On Thursday, September 30, as part of the Scripps-based conference, "Women in Cultural Production," three female curators came to the Humanities Auditorium to talk about their work and participate in a roundtable discussion. Because of the women’s very different fields, the panel succeeded in presenting a wide range of possibilities for future curators.

Mary MacNaughton, director and curator of Williamson Gallery at Scripps, moderated the discussion and introduced each speaker. Her introduction grounded the talk with a thought-provoking look at women’s historical place in the field of arts administration. She said that although curation is often thought to be a field reserved for women, women have historically served as a support staff for male curators. During World War II, some women were finally able to advance to the position of museum curator or director, but it was not until the expansion of the museum world from the 1950s to the 1970s that a wave of female graduate students were able to really penetrate the seal of the male-dominated field and become museum curators and directors.

Stephanie Barron, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, spoke first. Of the three speakers, Barron was the high-powered, corporate one. Dressed in a black suit and heels, she spoke loudly and confidently about her career path: the internships she had taken at the Jewish Museum, the Toledo Museum, and the Guggenheim, her persistance and determination to get a foot in the door, and her training as an art historian. The beginning of her talk was aimed at the future female curators in the audience, which seemed like a relevant and helpful topic to discuss at a women’s college. The problem with her method of presentation was that she made it seem so simple, as though hard work will always reap the same awards.

Barron took us on a slide tour of her life’s work, focusing on the challenges which many of her shows presented to her. A look into her career was a look into the established, elite art world–she talked extensively about the importance of loans from other institutions and the power which the lending institutions have over the shows that she puts on. Barron curated a show called "Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany," which displayed the works of modern art deemed "degenerate" by Hitler and his Ministry of Culture. Unlike the original Nazi exhibition of these artworks, which hung them diagonally, placed them claustrophobically, and denounced the art and artists, Barron’s show used exhibition methods which were flattering to the works. She said this was partly due to the politics of getting artworks on loan: no institution would have given their works had they thought they were going to be hung disrespectfully.

Many of Barron’s exhibitions have dealt with politically charged and controversial artworks. She definitely understands the profound influence that her position has on the general public and is trying to fulfill her responsibility as a cultural flagbearer. On becoming a curator, Barron said, "I learned the power of art, and politics, and history, and how tremendously linked they are."

Susan Schwartzenberg, who worked her way from a position as a photographer to her current post as curator at the Exploratorium (San Francisco’s science museum), spoke next. The Exploratorium was started by Frank Oppenheimer, the brother of Manhattan Project director Robert Oppenheimer. Schwartzenberg said that the museum is structured like a "giant think tank." She spoke on the challenge of trying to make science relevant to the average museumgoer, and how she helped the Exploratorium learn that "you can really bring in the story of a person and still teach science." For instance, she curated a show on memory which was based around an unknown Italian artist’s obsessive paintings of his childhood village. The show incorporated both information on the artist’s life and brain dissection demonstrations by members of the museum’s staff. Schwartzenberg’s talk presented the audience with an idea of how one can fuse different, seemingly oppositional interests into one’s career: for Schwartzenberg, these were her social conscience, her interest in science, and her interest in the arts.

For me, the most fascinating story came from independent curator Trisha Ziff-Meyer, even though she was the only one reading from a script. Her shows have reflected her interest in labor issues and community activism. She has a vaguely British accent, but she is now based in Mexico. She is also the president of the website, "Zone Zero," which is devoted to digital photography. (Unfortunately, I didn’t ask for the address, and all I found while looking for Zone Zero on Altavista was some extremely bad art by two young lads named "Chris" and "Mike.")

Though Ziff-Meyer’s job sounded very interesting, it also sounded like if she were to start out again at the beginning of her career, she could end up somewhere else entirely from where she is today. No recipe for success given by this curator. Ziff-Meyer worked with different community arts organizations in her younger days, helping out at myriad photography studios in housing projects to try to make them better places to live.

Reflecting her unique position as an independent curator, Ziff-Meyer told the audience, "Curation is such an open journey. I don’t want you as an audience to be intimidated by all these things." Ziff-Meyer "think[s] of exhibitions as multiple narratives," and is trying today to confront societal ills in her exhibitions. One photography show that she curated in Ireland in the 1980s, called "Derry Camerawork," focused on youth unemployment. The show was exhibited in community spaces and was seen by many people, despite its modest budget. In shows such as this one, Ziff-Meyer has tried to portray an image of community that the mainstream media has ignored. A show that she curated called "Hidden Truths" is now on tour. For this show, she worked with the families of 15 boys killed on Bloody Sunday in Ireland. She wanted to construct a journey through that day. The viewers of the show are not the only ones to be moved by it: many of the family members of casualties with whom she spoke only began to talk about Bloody Sunday with this exhibition, 20 years after the fact.

Although all three of these curators were interested in exploring socially provocative themes in their shows, the two curators working for institutions stressed the difficulty of their occupations. Schwartzenberg pointed out that the Exploratorium was never allowed to do a show looking at solar or nuclear power because of its association with Robert Oppenheimer. She also said that she couldn’t get approval to do an exhibition about AIDS until ten years after she started asking for it. Explaining the institutional perspective, Schwartzenberg explained, "You can’t get your visitors to discuss these issues, because they might explode." Barron added that provocative shows "are expensive, they are difficult to get loans for." This is because artists would rather have their works viewed in solo shows and not used as historical evidence for a larger thesis.

The event organizers did an excellent job in finding three curators who worked off of one another to present the field of curation as open and exciting. After the two and a half hour talk, I heard students talking outside, all praising a different one of the three women. The event provided students with a thoughtful, in-depth look at a possible future career.