Site Read: Seven Curators on Their Landmark Exhibitions, produced by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and published by Mousse Publishing, is an anthology of essays from exhibition makers who illuminate the site-based innovations in now-iconic exhibitions they organized.

Seven curators go on the record and lay out the motivations, conditions, logistics, and consequences of their unconventional approaches to making exhibitions that 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, or on television), dispersing or networking (as mail art, or simultaneous happenings in different cities), or interspersing (interventions in the public sphere).

Featured Essays

Yves Aupetitallot on Pour vivre heureux vivons cachés (1984) and Project Unité (1993) against a French intellectual, art world, and economic backdrop 

Mary Jane Jacob on Places with a Past (1991) at the Spoleto Festival USA, her interactions with the artists, and the contrasts between her approach and those of Nigel Redden and Gian Carlo Menotti 

Lu Jie on The Long March: A Walking Visual Display (2002) and the complex and nuanced history behind its concept 

Raimundas Malašauskas on Hypnotic Show (2008), first exhibited at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, and its unlikely path to realization 

Alan W. Moore on The Real Estate Show (1980), exhibited in a vacant city-owned building in Manhattan, and artist group Colab’s interest in both poststructuralism and direct action 

Seth Siegelaub in conversation with Teresa Gleadowe on his shows at Bradford and Wyndham Colleges (1968); The Xerox Book (1968); and the January, March and July, August, September shows (1969) 

Jennifer (Licht) Winkworth on Spaces (1970) at the Museum of Modern Art, the institution at the time, and the show’s reception and aftermath 

With an introduction from Bruce Altshuler, director of New York University’s program in museum studies

Edited by Paula Marincola, executive director of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage