[Transcript] Interview with Photography Curator Emmy Mickevicius
On portfolio reviews, acquisitions, and building relationships with curators and museums
Hi,
Today, I’m very happy to share a transcript of the recent long-form audio interview with Emmy Mickevicius, photography curator at the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, AZ) and the Phoenix Art Museum.
I had planned to release a text version of the interview for accessibility’s sake, and a few readers wrote me to say that they preferred to text sources over audio. Now, both options are available!
In this interview, Emmy and I break down the various avenues through which photographers can build important connections with curators and institutions (e.g. portfolio reviews), as well as what can result from them. Emmy also answers some very direct questions that I think many readers will find helpful, such as, What are the various ways that you can get a museum curator to look at your work? What sorts of things are curators looking for when considering work for exhibitions or acquisitions? And, what separates work that is selected by museums from work that isn’t?
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Interview: Photography Curator Emmy Mickevicius on Building Relationships with Curators and Museums
Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Hi, and welcome to The Open Call List's first long-form interview. Today I'm going to interview photography curator Emmy Mickevicius. Emmy is the Norton Assistant Curator of Photography, a position shared between the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Phoenix Art Museum. Before she moved to Arizona, she also worked in the photography department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Emmy has quite a lot of institutional experience and knowledge, and we are lucky enough to benefit from that today.
I'm fortunate enough to work with Emmy at the Center for Creative Photography, and I have been able to see some of the amazing work that she's done over the last few years. I think it's worth noting that many of the exhibitions that Emmy curates and coordinates between the institutions where she works involve contemporary photographers, including young and emerging photographers. So, I really wanted to use this interview to ask Emmy specifically about topics that I feel can be a bit opaque and abstract from our perspective as practicing photographers. I mean, specifically, topics like, how do we connect with curators? How do we prepare for portfolio reviews? Is it okay to invite a curator to visit our studio and talk to us about our process or learn about our process? And, more generally, how do we build the sorts of relationships with museums and institutions that could eventually lead to them showing or acquiring our work?
In my experience, these are the kinds of things that most photographers I know would include in their list of goals as their careers progress. On the other hand, I haven't been in many situations where these topics are discussed in detail. So that’s our goal here while we're talking to Emmy—to get into the nitty gritty of these things.
Before we do, a very big thank you to Emmy for taking the time to do this interview. It's really generous of her to take time out of her day to share this sort of knowledge. And as a listener or reader, if this is something that you find helpful and that you find interesting, I would love to know that. It was both fun and enlightening for me to do this interview, and I would be happy to do more things like this in the future if it's something that readers find valuable. With all that said, let's get into it.
Aidan: Thanks again for taking the time to do this. I think it's so valuable, and it's very generous of you to give your time to this conversation. Like I was telling you, many photographers who read the newsletter have expressed that they would like for the next step in their photographic careers to include building relationships with institutions, with curators, as well as participating in shows at larger venues like CCP, the Phoenix Art Museum, or other institutions like those. Plus, having their work acquired by such institutions.
Obviously those are those are big steps, so I thought it would be helpful to break down some of the ways to start working toward them—i.e. what sorts of opportunities and routes do photographers have to build a relationship with a curator, etc.? To start, where do you feel like an artist or a photographer should be before they start thinking about showing work to a curator or preparing for something like a portfolio review?
Emmy: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. As a curator, I personally welcome seeing work from people at a really wide variety of stages in their careers. I also really like seeing work in progress and I often indicate that in my bio when we reviewers are asked to articulate the kinds of work we're interested in seeing. We can talk separately about how specifically you prepare for a portfolio review, but I'd say more generally, if you feel like doing a portfolio review, do it.
In terms of just how you get your work seen by institutions or start cultivating a relationship with a curator, I almost want to start by turning it around and speaking a bit to the mechanisms by which I become aware of work as a curator.
First of all, honestly, Instagram has been really important for me professionally over the last few years. I feel like Instagram has sort of leveled the hierarchy or made access to artists more democratic than it used to be, which maybe sounds a little counterintuitive coming from me, a curator. But when I was working in a supportive role previously, I was not really empowered to just go do studio visits with artists when I felt like it. I really had to ask for permission and make sure it aligned with current departmental priorities at my institution. Whereas with Instagram, you can start following someone and start engaging with the work they're putting out and even strike up a correspondence. Suddenly, it feels like you sort of know someone in a way. I've gone from Instagram to emailing with someone to setting up a virtual Zoom studio visit.
So, I would say, it's really incredible how Instagram connects people. And I think that it's smart for artists to use it as a tool to put their work out there start being in regular contact with people even if it's in this kind of superficial-ish way of sending someone a like here and there, messaging them, or whatever.
So, from the artist’s perspective, can it be as simple as following a curator who works at an institution that I'm interested in and then developing a relationship by liking some of their posts and maybe sending a message like, “It's great to connect with you on here?”