AC Discussion | From the Margins to the Center: Inclusive Curatorial Practices
On August 19th, Natalie Bell, Curator at The MIT List Visual Arts Center; Mary Lawson, Grants and Awards Programs Manager at Charlotte Street Foundation; and Jared Ledesma, Senior Curator at the Akron Art Museum came together for a candid conversation about inclusive curatorial practices that center making projects, performances, and exhibitions with community instead of about. They discussed methodological shifts in the field, questioned barriers institutional structures pose to working inclusively, and talked through what adopting more inclusive curatorial practices might mean for arts organizations committed to racial equity and justice.
Watch the full conversation, or read through the transcript below to find links to additional resources, and share your thoughts in the comments section.
Title of Discussion: From the Margins to the Center: Inclusive Curatorial Practices
Panelist 1: Natalie Bell, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Panelist 2: Mary Lawson, Grants and Awards Programs Manager, Charlotte Street Foundation
Panelist 3: Jared Ledesma, Senior Curator, Akron Art Museum
Moderator: Jared Packard, Exhibitions Manager, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art
Date of Discussion: August, 19 2021
List of Acronyms: [NB] = Natalie Bell; [ML] = Mary Lawson; [JL] = Jared Ledesma; [JP] = Jared Packard; [PF] = Peter Fankhauser
Transcript
[PF] I think we'll go ahead and get started. Welcome everybody. It's great to have you all here tonight for our Alternate Currents panel discussion “From the Margins to the Center: Inclusive Curatorial Practices” with Natalie Bell, Mary Lawson, Jared Ledesma, and our moderator, Jared Packard (we've got two Jareds tonight). Special thanks to the Pape Family Foundation, the Nebraska Arts Council, and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment for making virtual programs like this possible. My name is Peter and I'm the Program Director at Amplify Arts. If anybody is new to Amplify, our mission is to promote unity, progress, and innovation in the cultural sector and Alternate Currents is one program that helps us do that by contextualizing national and international issues in the arts with the responses from people working on the ground. The program consists of a blog, a bi-monthly discussion series, and an artist working group of 10 artists, organizers, cultural workers who help shape the program and determine the direction that it moves. Jared Packard is a member of our 2021 Alternate Currents Working Group.
Tonight’s discussion is just one in a year-long investigation of the future of our cultural institutions. We're interested in talking with people about how those institutions can become more equitable, more transparent, and more just. If you're interested in more discussions and conversations like this, please visit the Alternate Currents blog anytime to watch videos, listen to interviews, and read posts from people like the amazing group of panelists that we have here tonight.
With all of that said, I'm super excited for this discussion and to hear from Natalie, Mary, Jared, and Jared and I’ll turn it over to Jared Packard.
[JP] Thank you, Peter. Thanks for bringing this wonderful cast of characters together. I too am very excited to tease out some conversation tonight. I'm Jared Packard. I'm an artist and a curator based in Omaha. I'm an Exhibitions Manager at the Bemis Center and that's my vantage point in this conversation. I'll let each of the three of you introduce yourselves if you could give a little bit of background and say something about what inclusive curating means to you and maybe speak to your experience in cultural institutions to give everyone a vision of your vantage point in this conversation. Mary, do you want to kick us off?
[ML] Sure. Thank you, Jared and thank you for holding space for this conversation. And thank you, Amplify for making space. My name is Mary Lawson. I am a Black femme woman. I identify as a Midwesterner. I’ve lived in Utah, Colorado, and most recently, Nebraska. I just moved to Kansas City, Missouri and work at Charlotte Street Foundation as their Grants and Awards Programs Manager. I am an artist, organizer, and I don't necessarily call myself a curator, but have had the honor and privilege of curating shows DIY style within the last three years in established institutions, nonprofits specifically.
Inclusive curating--is that the question, Jared? My response to that question is more questions. What questions do artists want to ask spaces? What questions do they want to ask audiences viewing their work? And what questions are created from their works? I think that's what inclusive curating means to me, the creation of more questions about powers at play in the institutions themselves. I'll leave it there.
