#askacurator Day
Follow @BucknellGallery
September 19, 2012
Have you ever visited a gallery or a natural history museum and found that the exhibits provoked questions or deeper interest? Of course you have! That’s a curator’s dream 🙂 Normally, the relationship between audience and curator is a veiled one, denying the opportunity for these questions to asked and answered… until now.
On September 19th, Ask a Curator Day will take to the Twitter stage. The concept is simple: Tweet at your favorite participating museum (like the Samek & Downtown Galleries!) with hashtag: #askacurator and passionate supporters of the 
arts, sciences and history will respond to the things/exhibits that interest you most.
Ask A Curator Day derrived from a concept developed by Museum Marketing Specialist, Jim Richardson, who I had the privilege of emailing with over the past few days. After seeing how social networking and the hash-tag-trend snowballed several years ago, Richardson encouraged museums to tweet things like #followamuseum in effort to boost the Arts footprint among a site generally geared towards tracking the celebrity.
#askacurator expanded greatly this year and will relaunch on 9/19 (this Wednesday!) This is an opportune event for the Galleries to partake in in hopes of gaining a stronger national and international following, while boosting traffic to our social media sites. The Art Galleries at Bucknell University are listed among the hundreds of participating museums world-wide. What makes this even more special is that we, as a smaller institution, get to join the “top dogs” and partake in a global discussion surrounding the Arts.
The advantages of #askacurator stem from many trajectories; the chance to hear directly from our audiences and gain support and following from regional arts initiatives as well as global. But, what interests me the most is the ability for social networking to be a catalyst in redirecting dialogue from an institutional voice, to a public one. We are continually seeing how art is shifting to a more collaborative, “tech share” kind of medium, such is the case with artist collaboratives such as Raqs Media Collective and MANIFEST.AR with whom we are currently exhibiting.
Perhaps this is why I enjoy that our website functions as a blog more than a static page. The opportunity for collaboration can only exist under conditions such as these. It is my hope that September 19th opens the door for discussion to become a continuious evolution as Wednesday comes and goes.
I encourage you all to start following the Galleries our Facebook and Twitter sites and visit our website.