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The Complete Guide to Becoming A Curator
What curators really do all day, what they earn at every level, and how to know if this is the right career for you - before you spend a decade getting there.
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: What Does a Curator Actually Do?
Let's clear something up right now: a curator does not spend their days wandering museum halls, admiring paintings, and occasionally placing a priceless vase on a pedestal. That's a visitor's fantasy, and if you're making this decision based on that image, you need the real picture before you commit a decade of your life and tens of thousands of dollars to a degree that only makes sense for this path.
A curator is, at their core, a steward of objects and knowledge. That means they are the person responsible for two things: managing a collection of physical or digital material (art, historical artifacts, specimens, documents, even sound recordings), and translating the significance of that collection to the public. Everything else - and there is a lot of everything else - flows from those two responsibilities.
If you work in a mid-sized museum (say, a regional art museum with 20,000 objects), a typical day will pull you in several directions at once. You might spend your morning in your office - a cramped, windowless room that's half filing cabinet, half book storage - writing a loan request letter to a museum in another state. This is not a poetic task. It's a legal and logistical one. You'll be stating which specific objects you need, the exact dates you need them, how they'll be transported, what the environmental conditions in your gallery are, what the security situation is, and who the courier will