[JP] Thank you, Mary. Natalie, would you like to go?
[NB] Sure, thanks. My name is Natalie Bell. I use she/her pronouns. I am a white woman who is a curator based in Boston. I work at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, which is in Cambridge. It is a university contemporary art gallery that puts on temporary, contemporary art exhibitions that rotate, usually around three per year. I also oversee a public art collection and public art commissions on MIT’s campus. Prior to that, I was working at the New Museum in New York City, also working with mostly living artists and making temporary exhibitions of contemporary art. That was an institution that did not have a permanent collection, so most of the work (really almost all of it) was temporary exhibitions, loaned works, new commissions, project works with artists.
For me inclusive curating, I think you can approach it from a lot of different angles, but at its base, I think it's really about thinking about who is centered in the work that you do and who is welcome in the spaces and exhibitions that you organize. With that, I'll pass it to Jared.
[JL] Thank you. I am Jared Ledesma. My pronouns are he/him/his and I am currently in Akron, Ohio. I'm originally from Union City in California. It's a suburb of the San Francisco Bay area. Born and raised, moved out, worked for a while at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and then moved to Des Moines, Iowa where I worked at the Des Moines Arts Center, which is a modern and contemporary art museum. I was there for about four and a half years and I'm now three weeks in Akron, Ohio working at the Akron Art Museum as our Senior Curator. It’s also a modern and contemporary art museum. We have about 7,000 objects in our collection, which starts around 1850 to the present day. Actually, next year is our 100th anniversary, so we've been around in Akron, Ohio for quite some time.
Inclusive curating--for me personally, my background and how I came to art history, has always been, at least in my experience, a little different than others. My single mother raised me. My family, they didn't go to college. My parents didn't graduate from college. I didn't grow up around an art collection. I came to art rather late in my childhood and so I always think about my mom when I'm curating, or people in the community where I grew up. Union City is extremely diverse. There are a lot of Pakistani, Latinx and Black people, so I come to curating thinking about communities where art is difficult to understand, especially modern and contemporary art; where it's intimidating. I remember my first weeks in graduate school reading Foucault to my mom. I attended a commuter school. I lived at home and would commute to grad school and come back home and read Foucault. My mom would be like, “What does that mean?” I'd be like, “I don't know!” So, that's always in the back of my head, trying to relate art and contemporary art to audiences who are intimidated by it. Also, seeing people like me, a gay, Latinx person on the walls, I think that's important as well.
[JP] Thank you, all. I'm even more excited for this conversation. As we were prepping for this, I was thinking about how I was taught curating, both by example and explicitly in the classroom. I really understood, or was told, that a curator was someone who had this genius idea and then assembled artists around that idea, which connotes using artists as a stepping stone in some way. That's where I was coming from entering this conversation. I'm really interested to see how we can expand and explode that. Peter offered us a useful lens in thinking about the Latin root of the word to curate as “to care for.” I think historically that's meant to care for objects. As we're thinking about how we can expand that, I'm interested to hear you talk about how you think about caring when you're entering or creating an exhibition, a public program, or an event.
[NB] I can dive into that. This is, I think, one of the really frequent touch points in curatorial conversations. It's one that we're all familiar with. As you said, it is coming out of a tradition of caring for a collection, looking after physical objects, but you know for those of us who are working with living artists, it's a very different relationship that on the one hand can be very, very personal, or it can also be forward thinking and having care for an artist's future legacy and wanting to be able to make sure that you're offering some kind of contribution toward that.
One other way that I think about care when I'm programming is in a different direction, which is, why should other people care about this? I think that ties to what you were touching on, Jared, about thinking of your mom. For me, I think of my family members too. Writing texts about art or texts for exhibition spaces, for some of us who've gone into academic spaces where you get sort of drenched in jargon, you have to then also come out, let that dry off, and come back to speaking in a clear and simple way about what it is you're sharing with people. One way of thinking about care is, why should others care about this and why do you care about it? I think it can be a really simple but powerful test for thinking about why you want to present something. Why does it matter? Why do you yourself as the curator or organizer care about this and why do you want other people to care about it? I think part of that is about bringing people in and making sure that what you're doing has value to the people you're sharing it with.
