#41 - Dr. Aoife Brady

Dr. Aoife Brady is the Curator of Italian and Spanish Art at the National Gallery of Ireland, specializing in bringing centuries-old masterpieces to life for modern audiences.

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Transcript

I can try all I like to convey a narrative or a story or to try to express my feelings about things. But we find that people will come into the gallery spaces and they'll always have their own take, they'll always have their own interpretation and their own feeling. Hello, and welcome to 15 Minute Coffee.

My name is Alan O'Donovan and I'm your host. I'm here today with Dr. Aoife Brady from the National Gallery of Ireland.

Welcome, Aoife. Thanks, Alan. Delighted to be here.

So, Aoife, you are the curator of Italian and Spanish art at National Gallery of Ireland. That's it. Spot on.

Long job title book. Guests, tell us a little bit about your journey to get to where you are now and I suppose how you come to specialize in that. I started my journey with a bachelor's in art history in Trinity College, and I started to develop a real interest in objects while I was.

While I was studying there. I really liked to go to museums. I liked to see the physical thing.

I wasn't so keen on just looking at pictures of things in books, but I was always interested in art since I was a little kid. You know, I loved to make art. I loved to draw and paint, and definitely, definitely liked the physical aspect.

And so then towards the end, I was thinking about what kind of career I would like, and I knew I didn't want to be an academic who sat in an office all day. And so I decided I would like to be a curator or work in museums. I wasn't really 100% sure, but art history is a very competitive field, and so I knew I would have to really specialize.

And so I went on to do a PhD about artists workshops. And I decided that I would focus on Italian art because from my. To my mind, it was what excited me most.

It was what was most interesting. It's such a rich place. I had no familial ties to Italy, but my parents were always real enthusiasts.

They got married in Rome. And so Italy was always a place that I kind of loved and loved. Eat the food and, you know, it was just a really interesting, really interesting country for me.

And so that was what I decided to focus on. And I went from the PhD then to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where I started my career as a curatorial fellow.

And that was a nice place to spend a year and really get to grips with what the job would be like, because it's a sort of a traineeship where you're put through your paces and you learn every aspect of curatorial work. And American museums are, you know, they're very fast paced, they're very formalized in their processes. And so it was a great place to begin.

And I went from there to another curatorial fellowship, London in the National Gallery, which was a kind of a dream, really, because they're such an incredible collection and such a famous place. So I was very lucky in that path that I managed to take. And then, unusually, while I was in London, the job came up in Dublin as curator of Italian and Spanish art.

A permanent position here at the National Gallery. What a journey. Like, I think there's so much to be said for following your passion and then being brought around the world with that passion and seeing such a sort of wide variety of different ways of doing things, I think.

So I think following your passion is an important one. My. My dad was a civil servant and my mum was a chef.

So it wasn't something that was normal for me, you know, the idea that I would go and pursue a career in fine art. But I always had that support and that encouragement that if you're doing something that you love, you know, you'll never work a day in your life, which I'm not sure is 100% true, but definitely, you know, if you're passionate about it, I think you can. You can make it happen.

Yeah, I think the passion is the spine of the work. I think the work is always work at the end of the day. But I think if there's passion behind it, it makes it easier.

What is. Because I'm assuming a lot of people who might be listening to this, like myself, wouldn't know what goes into curation or what's the process behind, I suppose, curating exhibition or what pieces get included or what the messaging is. So I suppose, what is the sort of process? It's interesting that you ask about exhibitions straight away, because I think that the first thing people think of when they think of curator is these sort of temporary exhibitions, these big ticketed exhibitions that come to Dublin for three months or four months and close again.

But the primary purpose of my job is to take care of the collections of Italian and Spanish painting and sculpture here. And so that's really, at a base level, what the curator does. They care for those collections.

And so that's everything from researching them to how they're displayed on the walls. That's the ones that we own as a nation, by the way. I mean, our public collection.

