“What do we need right now?”
That was the prompt posed to participants in Flipping Scripts 2. Do we need laughter, a call to revolt, time to reflect? Sixteen artists answered the question visually, their work now on display at Bitfactory Gallery.
But the artists behind the exhibition aren’t typically the ones with their work on the walls. They’re the ones deciding what to hang.
Now in its second edition, Flipping Scripts switches things up, inviting curators and gallerists to share their own work instead of promoting someone else’s.
Gallerists and curators spend much of their time organizing a full schedule of exhibitions that showcase work by other artists. This show flips the script, placing their own creativity front and center.
Organizer Dan Drossman, a visual artist and curator, said the exhibition is meant to reveal the creative voices usually found behind the scenes.
“A lot of the art world knows these curators and the spaces they curate, but less so the work they do. “
The concept resonates with Tobias Fike, an artist, curator, and educator whose work is featured in the exhibition.
“I think when you get into curating as an artist, sometimes people forget that you are an artist at all,” Fike said. “This type of exhibition can also serve as a way to remind audiences that many people are both artists and curators.”
For Daisy Fodness-McGowan, artist, curator, and artistic director of the RiNo Art District, showing her own work reminds her what it feels like to be on the other side of an exhibition.
Putting your art out in the world can be terrifying, she said. The experience has made her more “patient, sensitive, and considerate” when working with other artists herself.
Drossman was pleasantly surprised by how deeply participants engaged with this year’s prompt, with many creating brand-new works specifically for this exhibition.
While many artists interpreted the question “what do we need right now” with themes like love, community, humor, and creativity, Fodness-McGowan answered it with something much simpler: joy.
Inspired by watching her 7-year-old son throw paper airplanes in the park one afternoon, she built an interactive paper airplane folding station where visitors can make one themselves.
“It’s so simple,” she said, “but so joyful.”
Her other installations reflect the life cycle of a paper airplane, centering on transformation and release.
Todd Edward Herman took a different approach.
Rather than simply creating one artwork, the visual artist, curator, and co-founder of Sins Invalid micro-curated an open call for artists.
Titled Living the Dream (a dissociative thing), the project invites “dialogue about what happens when the world feels increasingly absurd, unstable, and unreal, and how we adapt when the lived reality no longer aligns with the expectations and narratives we have inherited.”
The line between artist and curator is blurrier than it appears. Fike sees curating as an extension of his own artistic practice.
“Looking for creative combinations of artists for group shows, or choosing unexpected locations to curate, like a taxidermy classroom, is a creative outlet. We hope to push boundaries about what art can be and do as well as where art can be shown and shared,” he said.
Drossman compared assembling exhibitions to making a collage, arranging different pieces to create a single cohesive image.
“Art is another form of language,” he said, “and curators create space to show that language.”
For Edward Herman, curation is an extension of his practice as a filmmaker.
“Both disciplines involve bringing together disparate images, voices, and narratives to construct meaning through time—one unfolding in the gallery, the other on the screen,” he said.
He believes that grassroots and artist-run spaces are laboratories for new curatorial ideas, ones that often challenge institutional norms and provide new cultural models.
“The days of ivory tower curators are really the past,” Fodness-McGowan said. “Museums used to have a total lock on curation, and I really feel we have moved into a golden era where it can be so much more. It’s incredibly important to open it up to a diversity of backgrounds and experiences.”