[JL] I think that's really interesting, the personal side of it. I definitely bring that to my work. I’m a feminist, interested in queer art, and I remember studying queer art in the early 2000s and people were like, “What's that?” or like, “What's queer theory?” It was still relatively new. At one point, I was even, I wouldn't say embarrassed, but compared to someone who studies early 20th century Matisse as far as being marketable for jobs. Now, at Akron, I’m very honest about who I am, my interests, and that museums are not neutral, that I am an uber-feminist, and and they love all that. A few years ago, I couldn't be that honest, or maybe with certain institutions, I couldn’t be that honest. I'm not quite sure. What you're saying, Natalie, about the personal is really interesting, caring about the decisions I make and the artists I choose, but also about communities.
In Des Moines, it was really interesting. There are areas of Des Moines where people don't know what the Des Moines Art Center is. They didn't know we were free, or they would say, “Oh that's not for me.” It's hard to access those areas and it's a long it's a long, uphill battle to try to. There were bus lines that didn't even go near the Art Center. The Art Center is in one of the wealthiest areas of the city, but I really wanted those communities to see themselves at the museum. When I got to Des Moines, I made that very clear. I went around and I met people in LGBTQ organizations to let them know there was a gay curator in town. I'm there for you. I will curate shows for you. I want to be the access point to the Art Center's collection. We have queer art. I'm going to bring it out for you. That was really important for me as well
[ML] These are really beautiful answers. The only thing that I would add to what Natalie and Jared have shared so far is just what I've heard in the last couple of years from my mentor and co-collaborators and co-organizers, which is, what does a spirit of care look like in this work that we do? How can we create a culture of care, not only caring for objects and materials the artists that we're working with bring in, but also, what is a spirit of care and how can we create a culture of care in these spaces that we're holding for artists and communities?
To uplift what Jared just shared about Black and Brown communities not having access to these spaces that are sharing artists and artists’ works, that's definitely a historical thing. I'm losing track of my thoughts but contemporary art (and art period) has not been accessible in Black and Brown communities historically. We aren't as familiar with it and so there isn't value to it, if that makes sense. I'll leave it there.
[JP] Jared, you were talking about intentional outreach and relationship building. I'm curious how that might play a role in Mary’s practice and Natalie's practice, but I'm also interested in how that kind of engagement might expand the limitations of traditional curatorial practice. What opportunities, in your experience, has that opened up and what lessons have you learned from that?
[ML] I'll start. I don't have a traditional background. I studied vocal performance when I was in college before I dropped out and also studied cultural studies. Stepping into any type of curatorial practice was just because I wanted to be around my friends and their work. That's my background. I feel like now that I'm in this more professional way of doing things, and working at a nonprofit institution here in Kansas City, what I bring to the table that is new, and refreshing, and will challenge these spaces, is that I don't have a traditional background. I'm interested in challenging these spaces, at all points, strategically.
I don't even know what your question was Jared. Sorry.
[NB] I was also going to ask you to restate it.
[JP] Totally. I guess I'm interested in the limitations of curatorial expertise as we know it and what you have gained going outside the institution for outreach and community engagement. How does that challenge your own curatorial practice? What have you learned that falls outside convention?
[JL] I have a story I can share related to that. I organized a show at the Des Moines Art Center called Queer Abstraction. It was pretty major for Des Moines and for the Art Center. One of the amazing ideas that our Director of Education shared with me is that we should get a group of community leaders together and share the idea of the exhibition, see what they think, and walk them through the exhibition space. It was more like, “We're doing this show and we would like your input.” So, I met with community leaders from One Iowa, from Iowa Safe Schools, and other LGBTQ organizations in Iowa, and I pitched the idea of the show and the thesis. When we were walking through the Art Center's main gallery space where the show would be, I opened it up to questions. Literally, the first question I got was, “How many artists of color and how many bisexual artists [are included in the exhibition]?” I hadn't prepared to give an answer like that. There were a few artists of color and there were no artists that were bisexual, at least to my knowledge.
