studying the dynamic field of curating.

From the Joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces and BBC Television series including Lucy Worsley: Mozart's London Odyssey and Six Wives with Lucy Worsley, available on Netflix. “Worsley is a thoughtful, charming, often hilarious guide to life as it was lived, from the mundane to the esoteric.” -The Boston Globe Why did the flushing toilet take two centuries to catch on? Why did medieval people sleep sitting up? When were the two “dirty centuries”? Why, for centuries, did rich people fear fruit? In her brilliantly and creatively researched book, Lucy Worsley takes us through the bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen, covering the history of each room and exploring what people actually did in bed, in the bath, at the table, and at the stove-from sauce stirring to breast-feeding, teeth cleaning to masturbating, getting dressed to getting married-providing a compelling account of how the four rooms of the home have evolved from medieval times to today, charting revolutionary changes in society.

Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones, first published in Latin in 1565, is an ambitious effort to demonstrate the pragmatic value of curiosity cabinets, or Wunderkammern, to princely collectors in sixteenth-century Europe and, by so doing, inspire them to develop their own such collections. Quiccheberg shows how the assembly and display of physical objects offered nobles a powerful means to expand visual knowledge, allowing them to incorporate empirical and artisanal expertise into the realm of the written word. But in mapping out the collectability of the material world, Quiccheberg did far more than create a taxonomy. Rather, he demonstrated how organizing objects made their knowledge more accessible; how objects, when juxtaposed or grouped, could tell a story; and how such strategies could enhance the value of any single object. Quiccheberg’s descriptions of early modern collections provide both a point of origin for today’s museums and an implicit critique of their aims, asserting the fundamental research and scholarly value of collections: collections are to be used, not merely viewed. The First Treatise on Museums makes Quiccheberg’s now rare publication available in an English translation. Complementing the translation are a critical introduction by Mark A. Meadow and a preface by Bruce Robertson.

Situated at the crossroads of performance practice, museology, and cultural studies, live arts curation has grown in recent years to become a vibrant interdisciplinary project and a genuine global phenomenon. Curating Live Arts brings together bold and innovative essays from an international group of theorist-practitioners to pose vital questions, propose future visions, and survey the landscape of this rapidly evolving discipline. Reflecting the field’s characteristic eclecticism, the writings assembled here offer practical and insightful investigations into the curation of theatre, dance, sound art, music, and other performance forms—not only in museums, but in community, site-specific, and time-based contexts, placing it at the forefront of contemporary dialogue and discourse.

Natural history museums have evolved from being little more than musty repositories of stuffed animals and pinned bugs, to being crucial generators of new scientific knowledge. They have also become vibrant educational centers, full of engaging exhibits that share those discoveries with students and an enthusiastic general public. Grande offers a portrait of curators and their research, conveying the intellectual excitement and the educational and social value of curation. He uses the personal story of his own career-- most of it spent at Chicago's Field Museum-- to explore the value of research and collections, the importance of public engagement, changing ecological and ethical considerations, and the impact of rapidly improving technology.