“Curating Your Life” is the topic of the next ACC Library Salon, at which Marybeth Stalp, associate professor of sociology at the University of Northern Iowa, will discuss the art of curation and collection with art historian Gabe Weisberg and artist Harriet Bart at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 12th.

Always curious, we went to the stacks to see what the library has about collecting. On Collecting: An Investigation Into Collecting in the European Tradition covers collecting processes, collecting in practice, and the poetics and politics of collection. Collecting in practice literally covers everything from Bronze Age hoards to postmodernist collecting. This work discusses ideas like the social context of collecting and the relationship of collecting to consumption, quite scholarly. The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and Its Linked Phenomena is a comprehensive, serious history of art collecting as a basic element in a complex behavioral system, which includes art history, art faking, art museums and more. For a more personal touch, Great Women Collectors looks at the very few women who, from 1750 to 1997, independently assembled significant collections (not the more-common collector: men collecting using their wives’ dowries or fortunes). Also, Acts of Possession: Collecting in America aims to explore to explore the discourse of collecting in the 200 years between the iconic 1822 Charles Willson Peale self-portrait, “The Artist in His Museum,” and Antiques Roadshow. If you'd like to see what individual collectors have amassed, we also have catalogs such as Conversations With Wood: The Collection of Ruth and David Waterbury.

What guidance do we have for today’s collector? For the corporate collector we have Art for Work: The New Renaissance in Corporate Collecting, with overviews of the methods and the collections of businesses in the United States, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan. Living With Art speaks of practicalities, options (collecting by period, spatial awareness, lighting) and environments (select examples of a diverse group of collectors). Do you want to explore the whys and wherefores of collecting? Collecting: An Unruly Passion addresses the psychological perspectives. The author, Werner Muensterberger, is a psychoanalyst, and he plumbs the psychology behind the act of collecting, looking at the cultural and historical patterns of collecting.

We hope you'll join us for "Curating Your Life." If you can't make it, we will be taping the session and making it available online after the event. Plus, don't miss these upcoming Library Salon Series sessions at the ACC:

Art-A-Whirl Kickoff Party
Garth Johnson Movie Night
Friday, May 18
4-8 p.m.
Presentation starts at 6 pm

Give & Take
Co-Presented
By Works Progress
Thursday, June 21
7 p.m.

This activity is funded in part by the Minnesota State Arts Board through the arts and cultural heritage fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the Legacy Amendment vote of the people of Minnesota on November 2, 2008.