1. There should be a grassroots approach to exhibition curation, exercising cultural democracy.

 

A grassroots approach to curation encompasses community-led movement involving ordinary people. This is a bottom-up structure exercising cultural democracy, when an exhibition “[originates] in community, [works] with cultural knowledge bearers, and [is] co-produced for social impact” (Villeneuve and Love, 138; 2021). This type of organising is “social action-oriented, embracing divergent knowledge that is important to and recognised by the community”. A grassroots and community-led approach would thus understand the lived experience of black people as communities are directly engaged with exhibition production and curation. Many predominantly White cultural institutions operate a top-down structure where funders and directors make final curatorial decisions or set certain goals that are not community focused, rather they are institution or optics focused, as expressed in the Beyond The Bassline case study. Curatorial autonomy from funders through a grassroots approach to funding and curation would mean fewer limitations in delivering an ethical exhibition that properly reflects and amplifies blackness. Funding however is often difficult to find, and corporate funding might be a curator’s only option in delivering an exhibition. Thus, one should ensure community consultation and collaboration as a starting point in curatorial research and work with funders that understand what it means to preserve blackness over financial gain or public opinion and optics.