Ever wondered just how an arts curator puts together a show, or for that matter a season of shows? Me, too. All the more so because my husband, Kevin Dean, who’s taught at the Ringling College of Art and Design for more than 20 years, has for 13 of those years also been director of Selby Gallery on the Ringling campus. He’s presented and curated dozens of shows, from the annual student and faculty shows to solo exhibitions featuring nationally and internationally known artists, including such names as Pat Steir, Helen Frankenthaler, Leon Golub, Lesley Dill and others.

For most of those years, and as part of the process of putting together his shows, he’s also traveled at least once a year to New York City—still the hub of the art world in the United States, if not the world, and a must-visit for any art curator or gallery director who wants to stay on top of the visual arts scene. Or so Kevin tells me. I was never really sure of what he did on those nearly weeklong fall excursions, because I never went with him. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t have liked to, but the demands of raising children and working my own job always meant that I stayed in Sarasota, holding down the fort.

Until last September, when for the first time I tagged along on one of Kevin’s arts jaunts and got to see with my own eyes just what he does and how he does it. Now you can see it, too, in this diary of a gallery director’s whirlwind tour of New York City.

Wednesday, Sept. 12

Having made copious “to-do” lists for our now old-enough-to-be-left-alone kids (feed the pets, take your sister to school, bring in the mail, etc.), we’ve boarded a plane at Tampa International Airport that will take us to LaGuardia. It’s a beautiful fall-like day when we land there, and for the first time in our recent travel history there are no delays, no hitches to our arrival. We take a taxi to the Salisbury Hotel, our home base for our five-day stay. It’s across West 57th Street from Carnegie Hall, a good location for just about everything we want to do while we’re here.

Since it’s already late afternoon when we arrive, there’s not enough time to begin gallery hopping, talking to art dealers and meeting with artists. There is enough time, however, to walk down Broadway, passing the standby line at the Ed Sullivan Theater waiting to see The Late Show with David Letterman, head for the discount tickets booth near the Marriott Marquis and plunk down $119 for two tickets to see Spamalot. (After all, there’s art and then there’s art.) After dinner at the Brooklyn Diner, also right across from our hotel, we head back to the Shubert Theatre for Spamalot. The show is great fun, and there’s also a twisted sort of fun in calling our Monty Python-loving kids at intermission and saying, “Guess what show we’re seeing? Spamalot!” Groans of envy ensue.

Thursday, Sept. 13

We’re spending today in SoHo. Long one of the gallery centers of Manhattan, SoHo is being supplanted in part these days by the expanding gallery scene in the Chelsea neighborhood. But a number of galleries are still here, including a couple where Kevin has established good working relationships with the owners.

One of those dealers is Louis Meisel of Louis K. Meisel Gallery, who Kevin tells me coined the word “photorealist” back in 1969. The Meisel Gallery, on Prince Street, has been showing realist artists for decades, and two of the most popular shows in Selby Gallery’s history, REAList Men and REAList Women, borrowed heavily from Meisel as well as other New York galleries. (Another popular Selby show, featuring pin-up art, was also indebted to Meisel’s holdings.)

As we head out the hotel lobby doors, Kevin explains that he’s looking for contemporary photorealist artists he’s never exhibited before for a show he’s putting together for the 2009 season. In planning Selby’s exhibition season that far ahead, he sometimes runs the risk of choosing a piece or pieces that will be unavailable by that time because they’ve been sold, but he usually can replace those with something close in style.

“I know the format I want to follow with this show, because it’s the same as the other two,” he explains. “It’s the third to look at the word ‘realism.’ It’s a word we all use, but what does it actually mean? The idea is to go from obviously realistic works to ones that are less so, to examine the distinctions between pure realism and naturalism and other brands of realism, too. What the show will do is go from the obvious to works that people may question as to why they’re included.”