Dr. Flavia Frigeri - Reframing Narratives at the National Portrait Gallery in London

From curatorial roles at the Tate to teaching positions at UCL and Sotheby’s Institute, and now appointed Chanel Curator for the National Portrait Gallery Collection, how would you describe the challenges of your career to date? Maybe the main challenge that kind of brings them all together has been the fact that traditionally either you were a curator or you were an academic. Only in recent years, there have been more people doing both. I think reconciling the two worlds, sometimes, is the most challenging thing. Having to deal in the morning with loans and framing, and then in the evening giving an academic paper. At the Tate I was working on many exhibitions at the same time, and I feel that was my curating school. At the same time, when it comes to teaching and this perhaps was more true of when I started at UCL (University College London), I had given many tours of shows and talks, but I had never taught. It’s a very different ball game; you really have to think in advance about how to break down information in a way that is manageable for people who've never heard it before. So it's not just about you being brilliant and saying this is a wonderful loan that we got, it's more about the art history, how are we going to challenge it. There are so many questions that you need to go through in your head beforehand and that was a real learning curve. What have been some of the highlights?…