Multimedia Story

How Did Things End Up Here? Art Curator Alisa McCusker

 

A relatively bustling crowd fills the small café at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA)—if you call a crowd of 12 people—at noon on a Tuesday. All too busy to notice, Alisa McCusker, the senior curator at the UMFA, entered the lobby in front of the café. She is the woman who is entirely responsible for what they will see on the museum walls that day.

 

With a graceful stride, calm but intentional, her hair pinned up off her solid black shirt accentuated only by a vibrant blue scarf that captures the eye before anything else. McCusker’s personal style is the embodiment of her UMFA galleries. She deliberately hand-picks pieces and sets them against a simple, austere background to fully communicate the art’s form, function, and the stories they convey. For McCusker, the process always begins with a question followed by team collaboration.

 

Selecting work, McCusker explains, has nothing to do with the self. Forget personal preferences, if she had to choose balloon animal sculptures, a style she does not quite understand, she would do so for the greater good of the museum community. When building a gallery room, she works on a piece-by-piece basis, but she always asks, “How do I inspire the awe that I have about my very focused subject but do that more broadly and create ways for people to enter the museum?”

 

McCusker brings those questions to the table with her team of curators, marketers, and museum educators and collaborates with them. Together, they collectively choose from the 22,000 pieces of art that comprise the museum’s collection. After they put all the ideas on the table, McCusker decides what art will represent the many groups who will tour the museum.

 

"We have galleries for American and European, which are my specializations, but it's important that we also have spaces for African, Pacific, Japanese, East Asian art and all different kinds of material to represent the global perspective on art making," she says.

 

McCusker stands in front of the art she chose, eight paintings hung from the four walls, two pieces of adapted San Ildefonso pottery sit in a glass case, and a Diné weaved saddle blanket draped over as it would have been used. The art she selected for the gallery room was deliberate, an effort to represent the true and full history of westward expansion in America. “It was important for me to represent the diversity of, not just creativity and different styles that artists work in, but the different makeup of American identity,” says McCusker.

 

The Picture of a Curator

 

McCusker is quick to push back against the romantic

image of the curator as a discoverer of lost relics; she's

not an archeologist. "I'm not going out and finding things

and holding them in my bare hands like they’re some kind

of miraculous relic from a past civilization," she says. Her

reality as a curator is far removed from the Hollywood

picture than most people imagine. In curating, there is less

focus on discovery and more on storytelling, and emails.

 

“There are lots of different ways to enter this world. And I

think a lot of my job is to just be open to different ideas

and then try to find those wonderful little stories in there

to tell and bring people in,” McCusker says.

 

She emphasizes there is no one door to enter through to experience art and that understanding drives her curation. When the museum walls are bare, McCusker does not just pack them full of random art; she takes the time to choose pieces that will speak to the audiences.

 

Art is more than a beautiful decoration for McCusker; it can hold up a mirror for a viewer or throw them down an emotional renaissance. “It's a source of happiness and pleasure for us to look at these things, but also broadens conversations—being critical about the world we live in for good and bad, right? Being critical about things makes us realize just how amazing something might be,” she says.

 

But before McCusker can get to hanging art, she must first communicate. Communication is fundamental to being a curator; it makes the museum’s world go around and moves things forward, explains McCusker.

 

After McCusker arrived at the museum with a heart full of art and a collaborative mindset, colleagues noticed a shift in how departments worked together.

 

“She is far more communicative. I think sometimes in museums, even in small museums, you can get so siloed. The curators don't talk to the educators; the educators talk to collections, so it's about good communication, and it starts with our managers, Alisa, being one of them,” Associate Curator of Collections Luke Kelly says.

 

McCusker’s collaborative approach in her work was shaped long before her career in the museum world.

 

 

The Curious Growing Pains

 

McCusker did not grow up going to museums.

 

Forty miles southeast of the Twin Cities along U.S. Route 52 lies the little town of Cannon Falls, Minnesota, with a cozy population of around 3,000. In her earliest years, Alisa grew up on a farm outside of town. The youngest of four kids and the daughter of high school sweethearts, she grew up in a working-class household where financial struggles were always lingering in the background.

 

Art was distant from her family’s life, and pursuing art history in college felt like a personal risk. Choosing it meant stepping toward a future without clear markers of stability and success. The difference between McCusker’s interest and her family’s understanding of them created doubt about whether the path she was following was practical or even possible.

 

“It was really hard because my family kind of didn't understand what I was doing. I thought it was incredibly risky,” McCusker says. “They just didn't know what I would do with that in a real way. So yeah, like the family culture was, that was hard.”

 

That uncertainty followed her into graduate school. During her master’s program, McCusker reached a moment familiar to many first-generation academics: she asked her advisor a simple, direct question — could she actually do this? The reassurance she received from her advisor did not ease the risk of the field, but it gave her permission to keep moving forward.

 

Fading worries and a surplus of art, McCusker was ready to get to work and return to the core reason

why she chose this path. For her, the joy comes from studying original works of art from different time

periods depicting layers of meaning. Each piece carries evidence of a lived experience, history and identity.

 

These bundles of history and identity give her a

sense of fulfillment not just as an academic but as a

human connecting with others’ experiences.

 

The Aura of a Place

 

“The idea that this isn't just a photograph of

something, but this is the original thing that someone

else held in their hands or that they made for this

important reason. And that's still thrilling to me.

I still get goosebumps. I believe really strongly that

the responsibility of a curator is to care,” says McCusker.

 

For McCusker, that responsibility extends beyond the objects themselves to the people who encounter them. Curating, in her view, is not simply about selecting and displaying art, but about creating conditions for understanding, reflection, and access.

 

Curator comes from the Latin word curare, which means to take care of or to care for. McCusker takes that definition seriously. She has a sense of care not just toward the art, but she feels personally responsible for caring for the people who interact with it, both staff and audiences.

 

McCusker describes herself as a link on a chain of people, and she takes that to heart.

 

“It’s not for what kind of accolades does the museum get for a certain exhibition. It's not just about the here and now, but we really think in terms of forever, as long as possible,” she says.

 

                                                                         The museum is fostered upon uplifting one another and creating a space                                                                            where everyone feels like themselves, explains Associate Curator Emily                                                                            Lawhead. When a rare donation came in for Lawhead’s department,                                                                                    Alisa was palpable as if it were her own.

 

                                                                        “Even though the painting would technically be joining the collection                                                                                 under my purview, she was incredibly supportive, and we continue to                                                                                 work closely on its interpretation and display. I stop by to see the painting                                                                         every day, and I always smile,” says Lawhead.