diaries


How Do Curators Actually Pick Artists?



Arts Editor: Victoria Comstock-Kershaw

December 2025
10 min read



Exhibitions don’t appear by magic. They are built through relationships, timing, labour and decisions most artists are never taught to read.

Victoria Comstock-Kershaw looks at how shows actually come together, and why understanding the structure matters more than believing the myth.

“Oh my God, Vic, you can’t just ask an artist how they got a show.”

I remember very clearly being told this in the taxi back from an opening night as a burgeoning arts journalist. It has been, to my inexperienced mind, a perfectly reasonable question, an attempt at understanding the choreography behind the event. After all, artworks don’t materialise out of thin air, but the horror on my companion’s face implied I’d trespassed on some private myth: that exhibitions emerge like Venus on her shell, through taste, destiny, celestial alignment, anything except the banal systems that structure real artistic life. Years and a million conversations later with artists, curators, gallerists and advisors, I’m convinced that the question is still worth pursuing.

Shows are built through three forces: proximity, legibility, and workability.

Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989, video still, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Proximity comes first: friends of friends, old coursemates, relationships formed over drinks or Instagram. The art world runs on small webs of trust, and although many like to pretend otherwise we are not above the base pleasure of sociability. Artist Sebastián Espejo doesn’t romanticise it: “The connection happened by a mutual friend.” Photographer Sophie Willison reduces it further: “through a mutual friend who was curating an exhibition.” Artist Sabine Šne’s first group show “happened thanks to an artist who had been invited and then suggested me. We only knew each other as acquaintances.” The art world loves to pretend this is scandalous. It’s ordinary. A show is a group project; the first filter is whether someone is willing to vouch.

The internet sits close to this ecosystem as an extension rather than a break. Artist Antonia Caicedo Holguín calls it “a very powerful tool to make connections,” while artist Faith Michael notes that curators tend to find her “online or through referrals.” A Los Angeles-based curator tells me they “barely look at Artsy anymore,” relying on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter to hunt down artists in the city that might fit whatever show is next on the horizon.

The Judgement of Solomon, Poussin, 1649. Wikimedia Commons.

Open calls appear throughout the testimonies with a different texture. Artist Tomislav Latinovic entered his first show through “an open call [he] saw on Instagram,” and says his early exhibitions followed a similar route, and Carolin Meyer’s comments on the NECROLOGY open call at Haarlem Artspace push the category further: she recalls thinking that the selectors “went for artists they are friends with rather,” later acknowledging that the chosen works “worked better together and made mine obsolete to complete the show.” Applications clearly widen the pool of candidates; but the final decisions tend to cluster around people and practices the curators already understand.

One curator tells me about a show that was “literally just [the gallerist’s] family member.” Another tells me their first show was “just people who went to [their university].” They insist this wasn’t a deliberate choice to exclude artists that hadn’t attended their school, but rather a choice to lighten the labour load: “I knew them, their work and their work ethics,” they say. “It seemed like such a no-brainer to include people who understood [the show]’s system in the same way I did.” 

Installation view: Hans Haacke, News, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 2008. New York. Photography by Ellen Wilson, courtesy Hans Haacke, Artists Rights Society (ARS), Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Indeed, workability is a major recurring factor. A show demands months of emails, negotiations, problem-solving; curators naturally choose artists with whom this process can unfold without unnecessary turbulence. Aleksandra Moraś, who runs the programme at mitość in London, says her exhibitions rely on “vulnerability and care,” which means she needs “a mutual understanding and shared sensibilities, a sort of collaborative chemistry and good vibes.” She gives a fantastic analogy: a visitor who enters a studio and asks “‘what do I do to get a show here’,” a question she compares to someone asking “‘what do I do to have sex with you’.” She explains: “no matter how much you fancied me, you would say no on principle. It creates this power dynamic that’s awkward and not fair or productive.” Even reciprocal interest collapses under that pressure; the Los Angeles curator tells me they won’t work with “artists that won’t pick up a phone” because of how important it is for them to be able to reach them at a moment's notice: “I understand artists have a lot on their plate,” they say, “but so do I. We both need to respect each other's time and vision.”

Where Moraś’ point concerns labour dynamics as much as etiquette, curator Roxane Hemard argues that artists should be seeking curators actively, though with a different tone: she wants a desire for engagement, not extraction. She mentions the subtle warning signs - people invested in the “socialite aspect” of the scene, or too shaped by online popularity - that tend to signal instability rather than ambition. Tomislav’s advice leans in another direction: “endurance through rejection.” The phrase summarises a reality often obscured by the glamour of opening a show: you have to sieve through a lot of shit. Sometimes you are the gold, and sometimes you are the mud, but either way you must be unafraid of throwing yourself in the pail. “It’s a game of numbers as much as anything,” says a Berlin-based gallerist. “If we get 500 applications it is statistically impossible that there is not some combination of artworks that does not produce a good show.”