It really took me back. I fumbled and it was a learning experience that I needed to prepare for, and answer, questions like that. The reality is that people are now looking at statistics, as far as exhibitions and numbers, and not just people who write reviews for Art in America, but people in my community are looking too. And it's important. Luckily, that gathering was so far in advance of the exhibition that I was able to add more artists to the show and really think about inclusivity in that way. If i hadn't gotten that question, I don't know what Queer Abstraction would have looked like.
[NB] I'll share a personal experience that kind of cuts both ways on this issue. What I'm thinking of is a large group exhibition that I was involved in pretty closely when I began working at the New Museum in 2013. It was a group show that took up the subject of contemporary art from the Arab world and it was a curatorial team of primarily white American and European curators. In order to research the exhibition, we did a lot of outreach to speak with people and meet with artists to learn about the various art scenes in countries throughout the Arab world or Middle East and North Africa. What my point is here, this show was very complicated to put together. I think it was, in some ways, out of tune with its moment, but also necessary. I think also probably one of the last of its kind, in terms of museums doing geographically or culturally defined group shows and finding some sub-theme within that. I don't see that happening anymore and I think that's a good thing. However, at the time, the argument to do the show was that there was an absence of representation of Arab artists in museums in New York City. That was true, and it's still true, and it's true throughout the United States. So, the argument was, this is a way to make a big introduction. No other museums are doing it for reasons that are more complex than the scope of this conversation and therefore, we should do it.
The argument for not engaging curators who come from an Arab background, or from the Middle East, was that they would already have too much expertise, or in other words, a certain kind of bias. They were too close to that scene to be able to take a fresh look at it. That's a different angle on it. I'm not saying I completely agree with that. I think there's probably a balance that could be struck and would potentially make for a richer show and there were ways that we did engage certain cultural groups and creatives from Arab backgrounds. We worked with Dune Magazine to produce the catalog for the show and really, we were getting all kinds of feedback throughout the process, some solicited and some of it not solicited.
What I wanted to raise here is the notion that sometimes you can be too close to something to be able to have perspective. How do we balance the benefit that can come from being new to a subject, or to a cultural experience, with what's at stake when you are new? What is lost from a novice's entry? Obviously no one, including myself, who was involved in making that show wanted to be a novice in that we did everything that we could to make sure we were well read and well informed, but we don't have those lived experiences, and didn't. So, for us to be engaging with work that was about the Lebanese civil war, or the Israeli occupation of Palestine, is ultimately going to come from a position of not knowing that through one's own lived experience.
Anyway, that's a long kind of personal experience that I wanted to share because part of me still does think that there can be value in having distance to allow perspective on something. At the same time, it can be super problematic and that was an exhibition that had some of both. There's lots of people who have other opinions about that show too; many of them have already written about it in various journals
[JP] That, to me, is really interesting in terms of acknowledging the limitations of your own capacity and the presumed authority of a curator. Just to throw that thought at Jared and Mary before moving on, I'm wondering if either of you have anything to add?
[ML] I wanted to add to, because I feel like my thoughts are all over the place, the first question that we answered at the top of this conversation about inclusivity. I recently took this course online called Decolonizing Curatorial and Artistic Practices and in the first session we had, we watched a short film. Something that was said in that film will stay with me forever, which is about the term inclusivity and how when we use it in this context, we usually mean that some group of people, or groups of people, are superior in a space. I only bring that up to say when we're thinking about care, or a spirit of care, a culture of care in these spaces, what does a decolonized practice look like, not only for the artist, but also for the curator or others on staff?