You know, the labels that you see, the lighting that goes into them, the wall colors that they're they're hung on and helping people to understand them, interpret them. So it's a real every day is different job where I find myself, you know, sometimes going to Rome to give a lecture or other days sitting in my office writing, you know, catalogs or essays or whatever, or fielding questions from members of the public or academics or teaching students. Sometimes it's really, really varied.

But it's all about looking after those core collections and helping people to understand them and enjoy them better. And then exhibitions come into it as a sort of secondary role, but becoming more and more central, I think, to a curator's job as these temporary exhibitions. And a lot of my time and energy goes into those as well.

And they involve coming up with a concept for an exhibition, a theme subject, researching that in serious depth, negotiating for artworks, sometimes to come over from different collections abroad. So, you know, we. We bring paintings and sculpture and other objects to Ireland all the time, from North America, from all over Europe, from far flung parts of the world for you guys to enjoy.

And a lot of that is negotiating and networking and convincing people to bring them here because they're fragile and rare and, you know, important. And then producing everything that goes on, goes on around the exhibition from, again, the wall labels and texts, the audio guides, the accompanying books. It's.

It's a lot of different jobs in one. How do you approach that sort of storytelling, or how do you convey the passion and the emotion that you sort of feel for these pieces of art to the general public? It's a great question. And I think, you know, I can try all I like to convey a narrative or a story or to try to express my feelings about things.

But we find that people will come into the gallery spaces and they'll always have their own take, they'll always have their own interpretation and their own, you know, feeling. But I try to arrange paintings on a wall in the way that they speak to each other in some way. So if you come in, for example, to the gallery, and you see the Caravaggio, which is one of our most famous artworks, and it's a scene of conflict.

It's Christ being betrayed by Judas right on either side. You might notice now the next time you come in that I have two other scenes of conflict. I have Christ disputing with the doctors on one side, you know, and so I try to make displays where you can see a kind of a pattern or a narrative emerging, that you can see paintings communicating with each other because they do kind of speak.

They're alive, they're Real objects that were made by real people, and they all have their own kind of story to tell. I think really what we want to do is create an experience where people don't feel our presence too much and that we're forefronting the artworks so they're able to do their job, you know, so it's not that I want to impose myself. It's very different from, you know, the work of, say, a poet or an actor who really conveying their own, you know, emotion through their storytelling or their own perspective or whatever it is.

We're trying our best to let the paintings speak for themselves and so that people can come in and be undisturbed, you know, unhindered by anybody else's thoughts. Like in sport, they always say the best referees are the ones who aren't noticed in the game. So it's maybe the same for curators.

That's it. One thing you mentioned earlier, and maybe it's a common misconception, but how I sort of see or saw curation was that sort of, you know, wooden exhibition. You're bringing different elements in, and it's a story within itself.

And, you know, you're seeing across a range of different industries, like, you know, music streaming and with Spotify and curation, that element and Instagram and social media. And there's this sort of. It's almost become a buzzword in itself in that curation, like, you're creating your life, you're creating your photos.

And do you think that sort of shifted how people sort of go to museums and, like, does it raise the expectation for how people expect everything to be created In. In a way, yeah. I think it's really interesting.

My colleagues and I, anyone who I know, who. Who works in this field, find it really funny that this. The term has been kind of apprehended and content curation has become a thing.

You know, the idea that you can. That it's more about arranging information or images or products, whatever. Whatever it is you do, as opposed to caring.

Because even the word. The word curator comes from a Latin word, curare, which means to care for something, to look after it. And curators, before we were called curators, were called keepers.

But my job sort of 50, 60 years ago, would have been the keeper of Italian art. You're the guardian sort of thing. So we never viewed ourselves as these people who were, you know, doing a very trendy job of, like, arranging things in a very cool way.

But it's definitely. It definitely changed the way that people understand the term. And the way that they use it.

And then I think similarly, the way they understand our jobs has changed too, because like you say now, they expect everything to be this, like, brand new exhibition that's been curated, you know, that's been arranged, that's been organized, and it's going to be, you know, cutting edge information and you're going to see something different every time you come in. It'll all be rearranged when in reality, that's definitely part of what we do, but most of what we do is about making sure that the paintings that you see here and the sculpture that you see here are preserved and taken care of and displayed well for future generations as much as for us right now. And it's funny you say future generations there.

