MA Curating

This practice-based Masters programme is for current curators as well as graduates new to curating, artists, and other creative practitioners, interested in exploring the curation of contemporary art through exhibitions, events and other creative platforms.

Working alongside the MA Fine Art programme, the course is multi- disciplinary in nature and encourages you to explore the relationship between audiences, curators and artists.  You will critically engage with debate around the increasingly hybridised ways in which curators work. The skilled lecturers will encourage you to respond to the context of recent developments within the field of curating and discourse surrounding the display, distribution and interpretation of art works and cultural objects.

You will develop new practical and theoretical skills in curating exhibitions, the funding and commissioning of arts projects, and will be supported to develop your own curatorial project that is realised at the end of the year within a public exhibition or event.

Your studies will be supported by a combination of tutorials, group critiques, seminars, as well as visiting lectures with professional curators, workshops, ‘behind the scenes’ tours and studio visits. Department research specialisms include the role of the artist-curator, artist-run spaces, institutional critique, critical theory, psycho-geography, and site-specific installation and interventions.

• Study within an independent specialist arts school with multiple opportunities to collaborate across programmes and disciplines
• Work experience opportunities with nationally acclaimed cultural partners such as Meadow Arts which brings unique contemporary arts projects to places where art is not usually found
• Access to HCA’s excellent programme of cross- college visiting lecturers
• Students are encouraged to develop innovate approaches through the synthesis of theory and practice.
• A broad range of lectures from practicing artists and designers.
• To engage with the creative community at HCA.

You will have opportunities to work collaboratively with other creative practitioners and organisations, and will benefit from external partnerships that include New Art West Midlands, Meadow Arts, Sydney Nolan Trust, Canwood Gallery, and heritage organisations in the region. You might for example develop projects around art in unusual places, new thinking on the environment, animating heritage sites or reimaging the use of public space within city centres and empty shop units. You will be encouraged to consider the role of curation in challenging and reconsidering habitual ways of thinking about art: curation as a tool for social change.

The course will enhance your position as an independent curator with a range of professional practice skills, and provide an entry point for a career in galleries, arts organisations, and the cultural industries more broadly. The development of practice-based research methodologies will also prepare you for further postgraduate study.

• Applicants should have an personal understanding of their particular discipline and be able to demonstrate their ability to sustain research at MA level.
• Applicants should be (or about to become) graduates. Preference will be given to good honours graduates although exceptional applicants from a non-academic background will also be considered.
• Professional makers, designers, photographers, craftspeople and fine artists who wish to reposition their practice may also qualify.
• Applicants should submit a short proposal of up to 500 words, detailing why they are applying to the programme of study, supported by a portfolio of current practice, which will form the basis of discussion within the interview.