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Reimagining how people access art, knowledge and culture online.

10/15/2026

Meet the panelists for our 2026 Metadata Learning and Unlearning Summit! ✨

Join us for our annual Metadata Learning & Unlearning summit on Tuesday, October 20 at 3 pm ET / 12 pm PT.

In this 90 min session, Anna Robinson-Sweet (University of Toronto), Kate Neptune (Brandeis University), and Danielle Galván Gomez, Isabella León-Chambers, and Sydney Kysar from the Postal Service for the Dead will share more about their organizations, approach to research, and their insights around navigating collections with sensitive or difficult material and how those experiences shape archival labor and the broader archival experience.

Link in bio to register!

10/14/2026

New feature alert! 🚨📸

We’re thrilled to share researcher and curator Farida Youssef’s recent editorial feature for Curationist, where she looks into the Auckland War Memorial Museum’s obscure archive of Sergeant Hugh Cowan Gilmour. His amateur and flawed photographs taken during the WWII present a view of Egypt that challenges European colonialist representations made during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Youssef observes, “[Gilmour’s] flawed photographs do not meet visual standards nor cultural expectations about Egypt. Yet if a good or correct photograph of Egypt confirms stereotypes, what different view of Egypt would these flawed ones offer?”

Read more of Youseff’s reflections in “Unseeing Egypt: The Value of a Flawed Photograph” at the link in our bio.

10/13/2026

The work of the week is this ink painting on silk, depicting a courtesan dressed in men’s clothes, riding a white elephant, the bodhisattva Fugen’s vehicle. 🐘

As the tale goes, in the 12th century, an extremely wise courtesan skilled in poetry lived in Eguchi. One night, the monk Saigyō asked for shelter at her inn. She initially refused him, saying she didn’t want him to become attached to the worldly space of the brothel. When she did eventually let him in, they engaged in a long poetic exchange. Ultimately, the courtesan revealed herself to be Fugen. In another tale, a traveling priest met the courtesan of Eguchi, and saw a vision of her true form as a resplendent Bodhisattva every time he closed his eyes. Feminist scholar Etsuko Terasaki argues that the tale both reiterates and challenges medieval Japanese Buddhism’s association of womanhood with spiritual contamination. Read more about Japanese courtesans’ association with the divine.

Learn more on Curationist.org. Link in bio!

Image:
Kitao Masayoshi, Stand-in Fugen 見立普賢菩薩図, late 1700s–early 1800s. Cleveland Museum of Art. CC0.

10/09/2026

It’s time for our forth annual Learning and Unlearning Metadata Summit! This year’s topic is Centering Care in Sensitive Collections.

Join Curationist and guests Anna Robinson-Sweet (University of Toronto), Kate Neptune (Brandeis University Archives), Danielle Galván Gomez, Isabella León-Chambers, and Sydney Kysar (Postal Service for the Dead) for a 90-minute webinar. The panelists will share their insights around navigating collections with sensitive or difficult material and how those experiences shape archival labor and the broader archival experience.

Event Info:
October 20th, 2026 via Zoom
3 - 4:30 pm ET (12-1:30 pm PT)

Register at the link in our bio!

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As part of the Curationist webinar series, this conversation invites our community to learn from digital cultural heritage projects and the people shaping them. All of our webinars are pay-what-you-will. Your contribution is essential to helping Curationist continue offering accessible programming and creating space for conversations on metadata, open knowledge, and digital collection stewardship. Thank you for your support!

10/08/2026

Our work of the week is this vibrant and lush scene by painter Jan Soens. 🪴🪻🪽

Here’s the story behind the piece, provided by the Curationist community:

Predating the lush garden scenes of Rococo paintings, Jan Soens’ “Rinaldo and Armida in the Enchanted Garden” was painted during the late Renaissance. His subjects are from a 16th-century epic poem. Rinaldo is a part of the Christian crusade to capture Jerusalem from Muslim rule. The sorceress Armida, who gazes at her own reflection, disarms him with her beauty. However, the use of beauty to charm a man was deemed immoral on the part of the woman. Thus Rinaldo’s contemporaries, hidden in the distance, have come to free him.

Image:
Jan Soens, Rinaldo and Armida in the Enchanted Garden, circa 1581-1611. Walters Art Museum. CC0.

10/07/2026

Another outstanding feature was published on Curationist. ⛏️

In “Nuclear Entanglements: Atomic Imperialism and the Infrastructure of Erasure,” curator and writer Helen Colton provides a thorough examination of the suppressed histories of atomic imperialism and the overlooked consequences of nuclear weapon development through an analysis of archival materials related to the Manhattan Project.

Link in bio to the full feature.

Image:
Los Alamos-Homestead Cabin near Pajarito Site, n.d. From The Manhattan Project, U.S. Department of Energy, public domain.

10/01/2026

Archive Deep Dive in Under 5: Qianlong Period Brush Jar 🏺🖌️

Image:
Qianlong Emperor, Brush Jar with an Imperial Inscription, 18th century. Brooklyn Museum. Creative Commons Attribution.

09/29/2026

The Work of the Week is a drypoint print by impressionist artist Mary Cassat. 🛁🌿🌷

Here is the description that Curationist added to the Work:

Mary Cassatt is known as one of the “three great dames of Impressionism.” While Cassatt painted outside like other Impressionists, she specialized in intimate indoor scenes, frequently depicting women alone as well as mothers and children. This print of a woman bathing shows the casual intimacy of a daily ritual. Cassatt’s Impressionist contemporary, Edgar Degas, also famously depicted bathing women. Yet whereas Degas’s portraits, in their high angle gaze and their fixation on the women’s rears, tend to have a voyeuristic quality, Cassatt’s depiction is profoundly humanizing in its mundanity. In her use of flat, bounded color, Cassatt borrowed from Japanese block print aesthetics. Impressionist artists, as other French creatives at the time, were heavily influenced by Japanese art, revealing modernism to be transnational in origin.

Image: Mary Cassatt, Woman Bathing, 1890-1891. National Gallery of Art. CC0.

09/24/2026

An exciting new feature is on the site! 🏜️

In “Dune as Method: Between Archive and Ecology,” researcher and writer Gregory Scott Young asks: What can dunes reveal when traced through museum collections?

Through the prism of artworks, metadata, and environmental history, Young suggests that dunes connect archives to ecological systems shaped by colonization, conservation, and change.

Read the full feature at the link in our bio!

09/23/2026

Our September Staff Pick comes from Betsy Lin Seder, Curationist’s Content Director! ✋🏻💫

“[Effluvia from a Hand Resting on a Photographic Plate] by Adrien Majowski is part of a series of hand images made by Majowski in the late 19th century. It is photogram made without light. In these images, the hand placed on or near the gelatin silver on the photographic plate would leave an impression that emerged when developed. This work was made when practitioners experimented with photography to make the unseen knowable by attempting to capture thoughts, feelings, spirits and in this case, the body’s “effluvia” with the medium. I am drawn to the way the imprints of the fingers starkly mark the surface as the hand recedes from the page, and the texture throughout seems to capture a sort of mystery fluid swirling around.”

Image:
Adrien Majewski, [Effluvia from a Hand Resting on a Photographic Plate], 1898–99, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

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