Free Thinking Fridays – Alisha O’Brien-Coker

A Class of 2019 alumna returned to talk to our Sixth Form History and Art History students about her burgeoning career within the curatorial space.

Alisha shared her experience of working with the Wallace Collection and her current role as part of the New Curators training programme. With this programme being very new – she is part of only the second cohort to go through the scheme – Alisha is on the frontier of the new generation of art curators. She confronts both the joys and the challenges that this entails with her critical eye and curiosity for broaching difficult and sensitive subjects, two things claims she developed in her school History lessons.

In an engaged and lively conversation with the Sixth Formers, hosted by her former History teacher Ms McDougall, Alisha spoke about her somewhat unique experience in discovering curation as a career. She started out working for four months as a gallery attendant at the Wallace Collection; during that time, she thought about the different ways in which the collection could be interpreted and made more accessible to the general public. In pursuit of this goal, she applied and got the opportunity to write interpretive captions for the Wallace Collection. In her interpretations of artwork, she ensured that she broke down jargon and opaque terms typically used by curators. Instead, she focused on accessibility, and translating the context of these artworks to ensure that everyone could understand and appreciate them.

As a passionate lover of History, something that germinated in Ms McDougall’s class at South Hampstead, Alisha explained how her work is fuelled by a desire to foreground the material and contextual histories of art objects – whether that be the origins of decorative materials, such as ivory and porcelain, or highlighting the invisible labour involved in the process of creating art. It is this context that she thinks will be vital for the legacy of these artworks, and these institutions, going forward. As she relayed to the girls: “We can’t pretend that these things aren’t personal-meets-political.”

It was a real pleasure to welcome Alisha back to the school, and for the current Sixth Form students to get an insight into the dynamic landscape of art curation.

To read more about Alisha’s journey after South Hampstead, read our Motivational Monday profile on her here.