On details and feelings
Or how to make an exhibition without going to the hospital
How are you holding up, sweet Studio for Tomorrow readers?
The first two weeks of the year have been a bit rocky over here, as I continue to recover from a respiratory illness that started last month and has wiped me out. But also, there have been unprecedented technology failures (my bank—a major, multinational behemoth—lost my checking account for six days; my paycheck took four days to find me at the beginning of the month, thwarting all my auto-pay bill scheduling; I forgot my kettle was on the stove and burned right through it and all of the water I boil tastes like metal, etc). And the interpersonal communication at work—where I am about to open two exhibitions with 22 artists, 21 of them faculty at the university—has been filled with miscommunications, hot tempers, direct conflict, gossip, bad feelings, and anxieties, in every direction. There has already been a lot of crying, and the opening isn’t til Thursday.
I hope that your year is starting off more gently.
There are two things that these weeks have taught me (with help from some wise friends). Well, two things I will take from these weeks in an attempt to make the next two better: the first is about curating in relation to the emotional experiences of artists and trying not to carry those feelings in my body. The second is about focusing on details, in order to help the daily systems that structure my day and my creative work function more smoothly.
Let’s look at these, one at a time.
As a conflict-avoidant, empathetic introvert—i.e. a writer who has been working in isolation for two years—I am attuned to how artists are feeling when we work together. The word curator has its roots in caretaking. From the Latin, it means “one who takes care of a thing, a guardian,” and it comes out of curare (“to take care of”), and cura (“care, attention, anxiety, grief”). I am sure there are family roots to my need to take care of others’ emotions, and in some situations, it can be not only a subtle super power, but also a generous gift. When an artist is creating or installing work in a space with me, they are preparing to share something intimate and vulnerable with an unpredictable viewer: they are entering a space of trust with me, with the architecture, with the audience, sharing something that is so profoundly personal, which has heretofore been held by the relative privacy of the studio. Depending upon many factors, this can be a frightening prospect, filled with unknown possibilities (among them, I should say—one of the reasons we do this to ourselves—is transcendent experiential communication between object and viewer).
But, as these unknowns are unfolding, they may also awaken complex affect in the artist, perhaps even feelings that remain unnamed and wordless, and need a place to land. With care and emotional intuition, these feelings need to be defused and calmed if the artist is going to trust my curatorial decisions and complete the exhibition. And, without going too pop-culture-spiritualism on you on the last day of this Mercury Retrograde, much of that emotion is offloaded onto the figure of the curator (who may have varying capacities for carrying it). In my case, when I receive this energetic weight from artists, it manifests in the pit of my stomach, in the space behind my eyes, and in my shoulders, as a warning tightness. If unattended to, it becomes intense physical pain or illness. For years, I realize now, whenever I opened an exhibition, I would then collapse for weeks at a time. When I co-curated the biennial in Guatemala City, I woke up on installation day with a violent infection of my kidneys. Perhaps a relevant morsel: in ancient biblical mythologies, the kidneys were associated with emotional life, used as a metaphor for moral discernment, reflection, and creative inspiration. Even my organs were overloaded with the curatorial taking-on of artists’ emotional needs, until my body shut it all down and sent me to the hospital.
The second lesson has been about attention to details. As someone whose executive function varies with my energy levels, the extensive detail work required for making an exhibition can be my biggest challenge and my endless failure. In one of my favorite Substacks, How to Glow in the Dark, Anna Sproul-Latimer wrote about this very thing last week. Anna is a literary agent—perhaps the job in the writing field most aligned with the curatorial care-taking I describe above. And, like me, the part of her brain that needs to solve details (like budgets, wall labels, mind-numbingly long lists of emails, expense forms, not to mention the small details of living i.e. feeding myself, sleeping, getting dressed in the morning) can quickly become overtaxed by the many other big-picture and emotion-driven parts of the work.
Counter-intuitively, Anna writes, the way most advice columnists suggest we solve this problem of exhausted executive function is by making check-lists, action items, “don’t forget” Post-Its, buying bullet journals. I recently bought a cute new app that reminds me to clean the house, and breaks down the cleaning into specific tasks. “This approach,” she says, “foists the projects onto my prefrontal cortex. Reminder: this is the weakest part of my brain BY FAR. I need all six or whatever of the neurons in there for other things: work emails and filing. My children’s safety. Remembering to put on deodorant.” (At this point when I’m reading her column, I’m standing up and clapping.) Anna continues: “This whole time, I’ve been driving the Ferrari of my brain to the racetrack of my imagination and then parking it at the gate to run laps in a pre-owned golf cart. And I’ve been mystified why I wasn’t going as fast as the other cars.”
Her suggestion? Find ways to make these details feel less like chores, if you want to actually do the creative work.
Or, put another way, embrace the natural rhythms of your work and try to re-think these details as small games, little pleasures, or ways of caring for yourself. What I hear is: instead of downloading the feelings of the artists all around me, focus on the emotional work of making details a cherished pleasure, a generative exercise, an enjoyable intentionality. Reset that wiring built into me: focus on the ways that my emotional self can take care of specific, small details, which make my personal and curatorial experiences better. The self-directed curatorial caretaking will, inevitably, support the work of making the exhibition richer, too. I don’t need to carry the feelings of artists. I need to deal with paperwork and write some wall text. And that can be a real joy, if I have the emotional space for it, and if I have preserved my physical health with rest, exercise, meditation, hot baths, good food, gardening, connection with friends, and time for reflection.
This work we all do can be taxing to the brain, body, and soul (three parts of the same organism, though we sometimes forget they are connected). How you care for, nurture, and support yourself as you do the work is also part of the pleasure of this work. How you care for, nurture, and support yourself as you do the work also makes the work so much better. And, in the end, it makes this difficult, under-resourced, and vulnerable creativity sustainable for the long haul.
Signing off, now, to send in some expense reports and write some wall labels. Wishing you all good things in the New Year, and hoping you make space to take good care.
-LA
A note about subscriptions:
If you have been with me for a while, you know that I paused all paid subscriptions three months ago, giving myself time to re-think how I wanted the subscription model to work. In part because I am a bit of a Luddite and Substack makes it nearly impossible to turn off paid subscriptions, you may have seen a charge come through this month. If that was a surprise, or caused you undue financial stress, reach out & I’ll refund you, happily. The payments restarted before I realized, so they caught me off-guard, too! (See above, re: executive function). Here’s my plan moving forward:
I want anything I write here to be available to anyone who wants it or needs it, regardless of their ability to pay for it.
Starting this month, all subscribers—both paid plans and free plans—will receive the same content.
If you no longer want to or are able to pay for your subscription, take a moment to switch to the free plan right now. No hard feelings – I want you to take care of you, and I am grateful for all of your support. You’ll still receive everything posted to Studio for Tomorrow.
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I welcome your support—financially, but also through your kind notes, and your time. It means so much to me that you read these missives on creative practice and lived experience. I hope they land when you need them.
Yours,
Laura
Laura August, PhD makes essays and exhibitions. 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 the first full-time Curator at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso.
Thank you for your gift of writing. With you for the long haul and, yes, trusting your leadership as we go. Blessings and praying you stay strong and healthy. With gratitude and thanks. ✨✨✨