Curatorial data formation in exhibition practice: how archival selection shapes cultural records

Abstract Exhibition documentation and museum archives are increasingly shaped by non-archivists working at the point of record creation. Participatory exhibition practice has expanded the number of curators, students, staff, and community collaborators who produce and select materials destined for archival repositories. The structural consequences remain underexamined in archival theory, which has developed primarily around institutional records and appraisal by professional archivists. The article proposes curatorial data formation as an analytic concept for examining how cultural information takes structural form through selection decisions made by those who produce and curate exhibition records. Over three years (2023–2025), thirty-five student curators enrolled in an upper-level Art Exhibition Practices course organized thirteen exhibitions across diverse venues and community partnerships. In the final year, eleven student curators assembled digital archives representing each exhibition and wrote reflections explaining the selection decisions. Reflexive thematic analysis identified four logics of curatorial data formation: record density and composition, reputation-based filtering, relational ethical filtering, and bias awareness. The four logics describe how the cultural record narrows at the point of production, before any professional archivist becomes involved. The findings position student curators as one type of non-archivist voice shaping participatory exhibition archives. The concept extends archival appraisal scholarship by directing attention to the moment of record formation in participatory settings, where selection and creation collapse into the same hands.