Opportunities: Consulting Curator of Experimental Performance (Chicago) Deadline – Rolling application

Consulting Curator of Experimental Performance (Chicago) October 2019 – July 2020
Deadline: Rolling application
Online Application:
Fee to Participate or Apply: 0

Description Of Opportunity:

Consulting Curator of Experimental Performance, UChicago Arts

Accepting inquiries on a rolling basis, with review process to begin July 15^th, 2019.

 

The University of Chicago seeks a consulting curator to assist in designing and implementing a new Experimental Performance program that both incubates and presents new work encompassing the full gamut of time-based arts. The consulting curator will aid in launching a new program that doesn’t just intersect with our academic and public programs but helps to transform them. The program is being developed in partnership with, and will build upon, a set of related efforts on and off-campus.

 

The successful consulting curator would:

• identify exciting projects in dialogue with our faculty, students, programmers, and professional presenting colleagues, working to amplify existing efforts both on campus and across the city.
• work with colleagues locally, nationally, and internationally to develop compelling presenting programs and support the development of new work.
• be excited to work in the context of a major research university, the south side, and the city of Chicago.

• strengthen existing ties between the university and the larger arts community, and build relationships with the south side, the city, and arts organizations at other universities and beyond.

 

Deliverables:

• A strategic/tactical program and 3-year implementation plan and budget, including:
  • an assessment of the current experimental performance landscape at the University, in Chicago, and beyond.
  • a vision statement that explains what will make this program transformative and distinct.
  • scaled plans for three [3] potential levels of annual funding.
• Proposal for an inaugural season for Fall 2020, in collaboration with relevant partners on campus, and, pending budget approval, contracting artists.
• Active participation in fundraising efforts.

 

Some of the questions the consulting curator would address:

• What is the right balance of presenting work vs. commissioning new work?
• What is the right balance of local, national and international artists?
• What can make this program distinctive, impactful, and transformative?
• How can we best partner with presenters locally, nationally and globally to make this program most successful?
• What are the pros and cons of a festival versus a season?

 

Please note that the consulting curator will be an independent contractor. The consultant is expected to start in September of 2019, with a full initial season to launch in Fall 2020. We expect the contract to conclude in June 2020.

 

 

Skills

• Strong relationship-building skills required.
• Writing, fundraising, and public-speaking experience required.
• Extensive experience, familiarity, and contacts with the worlds of performance (e.g., dance, performance art, spoken word, music, and theater, both historical and contemporary) is required.
• A minimum of 5 years of professional (e.g., museum, gallery, or theater) experience, with an emphasis on curating, producing, and/or managing performance programs is strongly preferred.
• Experience working in a higher education context strongly preferred.
• Experience negotiating contracts with artists strongly preferred.
• Curatorial and programming experience, including relevant strategic and/or tactical knowledge, strongly preferred.

Contact

Accepting inquiries on a rolling basis, with review process to begin July 15^th, 2019.

Please email the items below to Kate Schlachter, at [email protected], with the email subject “Consulting Curator” – emails without this subject may be missed.

• a cover letter
• professional bio and resume
• a letter that outlines a general project plan and proposes your anticipated fee for this work
• examples of related experiences with a clear enumeration of your specific role in those projects and/or programs
• a list of current projects
• names and contact information for 3 references.

 

About UChicago Arts

UChicago Arts connects and amplifies the impact of the University’s nearly 100 arts organizations, initiatives, and academic programs. This work brings together the efforts of students, faculty, artists and community partners to suffuse the Life of the Mind on campus with creativity while securing the University’s role as a cultural destination and resource on Chicago’s South Side, throughout Chicago, and beyond.

 

About the Experimental Performance Initiative

Experimentation is at the very heart of who we are and what we do at the University of Chicago. In our laboratories, our classrooms, or our publications, we are fundamentally committed to practices of exploration and invention – practices that are at once reverent (because deeply engaged with the history of how pressing problems have been conceived) and irreverent (in the unfettered determination to find new and compelling answers to those problems). The arts play a crucial role in our culture of experimentation, forming a crucible where new ideas are tested, new insights applied, and new forms produced. Thus, to cite a few examples, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition is reinventing longstanding practices of commissioning and presenting new music; the Smart Museum is rethinking the boundaries and forms of contemporary artistic practices; the South Side Home Movie Project is reshaping the archive of American film history; Court Theatre is redefining classic theater for an urban metropolis; the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry and the Arts, Science & Culture Initiative are modeling new forms of collaboration between artists and scholars; the Logan Center for the Arts is developing an array of innovative partnerships with ensembles and institutions across the city; the Green Line Performing Arts Center and the Arts Incubator are forging new ways to train and support artists in the communities of the South Side. Over the course of the past five years in particular, the arts have enabled us to experiment with boundaries – in a curricular, institutional, and conceptual sense on campus; but also in a social, historical, and political sense in the city and in the world. Having generated an extraordinary profusion of new forms of artistic practice and new ways that those practices can impact our students, our community, and our world, we find ourselves in need of a comprehensive – and suitably experimental – means of sharing this work. This initiative is that means: a program that seeks to gather together a disparate set of artistic practices at the U of C, but that also embodies the spirit of dynamism, invention, and astonishment occasioned by those practices. It is a program for art at this extraordinary place in these extraordinary times – and an invitation to share in the varieties of invention that define us.

 

How To Apply:

Accepting inquiries on a rolling basis, with review process to begin July 15^th, 2019.

Please email the items below to Kate Schlachter, at [email protected], with the email subject “Consulting Curator” – emails without this subject may be missed.

• a cover letter
• professional bio and resume
• a letter that outlines a general project plan and proposes your anticipated fee for this work
• examples of related experiences with a clear enumeration of your specific role in those projects and/or programs
• a list of current projects
• names and contact information for 3 references.

Contact Email:[email protected]
Website:

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