What does a curator do for an artists?

Question

I have a friend who is a wonderful visual artist, painter and fashion designer, but has no business skill. I intend on using my business and marketing skills to propel her career and I am trying to learn more on how to help her.

Answer 1

i don't think you would actually be a curator; a curator is someone who manages a museum collection. now if you open a museum of only your friend's work, then you would be a curator; otherwise, sounds like you want to be her manager, agent, or promoter, or something like that.

Answer 2

MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art
The course was set up in 1992 and is the first postgraduate programme in Britain to specialise in curatorial practice relating to contemporary art. It is designed to offer both a vocational training in and an academic study of curatorial practice The programme provides an introduction to the ways in which contemporary visual arts are funded, presented, interpreted and managed in Britain and internationally. Students gain practical skills in curating exhibitions and managing art commissions and are exposed to a wide range of professional curators, critics, artists and administrators. The MA Curating Contemporary Art is co-funded by the Royal College of Art and Arts Council England.

Answer 3

A curator of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., archive, gallery, library, museum or garden) is a person who cares for the institution's collections. The object of a curator's concern necessarily involves tangible objects of some sort, whether it be inter alia artwork, collectibles, or historic items.

The role of the curator will encompass: collecting objects; making provision for the effective preservation, conservation, interpretation, documentation, research and display of the collection; and to make them accessible to the public.

In contemporary art, the curator is the person who organizes an exhibition. Thus, to curate means to arrange a collection to achieve a desired effect. A new figure in contemporary art is the freelance curator, who does not have affiliation with any particular gallery or museum. Harald Szeemann of Switzerland is a good example of such a curator.

Today, as art institutions face an array of new challenges — management and financial to media and digital related — the role of the curator is being re-thought. One consequence of this has been the emergence of academic courses in contemporary art and curatorial practice (e.g., at the Royal College of Art, UK, Bard College, USA, Université de Rennes II, France, etc.). "Independent curators" can develop their own idiosyncratic methods for exhibition, be invited by museums and galleries to curate exhibitions in their spaces or operate in hybrid roles (publishing, collecting, installing, designing etc). "Tactical curating" is a term used by independent curator Roger McDonald (based in Tokyo with Arts Initiative Tokyo) to refer to the peculiar characteristics and advantages of operating independently.

Some argue that when curators prevent others from capturing and reproducing digital representations of their art, they are failing to act as stewards of human cultural heritage, and preventing people who are not able to afford to travel to see the original collections from enjoying them. Cory Doctorow criticized the Neon Museum in Las Vegas [1] on these grounds. The Digital Michelangelo Project [2] has also been criticized for not releasing 3D data of the David sculpture.