Site Read: Seven Curators on Their Landmark Exhibitions

The curators and creators of some of the most influential exhibitions in recent decades talk about their history-making shows

In this anthology, seven exhibition makers, including Mary Jane Jacob, Alan W. Moore, Seth Siegelaub, Jennifer Winkworth and others lay out the motivations, conditions, logistics and consequences of shows they organized that now stand as icons of structural innovation in terms of site. These exhibitions treat the museum as a studio (with works realized on-site); appear outside the museum (in the landscape, in domestic spaces, in the street, in the sky); and take the form of publishing or broadcasting (in books, online, on television), dispersing or networking (as mail art, or simultaneous happenings in different cities), or interspersing (interventions in the public sphere).

This book gets at the core of their innovations–how the shows came to be, and what they became–and brings out the story and character of exhibitions that have, in many cases, already been written about extensively, while mitigating hagiography and historicization.