The Curator

Onion Madder · Founder and sole staff

Portrait of the Curator. Onion Madder, photographed at an undisclosed location, removed from the events described.
The Collection holds that a curator ought to be visible exactly once. This is the once.

Biographical Note

Onion Madder is the founder, curator, registrar, conservator, docent, and sole staff of the Concord Curatorial Collection. She has held every one of these offices since the institution's establishment and anticipates holding them for its duration, there being no successor in view and no line in the budget for one.

She maintains this record on the strength of the only qualification it requires: she was present. On the afternoon of the 9th of November, 2001, she was the line. Everything published at this address proceeds from that single, unembellished fact, to which she has added, across twenty-five years, only footnotes — and, on one occasion, a correction concerning the volume of a bottle of milk.

Her wider work is kept at onionmadder.com, of which the present Collection considers itself a small and unusually concentrated department. The holdings there are graver in subject and broader in reach; this one is merely the most thoroughly documented, on the curatorial principle that the smallest grievances reward the closest attention.

She is, by the deliberate design of the institution, unreachable. The Collection regards this not as a failing of the curatorship but as one of its features: a record of this kind is improved by the absence of a person available to argue with it. Correspondence is therefore neither solicited nor possible. In its place the curator extends this photograph and her continued, undivided attention to the matter.

Her formal Curator's Statement is recorded in the Provenance, where it belongs.

— Onion Madder
Curator, sole
The Concord Curatorial Collection