Learning Resources Hatton Art Gallery

How to Be a Curator is a classroom handout resource, offering templates for teachers to bring art curation into the classroom; facilitating art appreciation, conversation and debate.

How to be a curator pack PDF (1.4 MB)

Art UK is a fabulous online resource housing 1000s of digital collections from museums and galleries all around the UK, including local ones like the Laing Art Gallery, the Hatton Art Gallery, and the Shipley Art Gallery One of the features of the site is that once you have registered and made a free account, you can search the many images and collate your own curation from the collections. You can make a stored image bank that you can title, offer descriptions to and share online with any one you want to give access to, or the wider online community if you wish. To offer an insight into this process, Colette Whittington our MAGPIE artist has shared one of her curations on artuk.org entitled Theme Generator, which she has populated with images linked to the 4 themes named on the template Theme Generator spinning wheel: Love, On a Journey, Nature and Us, and Unequal. The images she has chosen should be shared with the class to help them with the practical task; so they can make decisions for their own curations. This might best be done by printing off the images in advance to make a stockpile for pupils to choose from.

N.B. The images provided are only a starting point, teachers may decide to create their own or add to or replace Colette’s collection.

Pupils are then encouraged to work in small groups. Spinning the Theme Generator wheel, they will get a randomly chosen theme to work from. The aim is for them then to create their own exhibition by choosing and linking the print-out images to the group’s theme.

This will make more of an impact if it is a directed exercise where the group discuss their reasons for the images they have chosen; and make a case for its inclusion in the gallery. Collective decisions need to be made by the group in discussion to edit and arrive at the final exhibition selection. The group will then draw and make a miniature 3-D model of their curated exhibition for public display.

In her own practice Colette Whittington has become increasingly interested in the philosophy behind Slow Looking, an approach to viewing art based on the idea that we need to spend considered time with it to make genuine discoveries and find personal connections. Galleries around the country are successfully pioneering mindfulness techniques in gallery spaces, to encourage audiences to engage meaningfully with works on display. In conjunction with our be a curator resource pack, Colette would like to also encourage class groups to practice a mindfulness technique before they start the task, to trial the same approach. The Slow Looking Animation video is a six -minute meditation aimed at focussing the young curator on the task ahead, supporting Slow Looking to make real connections with the art works presented. 

Does using the animation have a positive effect on the task? We would love to know your results!