On being out of my element
Or, on returning to the world and feeling overwhelmed
Some news…
Dear Studio for Tomorrow subscribers,
I am so proud to announce that last week I began a new job, as Curator at The Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso. I join the Rubin Center at a particularly exciting moment in the institution’s history, with the mission of continuing and expanding upon their long line of remarkable exhibitions. Since its founding in 2004, the Rubin has created site-specific projects with artists such as Teresa Margolles, Minerva Cuevas, Carolina Caycedo, Adrian Esparza, Alejandro Almanza Pereda, Gaku Tsutaja, Machine Project, Mark Bradford, Regina Silveira, Tania Candiani, Regina José Galindo, and Luis Jimenez, as well as numerous artist collaboratives and border organizations. It has a long history of connecting artists in the El Paso and Ciudad Juárez region with artists from elsewhere in meaningful and experimental exchange, and it has been a leader in thinking about the ethics of working across borders. Finally, as the center for contemporary art on the campus of UTEP, the Rubin works closely with students, developing program-specific pedagogy and long-term paid internships to train the next generation of museum professionals and artists as they begin their careers of collaborating with arts organizations. Sincerely, I cannot imagine a job better suited to my particular interests, ethos, and experience. You can read more about the early years of the Rubin Center in founding director Kate Bonansinga’s book, Curating at the Edge: Artists Respond to the US/Mexico Border, published by UT Press in 2014. I’ll keep you posted of upcoming exhibitions, in case any of you find yourselves in the El Paso region… it would be wonderful to see you here.
That said, as I started work last week, that mailing of Studio for Tomorrow was delayed. Learning so many new systems, commuting several hours a day, and working around other people for the first time in years!, my brain didn’t have the capacity to write you anything particularly useful. I sincerely apologize for this gap, and will be sending out two editions next week, to catch us up. Otherwise, we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming… And, as always, I want you to know that your support of this writing is especially meaningful to me, always.
On being out of my element
I’ve been telling people this week about the mushy slowness that I feel in my brain, as I try to absorb this new set of daily requirements, softwares, interactions, and organizational systems. More than ever, my mental processes require extreme focus and patience. Everything from parking to having in-person meetings to setting up an office seems to require my entire attention, to an absurd extent. I don’t remember being this easily overwhelmed in the before-times. Have any of you been dealing with this as you return to activities from the past?
My crash into daily office life comes after two years of intense isolation: last year, I moved to a town of about 200 people in the Chihuahua desert, and I will go days without seeing more than one person outside of my household (it’s usually Beverly, at the post office). It comes almost seven years into my freelance life, where my days have been blissfully my own (or my cats’). It will take some getting used to.
But, even as my head struggles to reconcile this new administrative day-to-day with my creative work and research, I also feel a startling newness of curiosity and ideas. I’ve been reading in the morning before my commute: Maggie Nelson’s book On Freedom, Kathi Weeks’ book The Problem with Work, Suzanne Simard’s book Finding the Mother Tree, Pace’s gorgeous new Agnes Martin catalog The Distillation of Color, Jarrett Earnest’s compilation What it Means to Write About Art, the Kate Bonansinga book I mentioned above. On my drive, I listen to music loudly, sometimes podcasts (Jon Stewart’s visit to the Kara Swisher podcast Sway last week was particularly affecting), and I find myself exclaiming out loud about the stunning landscapes that are sweeping past my windows. I have a renewed appreciation for the Dixie Chicks.
If, on the one hand, my brain is having trouble remembering which computer system I order office supplies from and how to set up a new email (yesterday, I meticulously copied all my meetings for two weeks down into a new planner, so proud of myself until I realized I had copied them into February instead of March…), on the other hand, being surrounded by people again, being in a museum space, and thinking of my creative work in collaboration with a team, is wildly energizing. I feel myself opening up again to new ideas, to tempering the grief of these years with the balm of smart people, imagining other ways of seeing, of being in the world, of making something new. The world is so full of grief and pain—working with artists doesn’t make that go away—but returning to the world is also giving me a surprising feeling of possibility. I am remembering why I still do this work.
For many intertwined reasons, I went into extreme solitude in these years and, in my community, I am among the last to emerge from this deep retreat. Many of you have already had these experiences of returning to the world, seeing other humans, going to exhibitions, traveling, being in a classroom. And so, my question for you this week is: what has that return brought back to your creative work?
And, alongside that question: in what ways are you pushing your brain—or perhaps better said, your whole self—out of its nest of comfort, now? Where do you feel your thinking hit up against its edges, your whole focus required in order to figure something out? And what does this edge offer you?
Perhaps what I mean is that in these past two years, the edge of my experience has been in profound aloneness. It was a period of so much grief and coming to terms with old narratives, both personally and culturally. But, conversely, this new thing of being swamped, deluged, overtaken, by new information is returning my imaginative strength to me. Instead of only imagining survival, I am imagining how I want to make something new. And, it’s been a while since I’ve had that feeling of not being able to keep up with the breadth of new ideas and information I want to explore.
So, I wish each of you a little bit of overwhelm this week. Something that makes your processing systems slow down, recoil, reset, and expand. Something that breaks the part of your brain that is feeling rigid and makes it spongy and absorptive again. Something that gives you that fearless spark—that, even as you are aware and engaged in the world in its endlessly darkest moments—makes you want to get out of bed and still try something new, even though you can’t quite wrap your brain around it all yet.
With warmth, from out here,
Laura
Laura August, PhD makes essays and exhibitions, lumpy pots and wild gardens. She has curated more than 20 exhibitions as an independent curator working between the U.S. and Central America. In 2021, she was named an inaugural Mellon Arts + Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and her writing about contemporary art in Guatemala City has been recognized with an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Alongside her consulting practice for artists and writers, she teaches a process, practice, and professional strategies class for artists at the Glassell School of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She currently makes her home on the edge of the Chihuahua Desert, and she is Curator at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso.