As a first-time attendee at the 2013 Association of Art Museum Curators conference, I did not know what to expect when I walked into the welcoming reception hosted at Sotheby’s New York office. My specialty is American Indian art and I knew from looking at the list of registrants that I was one of only three attending the conference who shared my specialty. That is correct: three out of approximately 350 attendees. I did not expect to meet the pillars of my discipline—other conferences provide those opportunities; however, what I found was a group of colleagues who were fascinated to hear about my interests and experiences, and in many cases, identified me as a resource to tap in the future.

Many museums have some collections of American Indian arts; although, few have staff with the knowledge and experience to assess these collections, identify cultural sensitivities, or how to handle repatriation issues. I come from a department with two curators, and both of us specialize in American Indian arts. We have a large collection and extensive experience working with this collection and collaborating with Native communities. Identifying and effectively communicating your skills, knowledge, and experience to your colleagues of other disciplines in other institutions through networking helps to integrate yourself at AAMC, but also provides a service to other member institutions.

From this conference and the various networking opportunities provided, I realized that one way I can serve the Association is to make myself known to others as a resource. Attending conference sessions is always a benefit you receive as an individual as the speakers share their knowledge and expertise; however, just because you are not a panelist does not mean you have nothing to provide to others. Taking the time to meet your colleagues, share ideas, and offering your assistance to those who could benefit from your skill-set is a vital resource you can provide and one that makes the AAMC conference such an important yearly event to attend.

I have heard many times before that the best conferences are those where you give as much as receive. Each of us has value that we can share with our colleagues and the AAMC conference is a venue unlike any other where this value is identified and appreciated.

"Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing,” wrote Oscar Wilde. As a presenter at the AAMC Annual Conference in the Pecha Kucha Slam section, I am grateful for my grant because it allowed me to harness the experience of hundreds of curators at one time and use their comments and criticisms to improve both my public speaking ability as well as an exhibition very dear to my heart.

Because the focus of the Pecha Kucha section was on the presentation of an exhibition in planning stages rather than one already completed, I was given the motivation to consider the exhibition as a whole instead of the scattered piecemeal way I often begin the process. This greatly aided me in compiling resources and in determining layout.

The exhibition I presented, "Detroit: the abandoned city?” was one that I have been working on outside of my job as the Assistant Curator at the Boca Museum of Art, Florida, and so the competition took something over which I normally would have dawdled and forced me to really address the issues that come with an exhibition proposal: sourcing artists, images, and references.

The Pecha Kucha setup was also helpful in that rather than presenting a fully formed idea, a closed concept, it allowed for brainstorming from audience members. Following the talk, curators from the Philadelphia Museum, a Tokyo museum, the Peabody-Essex, freelance curators, and a previous curator from LACMA all offered helpful suggestions on artists to include in the show as well as the overarching narrative.

In fact, some of the artists that the other curators suggested for inclusion even dovetailed which was a sure sign that they should be added to the show. Besides the encouragement and helpful suggestions, simply chatting with the other curators during the reception was infinitely helpful and enjoyable.

In a matter of hours I took a poll on some registrarial concerns with which my museum has been wrestling, I got multiple opinions from experts in contemporary Latin American art on a possible donation we’ve been considering, and was extended the offer to visit a number of museums to continue discussions. It was so refreshing to spend time with other curators. Admittedly, curating can sometimes feel isolating despite the constant contact with docents, artists, and the public.

Meeting with hundreds of people who all are familiar with, and have opinions on, social practice art, the care of conservation, and philosophical issues in the arts can really hearten an individual in the creative field.

I have a renewed vigor now both for the exhibition I am planning as well as my profession in general and I think that was reflected when I returned to Florida. I opened an exhibition on May 7^th and so unfortunately couldn’t stay for the MoMA portion of the conference but my enthusiasm relayed itself to the opening – a group show of Floridian artists – and thus I received many emails and calls of thanks the following day, many more than I normally do, as I hold this exhibition annually. For both myself and my associate who also attended the meeting, Marisa Pascucci, Curator of 20^th Century and Contemporary Art at the Boca Museum, the conference was a resounding success and we made many new contacts, learned much, and secured a few new shows. Artists have their studios to meet with others of their ilk to exchange ideas and offer support, and curators have conferences like this one to do the same.

Last year’s Annual Meeting was the first I attended. It was an amazing spectacle that was nearly too much to take in. The 2013 Annual Meeting was different. This year I felt an undeniable sense that I re-dedicated myself to art history and a whole slew of professional standards that sometimes seem ancillary even though they are the forces that drive nearly all of my decision-making on a day-to-day basis. Perhaps I felt this because I spent a fair amount of time preparing for a Pecha Kucha presentation that made me analyze my relation to museums and the history of art in a broad sense. Delivering my presentation gave me an unexpectedly strong sense of ownership in the AAMC and curating as a profession. I believe this experience is at the heart of the AAMC’s mission and the reason we share our experiences and research.