And one thing I sort of love about art is that sort of legacy it leaves. I can go into museum and look at art from the 1700s earlier and this sort of connection to the past. From your point of view, do you think about how these pieces might be viewed in the future? You know, is.

Is that something that comes into your. Your thinking day to day? No, all the time. And I think, I think in some ways people feel like fine art maybe or, you know, traditional Renaissance baroque art is becoming less relevant in the modern day.

But I would argue that in a, you know, in a time when everything is ephemeral and instant and, you know, you have social media where images appear and they disappear and nothing really lasts for any period of time to have these sort of objects, these physical things that belong to the nate. The nation, they belong to every person in Ireland that you can come and see, you know, that you could come and see when we opened our doors in the 19th century and that you can still come and see in 2024 is pretty extraordinary. And the idea that people I hope will still be doing that in another 100 years time is.

Is pretty mind blowing to me. And I really enjoy being kind of part of that in some way being sort of the person who passes that on to the next generation. And as for how people think about them, I think that that is evolving all the time.

And we see that, you know, in real time as curators, I think in the last 10 years and since I've been doing this kind of work, you know, you've seen a massive shift in focus from the sort of the genius artist that people were just obsessed with the idea of Raphael and Michelangelo and how incredible these men were, to one looking for gender balance in museums, which is really important and something that I absolutely advocate for and two, looking at, you know, underrepresented communities in paintings, there's a massive shift in our attention toward, you know, people of color as they're represented in paintings, for example, and making sure that the story doesn't always just focus on the white man who created them. I suppose there's a sense of being proactive with the art that you're looking for and to sort of search out for that. Well, I think people of our generation are more inclined to see that anyway, as you look at art, art, you know, you aren't.

You're thinking about it through a contemporary lens, you know. So I think straight away, you know, our way of reading art, our way of reading images is different now than it would have been 50 years ago or 100 years ago. And I think it's still changing and it's going to change in the future as people's sensibilities and their understanding of the world and their moral, you know, and cultural ideals change as well.

Yeah, 100%. To wrap up, I was interested to hear for maybe someone who's listened to this and they've never really thought about career and curation, but now they're sort of curious about it. Like, what would you sort of say to those who might be interested in following that as a career or maybe applying the things which you sort of do on a day to day in their own life in whatever way that may be, whether it's art or their work.

Well, I think if you are interested in pursuing curation as a career, I think one of the most important thing you can do is go to museums, go to galleries and look. And I know that sounds really basic, but I find, you know, with art history students, sometimes they're so preoccupied with trying to memorize artists names and dates and, you know, read all the books that they forget that so much of our work is about looking at objects and thinking about them and being able to identify what they need by looking at them. You know what I mean? So that's a lot of what we're doing.

We're analyzing all the time. We're thinking about physical things. So going in and looking at displays and how they're arranged and now that you've sort of heard what a little bit about what we do behind the scenes, thinking about the way that they're lit or the height that they're hung out, or the space between them and how they relate to each other definitely is one way to start.

And the more familiar you get with that, the better your eye becomes and the more sort of intuitive you become about how to arrange objects and how to take care of them. And then as for your own life, I suppose it's a lot of it is about that as well. It's about taking some time sometimes to stop and think and observe and think about what people around you need, what the environment around you needs, you know, whatever that might be.

It's about giving that care to something by stopping and meditating on it for a minute. I think that's a lovely way to put it. I think you mentioned earlier how the road used to be a keeper and I think it's a nice way to sort of finish to say, you know, you can bring these elements of, you know, keeping your, your, your world around you, keeping that the way you left it.

The same with art, it's not just about curating the content so that it looks stylish or interesting. It's about taking care of what's arranging. So thank you very much if I, I really, really did appreciate that and it's.

Yeah, it's really interesting chat and thanks. Thanks Minu, for your time. Really happy to talk to you Alan, and looking forward to listening.