Hanbi Park, one of SITE Santa Fe’s Young Curators, reflects on the program which tasks high schoolers with curating an exhibition from start to finish.
This article is part of our Young Curators series, written by high school students taking part in SITE Santa Fe’s Young Curators program.
How do passionate high schoolers pursuing high creativity and art explore curation? SITE Santa Fe, a contemporary arts organization based in Santa Fe, offers a program that specifically allows for high school students to shape and delve into the rich tapestry of contemporary art.
SITE Santa Fe Young Curators is an after-school program hosted at SITE Santa Fe for high school students to get the opportunity to work with artists and curate a show. The students develop and pick a theme over several months and select works that revolve around that theme. The students then work as a group to bring their exhibition to life.
The Young Curators meet after school once a week for two hours, exploring locally curated shows and artists. This year there are eight young curators from Mandela International Magnet School, Santa Fe High School, and New Mexico School for the Arts. I’m a Young Curator this year, and this program interested me because I wanted to see what it was like to curate and select pieces for an exhibition.
Throughout the year, we got to meet many experts who work in various fields of art. One of the experts we met was Jaime Herrell (Cherokee Nation), a curator at Art Vault who was working with the Thoma Foundation. As students, we were able to ask about how she chose pieces to create a show and a bit about her background. This was an exciting opportunity because not only did she give an insight into her thinking on putting on an exhibition, but it also showed us a way that artists can make a living and pursue a possible career path.
Another lens of art we were able to explore as Young Curators was art and cultural journalism through Southwest Contemporary. Natalie Hegert and Lauren Tresp, editors at SWC, taught us how to write articles about art. They gave us the opportunity to be published and to explore in writing the many exhibitions that exist throughout the Southwest region. This opportunity allowed students to share their thoughts and opinions, and to learn new writing styles.
Summer Stuedell, Creativity and Learning Coordinator at SITE Santa Fe leads the Young Curators program. She guided us to think about how curating a show allows us to bring ideas to the public and asked us what conversations we wanted to spark and what we wanted to convey through our exhibition. She then tasked us with deciding as a group what we wanted our exhibition theme to be.
The most difficult part was choosing a theme, as there were many complexities to consider, such as what communities we wanted to represent, as well as the relevancy and narrowness of the theme. It was an incredibly tedious process discussing with the other curators, but it was a unique opportunity nonetheless.
Through intense discussion, we decided the theme for this year will be Contemporary Roots: New and Old Traditions. Artists in this exhibition are encouraged to share their customs and openly interpret what tradition means to them.
SITE Santa Fe’s 2024 Young Curators will be hosting Contemporary Roots: New and Old Traditions from April 5 through April 19 at the Santa Fe Community College to showcase the talented work of local artists throughout the region. There will be an opening on the evening of April 5.
Young Curators is an incredibly underrated program that gives teenagers an opening into professionalism and art. If you are a high schooler in Santa Fe interested in art and careers in the museum field, consider applying next year!
The Young Curators series is presented in partnership with SITE Santa Fe.
