24 April 2026 - free Collective Curating workshop available for booking soon…
Collective Curating workshop with Clare Gannaway and Alice Blackwell
Free to attend, but please book as numbers are limited (booking available soon)
Friday 24 April, 2 - 4:30pm
SEESAW, 86 Princess Street, Manchester M1 6NG
What does it mean to make decisions collectively?
Curating can be a brilliant way to bring people together to design ways of being, creating and working together. It can be a joyful, non-hierarchical process in which everyone feels valued and collectively empowered.
In this workshop Clare and Alice will guide participants through a consensus-based method of facilitation to explore values and needs in relation to collective curating. What needs to be agreed and in place before we even start to make decisions together? How do we ensure that everyone’s contributions are valued?
You are invited to bring an example of an artwork that means something to you in relation to Climate Justice. This can be your own work or someone else's, it can be an image on a phone or a description, printed or digital. We will begin with a brief sharing of these artworks, then start to think about what collective working means. Clare and Alice will facilitate the workshop with the aim of agreeing a set of shared principles to guide a collective curating process. At the end of the workshop you will be encouraged to reflect, and perhaps you will even be inspired to take action with next steps and curate something together…
This workshop is in development, so we’re making it free to attend. This is an ideal opportunity to be part of some emerging ideas and contribute to a creative experiment. Feedback will be very welcome.
About us…
Clare Gannaway is a freelance curator based in Manchester specialising in collective curatorial practice. She is guided by the potential for curating to be a collective act to resist traditional structures and demonstrate non-hierarchical approaches with the potential for wider social impact. Clare has worked in the arts for over 20 years, including roles at the Whitworth, Touchstones Rochdale and Folly digital arts, Lancaster. Most recently she was Curator: Contemporary Art at Manchester Art Gallery, where, with others, she developed evolving collaborative processes as alternatives to traditional temporary exhibitions, such as Rethinking the Grand Tour, Climate Justice, Get Together and Get Things Done and Sonia Boyce: Six Acts. These processes enabled groups to explore creative decisions, co-authorship and co-creation, who/what is represented and which stories are told, as well as the curating process itself, using radical care and deliberative decision-making to work in more equitable ways. Clare left Manchester Art Gallery in 2023 to develop her curatorial practice independently.
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