Thomas Rowlandson, Exhibition ‘Stare Case’ at Somerset House, 1811

Indeed, rejection sits heavily across the testimonies, though the most useful comments treat it as a structural feature rather than a personal verdict. Šne describes obsessing over being overlooked as “a waste of time,” and insists that the exact reasons a curator chooses one artist over another are “no one’s business.” The image is inelegant and entirely accurate. Artist April Lannigan gives the emotional corollary, describing the feeling of a scene where she has “arrived after my tea at 5pm and everyone seems to have been there since lunchtime” and she is still on the sidelines, calling “hey!! Pick me!!” Artist Elizabeth Dimitroff also speaks of pushing past the fear of rejection in her podcast episode with brave, arguing there is real merit to applying to everything, even if you don’t think you’ll get in. The situation is a shared reality for an entire generation of artists. Most people who eventually become fixtures in programmes and rosters have lived through years of that rounders-game dynamic.

This is not to say that the stone-cold practicalities of curation and social systems always overshadow all of the conceptual or artistic aspects. Once proximity brings someone into view, legibility becomes decisive. Espejo describes the process as dependent on “the specificity of the project itself.” Šne reflects on her early career and remembers being selected “because of the themes in my work and a certain level of naivety in my research-based practice,” adding that her skills “weren’t developed enough for someone to choose me purely for my voice, style or methods.” These observations point toward a pragmatic logic: curators work with practices that can be read, placed, contextualised, and supported within the artistic dialectics of the show; an artist’s position within their own development shapes how readily a project can be integrated into an exhibition. 

Jasmine Bradbury outlines a later-career version of this alignment. She describes curatorial decision-making as a “combination of the work and the person,” influenced by where the artist stands professionally and how their practice intersects with a thematic vision. She adds that “price, scale, and availability definitely play a role,” and that representation “often signals a certain level of support and visibility.” Her language doesn’t flatten the aesthetic dimension; it simply acknowledges the infrastructure that carries it. Legibility happens on many levels: conceptual, spatial, financial.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Panoramism and the Abstract Sector, at Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2022. Photo by Andrea Rosetti, courtesy of the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul.

Asked what they would tell a younger artist, people dropped the mystique very quickly. Holguín advises starting with the most unfashionable move in the art world: showing up. “Go to openings,” she says, “engage with them in a genuine way… Invite them to your studio / invite them for coffee. Approach curators who are just starting out.” Her emphasis lands on alignment rather than volume; the encounter only makes sense if the curator’s interests already sit somewhere near the work.

Several contributors address the fetish around institutional markers. One London-based curator admits that a strong CV or MA “can give someone a tiny edge” in a pile of near-equals, largely because it signals that the artist has already navigated deadlines, crits, and some basic professional expectations. Others are wary of that bias. Elle Anna Chapman says: “I thought the art world was meritocratic for some reason but it’s not as simple or idyllic as that at all…. some people do just have the advantage of nepotism, privilege, etc.” Her conclusion is pragmatic: those conditions exist; the only controllable variable is the work and the relationships built around it.

Weegee, Self-portrait Class with a sleeping schoolmaster, 1672.

Advice for curators surfaces more quietly, though it sits between the lines of almost every testimony. Artists want refusals that are clean rather than evasive, criteria that are stated plainly, and budgets that do not evaporate halfway through a project. Several people describe learning to accept “no” with more grace once they understood that scale, freight, and cashflow were often the real culprits. When those pressures go unnamed, everyone falls back on superstition: fantasies of genius, fantasies of injustice. When they are described with the same frankness as an artwork’s strengths and weaknesses, the entire process begins to look a lot more like work than fate.

Louise Lawler, BIG, 2002/2003.

So how do curators actually pick artists? Not through divine revelation, and not purely through fairness, either. They pick artists they can reach, understand, and work with; artists whose practices fit the conceptual, logistical, and social architecture of a show at a specific moment in time. None of this is particularly romantic. It is also not a moral failure. If there is a takeaway here, it is this: the art world is not fair, but it is learnable. Make yourself legible. Make your work speak clearly. Build relationships that can survive an email chain and a deadline. Rejection is not always proof of conspiracy, and proximity is not always proof of corruption; it is simply how labour organises itself. At the end of the day, we are all just trying to make, exhibit and see good art and whatever either side can do to facilitate this is worth taking seriously.

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