Take Care joins efforts with over 100 artists, activists, curators, and researchers to reimagine cultures and politics of care. Its first circuit, Labour of Curation, works between two tasks. The first is to begin to contour societal care crises and their differential effects while simultaneously reasserting care as a collective practice of resilience amid structural forces of neglect. The second task is to not seal off the institutional context in which Take Care itself is hosted. Labour of Curation reflects on art’s implication in, rather than detached observation of, the crisis of care. A gallery is not a sanctuary but a site where distinct “dilemmas of care” manifest, and are continually negotiated.11Emma Dowling, “Dilemmas of Care,” The Blackwood 1 (July 2017), 9–11. Reframing cultures of work and interaction in art institutions through a care lens, Labour of Curation monitors the work of custodianship in the face of certain fragility; tarnishes the polish of the exquisitely mounted exhibition by highlighting the material labour its production entails; traces lineages of radical feminism and theories of social reproduction that are vital to a political reckoning with care crises; explores tactics for unsettling the congruence of curatorial labour and valorization regimes under contemporary capitalism; and stages conversations to counter care gaps in cultural labour economies with proposals to prioritize tending to livelihoods.

—Letters & Handshakes