When I was working at the Union [for Contemporary Art] in Omaha, and now here in Kansas City, something else that's floated up at both organizations is anti-oppression. What does that also look like in these spaces? I also wanted to mention that as a Black femme woman, I'm very interested in sharing space with my people, with Indigenous people, and with Brown people. I think that when we are in these spaces that have historically not been open to us, or accessible to us, it's revolutionary. I think that when we are visible in these spaces, a lot of transformation can happen. Of course so many things have to be in order for all of that change to happen, but I think just occupying these spaces and showing in these spaces is one way of doing that.
[JP] I'm also thinking, in the wake of George Floyd's murder and all of the statements being put out by cultural institutions, paired with Covid, there's been a call for cultural institutions to do better. We've watched some take steps forward and many recede into the status quo. I'm curious to know what you think inclusive curatorial practices might do to make cultural institutions more racially equitable?
[JL] I'll jump in. I think demystifying the museum is key and realizing that the museum is an artifact of colonialism. I know that's something that's being thrown around, but I think it's really hard for certain institutions to understand that, or to accept that, and it's incredibly hard for a modern and contemporary art museum to stop in its tracks and realize that and make change. Like I was saying earlier, it's going to take years--everything from the wall texts, to staffing, to how you post a job, where you post a job--but I think that's a first step. I think that's all I have right now. I'll think more about it.
[NB] I want to follow what you said about it being especially hard for contemporary and modern museums. That's something I've felt a lot. And I'll say that I'm still learning this. I'm still unlearning. It's one thing to look at encyclopedic museums like the Met or the MFA in Boston and say, “Oh, well yeah, they're artifacts of colonialism because they have all these old objects that were stolen from colonial countries.” It's much harder to look at a contemporary art museum and see how that too is still an artifact of colonialism. That is really hard to do. It takes a lot more introspection and I think it takes a lot more translation of practices and understanding how certain conventions do effectively a similar thing. To use the example of the show I was just talking about, that is absolutely a show that was in a colonial framework. I think that's basically one of the biggest problems with it.
Certain other practices come to mind, even just the ethos of discovery and newness that is so central to showing contemporary art and the emphasis on someone's first show, or their first show in the US, or their first something and the expectation that as the curator you're kind of a talent scout--you're just like roaming the world and picking up the next new artist from a foreign country to bring to their first US solo so you can put on the wall text that it's their first US solo and you discovered them--that's colonial. There's much more to it, but that's just to name one very common convention that we could definitely live without.
[JP] Thank you for naming that. To your point, it is hard to understand how those conventions operate in a contemporary context. It is kind of easy to be like, “Well, we work with contemporary artists or living artists and therefore we're absolved of the responsibilities that come with a collecting institution and that history of violence.” I feel like there's been a few times where we've named or identified some of the barriers institutions pose. I thought it was really interesting, Jared, your point about bus lines didn't even go to the Des Moines Arts Center. I'm curious, what are some of the other barriers that prevent people and communities from being more engaged with cultural institutions?
[ML] I think walking into a space and not seeing someone that looks like you, I think that's a very obvious barrier. Not being familiar with a space or what value it holds. Those are a couple of barriers that come to mind.
[NB] I also think about the cost of entry. That was an issue for me for many years until I was working in the field and could show an employee ID card and, most of the time, get a comped entry. Museums are super expensive. $25 for most people, they'd rather spend that on a movie.
[JL] I agree. I used to get really mad when people would be like, “Museums are so expensive!” I'd be like, “Well, you go to football games and that's expensive.” But they are expensive and that is a barrier. Culture, especially the visual arts, is viewed differently, that it should be free. That's an interesting conversation I think we could spend a while talking about, but I think Mary talking about value and the institution is also really interesting. It was like that at the Art Center, and now at Akron, where we have these amazing collections of modern and contemporary art right in people's backyards and they don't understand the value or what they can gain from the perspectives of these artists. That's really challenging for me. I would wander in the galleries in the Art Center to take breaks and often I would hear people ask the guards, “Are these the real things or are these replicas?” It was hard for them to believe that Des Moines has a Picasso or a Matisse. Another barrier that I mentioned earlier is staff. Like you're saying, Mary, about seeing yourself in the museum, and museum staff, and making sure that there's diversity among staff is key.
