Curator, Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College

>> My name is Jonathan Frederick Walz. I am the curator at the Cornell Fine Arts Museums here at Rollins College and being a curator entails a lot of different kinds of work, research, also working with donors and sometimes living artists. I do some teaching, give tours, work with objects in the collection. Whenever I give tours I tend to tell students who don't know what a curator is that it's analogous to being like a librarian. Whereas a librarian is concerned about a collection of books, a curator is somebody who is in charge of a collection but instead of books it's objects. So I spend a lot of time actually working on relationships and that involves a lot of correspondence, so e-mail is something I do every day, can't escape it, research, certainly planning. I do a lot of planning so it's important to know a little bit how money works and also project management. I would say a typical day I might give a tour so I would be downstairs interacting with the public in a very interpretive kind of way, instructional. Gosh, so many things that I do, research on potential exhibitions or artists that I want to work with or objects to include in terms of a purchase, so it can be very varied. I'm also in meetings a lot. At Rollins I'm the only curator and our staff is fairly small so I do many more administrative things than a larger museum with a larger museum staff and curatorial staff might have to do less administrative tasks because they have other support staff to be able to do those kinds of things. So I think just in terms of career it's depends on where you land and the kind of institution you work for.