‘Maker of Exhibitions’: The curatorial practice of Cordelia Oliver
The artist, critic and curator Cordelia Oliver was an integral figure in Scottish art from the late 1950s to her death in 2009. A graduate of Glasgow School of Art with no formal training in curation or criticism, Oliver gave up her career as a painter to become a freelance critic and curator, a dual role which allowed her to offer a unique perspective on the production and reception of contemporary art from Scotland over five decades. In the late 1970s she was a member of the Williams Committee, set up by the Callahan government to look at the needs of museums in Scotland and much of her subsequent curatorial work focussed on enhancing the reputation of Scottish art in a British and international context.

A founding member of Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre, she went on to curate a series of exhibitions throughout the 1970s and 1980s which, considered in retrospect, reveal an implicit yet sustained effort to foreground and champion art by women in Scotland. A close associate and supporter of the artist and gallerist Richard Demarco, Oliver also worked on a number of projects which sought to introduce (mainly European) avant-garde and cross-disciplinary practices to the relatively staid and conservative art institutions of 1970s Scotland (including the seminal 1970 exhibition Strategy: Get Arts, held at Edinburgh College of Art). This paper focuses on Oliver’s activities as a ‘maker of exhibitions’ (a term she preferred to ‘curator’) looking in particular at her position as an artist-curator, a polymathic ‘participant observer’ of the artists she critiqued and exhibited.