[ML] Yeah, and just to add to that, Jared, I was gonna put this in the chat box but when you do see someone that looks like you, a person of color, in these spaces what roles do they play?
[JP] As we're thinking about these more inclusive ways to approach exhibition making or public programming, to project a little into the future, how do you see the role, or the obligations, of the curator shifting in the coming years?
[NB] Algorithms.
[JP] Can you say more about that? I don't know what that means!
[NB] It's my bad joke that curatorial work will be replaced by algorithms. It's super possible and around the corner. I think another possibility is that curatorial work will be less about the individual, the individual curator, and more about work that is done through a committee or a coalition and the role will evolve more into one of an organizer a project manager, something that is less driven by individual taste or a certain expertise, if we're going to invest in that as a notion.
[JL] I agree about the role of the curator changing to be more community driven. The Promise Witness Remembrance show at the Speed Art Museum, I was lucky enough to see that. It was curated by Allison Glenn and there are many aspects of that show that were really incredible. One thing that I really admired was that Breonna Taylor's mother wrote her timeline, her chronology. I think for a curator to give up wall text space to someone, it sounds trite, but that's a big deal to give responsibility for the text on the walls to someone who's not a curator or not trained as an art historian. I think that's radical in some ways. I loved it. I embrace that and hope to see more of that in curation, a collaboration with community and artists writing labels.
We have a Donald Judd in the Akron Art Museum’s collection and I was just told a story last week that years ago a visitor got really excited about the work who was only at the museum to see our Norman Rockwell exhibition. This was the first time they saw our Donald Judd. It’s a sculpture that sits on the floor and they were telling their spouse or partner that they got really excited because of the execution of the work. This person worked as a metal worker and saw the simplicity and the perfectionism in the execution of the design. That's something that I would never think about. I did not think about that before hearing this story. Right away, I'm like, “Oh my god, this person should give a tour or they should write the label.” Inviting them to give that perspective and insight, I think, is also part of the future of curating.
[JP] I just want to open up the floor to questions from anyone in the audience. Please feel free to chat them in. Oh, there's already one in here:
“How can artists, parents, and other community members etc. help instill the value of public arts and art spaces into our communities?”
[ML] I think getting involved in local policy making, understanding who's running for what and what they stand for. See what they're talking about when it comes to arts and culture in the cities and towns that you live in.
[NB] Yeah, I think so much comes down to funding. In the US, we don't have any great precedent of government or state funding to sustain art centers. So much of our funding comes privately. It's a circular issue because the problem, the lack of funding, comes from a lack of valuing it. So, how do you get people to value it? Well, we need to put more funding into it. A lot of people I know who come to art have come to it through a really great teacher, or a really great encounter with it, through someone who we might call a really great interpreter. Those are the kinds of people who can bring someone into it. I would say find those people, and pay them, and support them, and help them do what they're doing.
[JP] On that issue of funding, in our last local election cycle here in Omaha, a cohort of cultural workers and activists, facilitated by Amplify Arts, came together to create a voter's guide for the arts. I encounter them all the time for how to vote democrat, how to vote along these political lines, and I was struck by how obvious that was and yet, I hadn’t encountered it [before]. It seems like a really direct way because it's hard to know what all the representatives are doing for the arts community and those issues aren't being foregrounded in the broader political discourse on a national level or on a local level. That small gesture, a voter's guide, felt like a really effective way to be engaged.
