What Does it Take to be a Museum Curator? | Career Crush

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0:35The versatile Equinox tackles your entire day. The spacious Traverse fits your crew and your whole weekend. And tracks bring style with value you can count on. All infused with tech that has your back. So your drive always hits the right chord. Chevrolet. Together, let's drive. You know that part at the end of every episode where I ask for your career crush? For this episode, we took one of your suggestions. Museum curator. I love museums, but the last thing I'm thinking about when I'm walking through one is the person who hung the frame up on the wall or the person who wrote the description next to the masterpiece.

1:17Turns out that's actually a good thing and I learned that when I started to dive into what museum curators actually do. In this episode I learned that it's really about helping artists bring their ideas to a general audience and although that's a noble mission it's not always easy. This is an extremely competitive industry and a fair salary can be hard to come by. If you're passionate about art and those challenges don't scare you, keep watching to find out if you might be a good fit for this career.

1:54My biggest pet peeve is people who are walking backwards while holding their phone without paying attention to what's behind them. Don't do that. You'll break something. That's Natalie Bell. She's the curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, a contemporary art museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So what exactly do museum curators do? One way of thinking about curatorial work is, okay, you're a midwife, you're like helping an artist bring something into being. You're also a translator. You're maybe taking something that is primarily visual and helping put it into language. you're also telling a story and helping people enter into something that might be new, might be difficult, might be challenging, but there's a story to be told there.

2:44And it's your job to make them interested and make them care, give them a reason to care. As a museum curator, what does the day-to-day look like? The day-to-day can really range. Most days, I would say, are desk days, where I'm doing a lot of emailing, a lot of planning, a lot of correspondence with people. Conversations with artists are kind of one of my favorite parts of any day. As you can imagine, there is a lot that goes into making an exhibit. There's overseeing the transportation of the art. There's making sure it gets installed properly. Of course, there's making sure that the art doesn't get damaged.

3:23I wonder what in her mind makes a good exhibit. I'm often thinking about how the exhibition is laid out, how it's organized. That's sort of the basic thing. Oftentimes I'm looking at who lent the work, where did this come from? Oh wow, like they loaned this from Japan. Oh, this came from So-and-so's collection. Like spending a lot of time with the language around an exhibition. How are they interpreting the work? I also like watching what other people are doing in the space. Are they spending lots of time? Hey, it's Christy from Lululemon. I'm here at the office and we just dropped some really fun new summer colors in the Flow Y styles.

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4:50What's catching their attention? What are they connecting with, basically? Natalie began her career by making art, but she realized that she was better at interpreting it than creating it, which is what led her to museum work. I'm not somebody who studied art history or studied curating. I did degrees in philosophy both times, which is a little bit less conventional. What is a fair starting salary? Like, what is typical in this industry? And then, you know, what should you actually kind of strive for? It depends what city you're in, I think. The American Association of Museums has done a salary survey of the industry for a number of years.

5:35That's a useful resource. Got the survey. Okay. Starting from if you're just entering the field as a curatorial assistant, it says in the low range is around$25 ,000 and in the high range is around$46 ,000. For assistant curator, low end is$31 ,000, high end is$68 ,000. And then senior curator,$42 ,000 is on the low end,$105 ,000 is on the high end. And then for chief curator, which seems like the top dog here, 34 ,000 on the low end and 107 ,000 on the high end. Like, how do you live off of 25 ,000 in a metropolitan area or a city where a lot of these museums are located? It just doesn't even seem possible.

6:23And how do you do that? Internships are an entryway into the museum world. And Natalie herself interned at the New Museum and the Guggenheim. I ended up doing internships at both places at the same time. Historically, internships have been really important and a valuable stepping stone. They've also been really difficult, I think, for lots of people because they've been unpaid. That's changing now. I think more people are committed to paying their interns. In my case, I was waitressing a lot, and that was my other means. Unpaid internships are tricky. I took one in college too and worked at Old Navy on the side.

7:05You do it for the experience and for the line on your resume, and that's the tradeoff, right? But over the last few years, ideas around unpaid internships have changed a lot, and people are wondering if that tradeoff is really worth it. You know, someone who's interested in this profession wants to take an internship, but it's unpaid. Would you suggest that they take it for the experience or look somewhere else? You know, it's a personal choice. I would say no. And I wish I had held a line years ago, but it was just not something that people did at that time. And I was really accustomed to just trying to make things work.

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8:25Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. um regardless of how difficult it was um you know but yeah it's a personal choice I think it depends on your your own situation you might do an internship where you're just researching provenance or you're looking at looking at images for a catalog that will be published in two years um and you're writing artist biographies for a show that you'll never get to see.

9:13So, you know, internships can give you some insight behind the scenes in an institution, but you might not really get hands-on experience making a show. What I would caution is that, you know, in this industry, starting salaries can be very low. And one way that you get accustomed to that is by starting out by not getting any salary at all. So for these types of roles, what do hiring managers really look for in candidates? Writing skills, they look at, as with any job, a desire and an interest and some evidence of that commitment. One thing I've often told people who are interested in curating but don't know how to get a start is that you don't have to have a space.

10:02You can, you know, you can curate a show in your apartment. If I want to make a show, how can I make a show? And then make it happen, get some friends together and, you know, paint the inside of your parents' garage and hang some of your friends' work. And then, you know, it's up to you if you want to take it further. Do you want to write a press release for it? Do you want to make a little chat book? Do you want to invite somebody from your local paper to come? You know, all of these things then start to get, you know, your work off the ground and give you also the confidence to know that you have the capacity to do these things professionally.

10:41This job can definitely give you the creative fulfillment and connection to art that few other careers can. This industry is far from perfect. It's a profession where you really have to love the work, love what it means, and love what it can be. So it sounds like it was a ton of work for you to kind of keep going to take these unpaid internships to, you know, waitress on the side. What kept you, what motivated you to stay in this industry?

11:14Because I love art and I love artists, I can't picture feeling as fulfilled working in other fields. I think it just has this vast capacity for learning. And I take pleasure in that, but I also take pleasure in transmitting that through making exhibitions, supporting the work of artists, and hopefully bringing that to the public.

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