"This summer, I participated in the Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice organized by the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL) in New York City. Now in its 12th year, the program brought together twelve doctoral candidates for an intensive two-week seminar combining site visits, one-on-one mentorship, working sessions with Columbia Business School professors, and sustained conversation with practitioners across the museum field. I am also very honored to be the first grad from Cornell University to participate in this program.
One of the most valuable aspects of the seminar, for me, was the chance to see museum work from the inside: not just as a set of curatorial and conceptual questions, which is where most of our training as art historians focuses, but as an institutional practice with its own managerial, administrative, and leadership logics. Coordinating across departments, building budgets, managing staff, cultivating relationships with the board, and thinking strategically at the institutional level are not peripheral to curatorial work; they are increasingly inseparable from it. Spending two weeks immersed in that side of museum life gave me a much fuller picture of what it actually means to run a curatorial department and organize an exhibition program, and of the kinds of decisions curators are expected to make well beyond the level of ideas.
That fuller picture came through especially clearly in our group discussions, where we worked through some of the most pressing issues facing museums today: funding models under increasing strain, the ongoing reckoning with provenance and restitution, and the challenge of public outreach in a moment when museums are being asked to justify their relevance to broader publics. None of these are new problems, exactly, but what struck me was how squarely they now sit within the purview of curatorial practice itself, rather than being handled elsewhere in the institution.
The CCL seminar also underscored something that rarely gets named explicitly in graduate training: the importance of so-called soft skills. Curators do not work in isolation. They depend on functional, often delicate working relationships with directors, conservators, educators, and registrars, each of whom brings a different set of priorities and a different professional vocabulary to a shared project. Learning to communicate across those differences (to translate a conceptual idea into something a conservator can execute or a director can defend to a board) is its own kind of expertise, something that cannot be learned in the classroom in grad school.
Beyond the curriculum, the CCL program was an extraordinary networking opportunity. Over two weeks, our cohort met with directors, curators, conservators, and educators at museums like MoMA, the Met, the Whitney, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and El Museo del Barrio, as well as with independent practitioners and cultural workers at institutions like the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Sculpture Center. Taken together, these conversations offered a remarkably wide-angle view of what curatorial practice looks like across very different institutional scales and missions, from the large encyclopedic museums to public institutions and some of the city’s newest art spaces. It was also great to share all these experiences with the cohort of fellow grad students and I am very glad to have met people who are also going through a similar trajectory to mine and are thinking about possible career paths beyond academia at museums and other cultural institutions.
Finally, I want to stress how important programs like this one are for graduate students in art history. So much of what the CCL seminar offers, like direct exposure to institutional operations, mentorship from working professionals, and a genuine professional network, is simply not accessible from within a doctoral program alone. Academic training gives us the conceptual and historical tools to think critically about art and institutions, but it rarely gives us the practical knowledge or the relationships needed to actually build a career inside them. Programs like the CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar fill that gap, and in doing so, they do real work to prepare the next generation of scholars for careers in museums."