The panels on Museums & Civic Responsibility, Innovative Conservation, and Participation, Engagement & the Curator all dealt, to some degree, with the profound challenges of collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting art in the name of the public trust while still fulfilling our profession’s high academic standards, standards that often seem to alienate the aforementioned public. There does not appear to be a singular approach that will bridge this gap. What became apparent to me as I tried to articulate an answer to this quandary for the sake of a blog entry was this; the answer starts with curators and then other museum professionals. It is the human element in our interpretations and how we articulate them that will make our institutions relevant both civically and academically. If both of these goals are taken into account when a project is in its gestational period, I think both will be more easily attained. This is more or less the tact Holland Cotter urged us to take in his Keynote Address, and I agree with him.

Thank you to all presenters for sharing your work with us and giving us all a great deal to discuss.

This year’s AAMC conference in New York provided a platform for discussions that went on far longer than the sessions themselves. Two sessions in particular sparked dialogue about the relationships between curators and other museum staff, namely educators and development officers.

A panel entitled "Museums and Civic Responsibility” proved to be about more and different issues than I’d expected. Audience engagement has been a hot topic in museums for several years, but institutions have met the challenge in very diverse ways. What I thought would be about visitor services, outreach to under-served communities, and possibly the use of technology to engage audiences on local issues took an interesting turn when Salvador Salort-Pons of the DIA shared his museum’s approach to education and curation. The relationship between educators and curators has long been complex and is changing rapidly. I and others that I spoke with later in the conference were quite frankly shocked to learn of the level of participation DIA educators have in the curatorial process. Whereas at my home museum, the MFA, Boston, educators enter the picture when labels and gallery text are written and after a show opens steering some related programming, at the DIA an educator is paired with a curator from a show’s inception and has a lot of say in the delivery of a curator’s project and also in its concept and approach. To learn that educators there write the labels and curators edit them, as opposed to the opposite tactic, among other such responsibilities caught me by surprise. Have educators overstepped their bounds? Is the traditional art of curating itself at risk of extinction? Will educators play an increasingly active role in shaping content itself? Very interesting indeed.

Another complicated and sometimes fraught relationship is that between curators and development staff. With funding growing increasingly scarce for all museums the few grants to be had are especially prized and the application process more competitive than ever. The workshop on grant writing hosted at the Museum of Arts and Design was illuminating and tremendously helpful. What do granting organizations want to see? What makes a successful proposal? James Bewley of the Warhol Foundation, an organization vital to the work of contemporary curators such as myself, strongly cautioned against allowing development staff to write proposals for curators revealing that his panelists could sniff out such applications easily and are inclined to dismiss them. How does the average over-taxed curator find the time to write these important documents? How would that affect the relationship with and role of their development officer(s)? I have plans to meet with one of my grant writers to review my notes in relation to an upcoming project.

Attending this year’s conference was an enriching experience, which provided me greater insight into the changing face of our field and lasing connections with great colleagues at intitutions across the country.

I have been working in museums since 1999, but only recently, in the last 3 years, been working as a curator. So, because of my previous experience in the museum field, I came to the AAMC conference in NYC —my first—as both a participant and observer. In the keynote lecture, Holland Cotter’s admonition to curators to "be an artist yourself” and "put life in art,” I think, inadvertently captured the theme of what I took away from the conference: the need for creativity in curatorial work. In the Pecha Kecha talks, I heard how my fellow curators demonstrate an artistic practice by being creative in their research, organization, and execution of ideas. I also saw how creativity abounds in collaborative activities, such as conservators, educators, and curators working together to create memorable and engaging experiences for visitors.

Over and over again, I learned how curators must be "artistic” in how they overcome obstacles, be they bureaucratic and political at big museums, or financial and logistical at smaller museums. I enjoyed hearing from others "in the trenches” who face the same types of challenges that I do and who have come up with some new ways (or revived tried and true methods) of dealing with those issues. Those interactions over coffee or at the lunch table were invaluable to me, both as a means of encouragement and practical advice. I also participated in a mentoring session, which was very helpful and productive in a more in-depth way as I was able to pick my mentor’s brain about specific projects.

Lastly, having the conference in New York City afforded me the opportunity to add extracurricular activities to the conference, such as visiting the Met, the Guggenheim, the Frick, MoMA, the Neue Galerie, as well as other galleries, which was helpful in not only viewing really great works of art but also learning about other museums’ presentation strategies. In all, the conference underlined to me, what I believe Holland Cotter was trying to get across, that curators can (and should) be as artistic or creative in their practice as the artists who they study and present to others.