Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Curator as Expert
Work: In My Gondola
Artist: Anders Zorn

This excerpt from the Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle exhibition’s audio tour demonstrates how an unscripted interview with a curator can inform visitors in a dynamic, natural way. In this stop, Alan Chong, curator of the collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, animates Zorn’s painting with visual analysis, describing the artist’s brush strokes with sincere enthusiasm. The professional narrator provides visitors with the necessary contextual framework to appreciate the curator’s insights, especially about the formal, visual qualities of the work.