I had a question as I was listening to the three of you talk. It comes out of my experience at the Bemis Center where a lot of the exhibitions and programming that we do brings in national and international artists to Omaha. In the call for institutions to do better, part of that has been to be more community centric. I sometimes encounter, navigating our Omaha art world, a frustration that the Bemis Center doesn't show local artists. It doesn't show me; it doesn't show my friends, so why should I care? I find myself feeling very conflicted on that issue because on one hand, yes, we can do better to connect the dots and to represent and activate our community. On the other hand, I'm like, “Well, these are still great artists, this is really exciting stuff, and you can learn something from them.” I want to share that excitement. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how to negotiate this kind of locality in a broader, global art world.
[JL] That's hard. That's really hard. I got that in Des Moines, especially because at the Des Moines Arts Center, there's an annual exhibition called Iowa Artist where they feature an Iowa artist every year. For a while, I think it started in the 1940s, it was a juried art show. Then it changed and the curators would choose the artists. We would get inquiries about why it isn't a juried show any longer. And also, you have Art Center in your name. Why isn't it more like a community center? Why aren't you showing my work? It's hard to answer. I would invite people to come to the museum and meet me, come see what's on our walls and let me explain why these artists are important and why we're showing them. I would um explain that right now we're looking at women artists, or artists of color, and this is something that's really important to us. We would even get people wanting to donate their artwork to the collection and I would have to give the same response. It's hard. In Des Moines especially, but also in Akron, we want to bring the contemporary world to our communities and share what's out there for people who can't travel to New York City or to Los Angeles. That's part of it as well, but it's hard.
[NB] On a somewhat different scale, when I was at the New Museum, we very rarely showed artists from New York City and there are more than a few artists in New York City who would be, in my mind, deserving of a New Museum exhibition. It was just a strange thing that the emphasis was so much on bringing an artist who'd never had a show in New York that it effectively eliminated artists who'd been living there. Once in a while there were exceptions to that, but it's difficult. I think it is sometimes, and this isn't a great answer, but one answer is that it is sometimes just where an institution falls in a larger ecosystem of art spaces in a given place. If you have the Whitney or MoMA PS1 who are going to be showing more American artists, or more local artists, add to that the Queens Museum, the Brooklyn Museum showing a lot of local artists, then the argument would be it's fine to have a museum that has its eyes a elsewhere in the world. Part of me agrees with that. I think that's a sort of subtle unspoken negotiation that sometimes happens in urban spaces that have enough of an arts ecosystem that such a thing could exist. It's still always a balancing act of some sort, to collapse that into a bit of a cliché, but I think you know what I mean.
[JP] Another part of that question, this is another criticism levied at me that I'm going to throw at y'all (sorry), is--and we haven't spent much time today thinking about public programming and using that as a band-aid on an amputated arm, like here's our local flavor--I'm curious how public programming might play a part in a more inclusive curatorial practice for you?
[JL] I think i'll jump in for a little bit and go back to Queer Abstraction. When we decided to add that show to the exhibition schedule, we, the curatorial team at the Art Center, thought it'd be a good idea to start bringing out the queerness of the collection in different ways. I did a show on Grant Wood and his sexuality and I started giving tours with the director of One Iowa where we went around and looked at artworks either by queer artists, or that were queer in some shape or form, to help our audiences start thinking about queerness and become familiar with the word “queer,” which was fairly new to Des Moines.
[ML] The only thing that comes to mind is the archive, or a counter archive, to inspire public programming. How can I make this impermanent thing have a little bit more longevity? I curated a year-long series at Charlotte Street Foundation before they hired me called Because Of This and one of the public programming components of the series is an audio archive. Throughout the series, we were interviewing all of the artists that are part of the series, all the performers, not all of them, but a few of them, and that's what comes to mind. Archiving things and documenting.
[JP] Well, that takes us to the hour unless there are any final thoughts that you y'all want to share or final questions from the audience. I'm super grateful for your thoughtfulness and your generosity. I feel like from this conversation, I'm taking away a new level of acknowledgement, or a different kind of acknowledgement, of the limitations of our knowing and institutional knowing. To return to thinking about caring, I’m taking away ideas of how to better care for ourselves, and for others, their bodies and their politics, in ways that extend beyond conventional curatorial practices. Thank you all for that.
