AWeek in the Life
of a Curator
By JONATHAN P. CANNING
I
t is one of those peculiar differences between Britain
and America that while British calendars begin the
week with Monday, American calendars start with
Sunday. Thus, the week I will chronicle in this column
began on a Sunday, November 16, 2014.
I came to work to concentrate without interruption on
my role in a public program to be held at the Art Institute
of Chicago at the end of the week. I had been invited
to moderate a panel discussion on the history of the
Neapolitan crèche (or
presepe
, in Italian). It would be my
job to introduce each speaker and to speak briefly at the
end, tying the three papers together before orchestrating
questions from the audience. I had received the speakers’
biographies in the previous week and two of the papers.
I spent the day reading through the material and some
additional writings that I had ordered via Interlibrary
Loan, before drafting three short introductions and some
remarks of my own. As you can imagine, I was nervous
about performing on the stage of the Art Institute. I
returned to this project throughout the week.
On Monday, November 17, there seemed a host
of other issues to get through first. When I arrived that
morning, there was a voicemail from the Jesuit archivist
in St. Louis, from whom we had borrowed items for the
