Exhibition Texts: Writing, Editing and Ethics

Exhibition texts are vital tools in supporting an audience’s understanding of an exhibition, artwork or artist. This course is a practical guide for improving your skills in producing exhibition texts and editing texts received from artists or collaborators. Additionally, this course considers the responsibilities curators have in producing sources of information for audiences and representing the practice of artists.

The course will start out by presenting strategies and standards for structuring texts aimed at different types of audience. We will use the Paddlers, Swimmers and Divers model as a guide through the course to help us shape our texts. We will learn how to embrace and make use of the flexibility of language, considering it in new ways while staying true to our own voice.

The course will consider the ethical responsibilities we have as knowledge producers, interpreters and conveyors for audiences. Alongside this, we have a responsibility to the artists and collaborators we work with to ensure that they are being presented and heard in the ways they want to be. Finally, we will consider the responsibility we have to ourselves in terms of time management, energy and self-representation.

By the end of the course, you will have developed new skills, techniques and confidence in writing, collated a set of resources to help in text production and editing and have created a selection of texts in your own voice which you can refer back to for years to come.