The Start that Gave Me Many Paths 

Part 1 | Rama, Development Officer, Ottawa Art Gallery 

The Ottawa Art Gallery is a corridor to endless becomings for anyone ready to dive deep into Ottawa-Gatineau’s art scene.

One such path you can take is the Curatorial Internship offered by uOttawa’s Masters in Contemporary Art Theory and in partnership with the OAG. The internship is a hands-on, career-building experience that places emerging curators at the heart of the gallery.

In this role, you become a community connector by working with the uOttawa Master of Fine Arts candidates to interpret their work and share it with the diverse audience of art lovers who walk through the OAG’s doors. In these vibrant walls you can be mentored by the OAG’s curatorial team to conduct curatorial research, map out floor plans, write impactful curatorial statements and discursive labels. At the OAG you can dream as wide as you want.

Throughout the making of the exhibition, you work with and across departments to learn how curatorial work intersects with Learning and Engagement, Marketing, Finance, and Collections. In this internship, you learn how to “wear many hats” and explore the creative potential of curation.

I would know, because in 2023-2024 I got to work alongside my curatorial partner, Karen Miller, to bring Spanning the Divide to the OAG.  

My path to curating at the OAG was a winding one. For a few years, I had been taking up opportunities to curate local exhibitions for emerging artists. These exhibitions were small in scale, and in budget, but had plenty of encouragement and need backing them.

In 2023, I began my Master’s in Contemporary Art Theory at the University of Ottawa: Through this pathway I was offered the chance to thoroughly explore my interest in curation through an institutional lens. Under the guidance of Chief Curator Rebecca Basciano, I delved into the work of the 2023 MFA cohort to find the thematic throughline that could best represent their art as a collective.

My co-curator Karen and I landed on the title “Spanning the Divide” to represent the thematic overture of the exhibition artists Sarah Tompkins, Heer Mandaliya, Kelly Rendek’s emergence as contemporary artists from MFA candidates. From there everything took off.

Studio visits with the artists turned into long discussions with the Collections department at OAG about the endless possibilities and definite realities of how to exhibit their work. Most of my hours were spent hunched over my laptop writing and rewriting labels to be sent off to Rebecca for a thorough review. Once I got the emphatic “Okay!”, these word docs were promptly sent to the Marketing team for translations and scheduling social media announcements.

As crunch time came, Karen and I sat down with Learning and Engagement to do a walkthrough of the exhibition and share insights that the educators could reveal during public tours. This is only a snapshot of the lengths of work you learn to balance alongside the phenomenal team at the OAG. With their help, I got to stretch and flex my curatorial dreams and take lessons with me throughout my creative career.  

Stay tuned for part 2 of this article for an interview by Rama with this year’s Curatorial Interns and Curators of Endless Becomings, Elisa Jiménez Robles and Shems Benmosbah.