Art Curation The
of
BAMPFA’s new Chief Curator Christina Yang BY Lou Fancher
A
nchored for a mere 18 days in her position as the newly-appointed chief curator at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Christina Yang offers weighty resistance. During a lively, 50-minute phone interview in early December 2021, I try to budge her off the shelf of “that’s to be determined in the months to come” and “I just landed here” protests. Consistently, politely, firmly—and alway presented with solid rationale— Yang refuses to fling projections about exhibits. She declines my invitations to predict or prognosticate about specific directions she intends to pursue while leading the staff, campus faculty and
students, visitors and collaborative partner organizations in the Bay Area and nationwide into and through a period most experts and scholars in the field say is a time of reckoning for large art institutions. Typically, an interview with this level of pushback leaves me frustrated and floundering for a convincing “hook” upon which to compose an article. In this case, I like Yang’s powerful pushback. It becomes the storyline; in part because she keeps it up for the entire time we talk, bandying her way out of corners and convincing me she means what she says at the start of our conversation: “I actually don’t yet have enough information to put out what I’ll be
proposing,” she says. “The work I do is based on listening to our community and listening to the internal work culture. I need to understand how this body functions. We are in a time where the work of a curator isn’t just researching artists and taking care of artifacts, but also taking care of staffing, art and budget parameters, hiring practices, equitable payment, the interests and needs of the larger community. Yes, it’s expanding the canon and uplifting under-recognized artists and countering injustice and more, but these actions must reflect our internal culture. I see my role as not just leading, but also uplifting and nurturing a staff of curatorial thinkers.”
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