[ML] My final thoughts are: one, jared and jared, we’re all wearing the same color, and second, I really love your point, Natalie, about perspective and being too close to something to have a perspective that might offer balance. I'm gonna sit with that.
Jared, you shared many beautiful things as well. Thank you, Jared Packard for moderating. This was great.
[JL] Natalie, your comment about finding the next big artist was awesome. I was like, “Wow, oh shit.” So thank you.
[NB] I mean it's depressing. I've done it so many times.
[JL] Yeah, it's something that I've been asked to do many times. You need to find the next emerging artist because we can't afford so-and-so.
[NB] And the number of times that you've said, “They're like a young so-and-so,” right? You just sort of slot them into place to ascend.
[JL] Yeah, thank you, Mary and Natalie.
[NB] Thank you both as well. I feel like I've gotten a lot of food for thought and there's a lot of work to be done.
[JP] I love how mutually supportive you three are. So great. Thank you all, and for all of our guests out there, thank you. Have a great night and take care everyone.
*This transcript has been edited for clarity.
About the Panelists:
Natalie Bell is Curator at The MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she thinks and works with communities committed to experimentation and risk-taking in the arts. Before joining the List Center’s staff, Natalie worked as an assistant and associate curator at the New Museum in New York. During her tenure there, she curated solo exhibitions by Anna Boghiguian, Marguerite Humeau, Hiwa K, and Lubaina Himid and co-curated large-scale group exhibitions including Here and Elsewhere (2014), The Keeper (2016), Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon (2017), and, most recently, The Warmth of Other Suns (2019). Prior to her work at the New Museum, Natalie was assistant curator for The Encyclopedic Palace, the International Exhibition of the 55th Venice Biennale (2013).
Mary Lawson is a musician, organizer, and advocate who most recently worked as the Artist and Program Support Manager at the Union for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska. While at the Union, Mary curated Uplift & Elevate (2020-21), a series of virtual performances and rotating exhibitions installed in the gallery’s street-facing windows that celebrate the work of traditionally underrepresented artists. Mary, who also performs under the moniker ‘Mesonjixx,’ belongs to two diasporas of two hemispheres. Her father is a Black Visionary born and raised in Ozark, Alabama and her mother is a South Pasifika Islander-Oracle from Honolulu, Hawaii. Her work as an organizer and artist is central to her identity as a Black-femme woman, with Native and Indigenous South Pasifika roots, who calls the plains of Amerika her home.
Jared Ledesma joined the Akron Art Museum as senior curator in July 2021. Prior to Akron, Ledesma was associate curator at the Des Moines Art Center, where he organized more than a dozen exhibitions. This includes Queer Abstraction, which earned a commendation from the 2019 Sotheby’s Prize jury and the 2020 SECAC Award for Outstanding Exhibition and Catalog of Contemporary Materials. Other exhibitions Ledesma has organized include Iowa Artists 2021: Olivia Valentine, Hedda Sterne: Imagination and Machine, Jeffrey Gibson: I Was Here, The Art Students League of New York, and I, too, am America (2017). Before working at the Des Moines Art Center, Ledesma was curatorial assistant in the department of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Ledesma is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area and holds both a BA and MA in art history, with a focus in queer art.
About the Moderator:
Jared Packard is an artist and curator based in Omaha, NE where he is the Exhibitions Manager at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Packard completed his BA at Clark University and his MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has curated the NEA-funded unLOCK: Merging Art and Industry, Lockport, IL; an urban curatorial experiment, Stumble Chicago; the nationally traveling exhibition, ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection; and (Re)Flex Space, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL. He has shown his work at ADDS DONNA, Chicago, IL; Baltimore Gallery, Detroit, MI; Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL; Centre International d’Art Contemporain, Pont-Aven, France; Hillyer Art Space, Washington, D.C.; Shiltkamp Gallery, Worcester, MA.