At 27, Kreneshia Whiteside-McGee has big dreams for her career as a curator of the arts, and she is determined to pursue them even if it means traveling alone to Venice, Italy, during a pandemic not long after getting married.
After hearing about the School for Curatorial Studies Venice from Sean Clark, an artist whose work she had curated at the Association for Visual Arts, Whiteside-McGee researched the program and decided it was something she wanted to pursue.
That was three years ago and several things conspired to delay her study, but she is close to wrapping up her work in the four-month program that introduces people to the world of art curation on an international level.
“I planned on going in 2019 and that got pushed and we all know what happened in 2020,” she said. “And, then I got married, but 2021 was more of a post-pandemic thing at the time and it was almost perfect because far fewer people were traveling.”
Whiteside-McGee said she spoke to numerous people about the Venice program before signing up and paying her tuition. She was intrigued by the curriculum that included such topics as how to exhibit works, artist development, marketing, media relations and the history of curation.