I am an independent artist and curator, who also works as an art consultant via a commercial container (Latela Curatorial), which I started 10 years ago to date. It was early Spring 2015, and I was mind-mapping and SWOT analyzing on a dear friend’s sunny terrace in Florence, Italy about a month after I quit my full-time job at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. As I write this, I’m back in the sweet Tuscan city, staring out amongst terracotta rooftops, reflecting on the past decade and preparing myself for what’s next. For me, that feels like making more space for my artistic practice and starting a Phd program to deepen in my concepts.
My background - a budding curator/scholar:
My early experience involved working in Florence, Italy in some of the most prestigious Renaissance Art museums as a budding curator/scholar. Realizing that this path would lead deeper into Renaissance scholarship caused me to feel somewhat stagnant, and instead I directed my attention and curiosity toward the emerging academic discipline of “Curatorial Studies”. After researching numerous curatorial graduate programs, I selected a program in Barcelona, Spain that checked all my boxes, except that it was taught in a language I did not speak. Nevertheless, I uprooted myself and learned the Spanish language during the program. While many said that attempting graduate level work in a new language was unnecessarily burdensome, my intuition said otherwise. I’ve always felt that when curiosity and intuition are strong enough, drive will follow. Although it was challenging, my journey kept me focused and grounded in a sense of purpose. This also wasn’t the first time I decided to follow my intuition. Late in my undergraduate study, I added Art History to a double major in Communications and Sociology after being introduced to the Renaissance. I dove in headfirst and experienced unprecedented joy in learning. I moved to Italy a week after graduating, and juggled volunteer artworld projects and odd jobs whilst studying Italian until I was a solid candidate for museum work. I went on to hold positions at The Medici Chapels, Casa Martelli, and the National Bargello Museum.
In Florence, I was deeply embedded in creative and experimental artist communities, which felt very disconnected from my professional curatorial path at the time. However, in Barcelona I completed my graduate practicum at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies (now: Museu Tàpies), an institution focused on the revolutionary Catalan artist’s work, with a portion of its mission also dedicated to the advancement of contemporary art initiatives. In this institution, I witnessed a powerful, cutting-edge curatorial voice that existed simultaneously with – alternately interwoven and separate from –Tàpies’ work. The two parts of me (artist and curator) that felt fragmented in the “conventional” art world at the time, did not conflict under the aura of this institution. It was there that I first discovered artists like Jannis Kounellis, Eulàlia Valldosera, Ana Mendieta, Anna Maria Maiolino, Jana Sterbak, Mario Merz and Louise Bourgeois – to name a few. These artists, along with Antoni Tàpies, catalyzed my admiration and profound curiosity in themes and movements like arte povera, materiality, land art, body ephemerality, earth stewardship, and ecofeminism. Through self-study of these artists, I began to understand and further research anti-capitalism (and reflect on how I live and contribute to our current world), Jungian psychology (including the work of Clarissa Pinkola Estés), my own spirituality, and the practice of feminine archetyping – all concepts that have since guided my artistic and curatorial pursuits.
10 years as a solo entrepreneur in the arts:
For the past decade I have worked as an independent curator and arts manager, while also maintaining my art practice. I have built and managed multiple projects/platforms (Latela Curatorial, GLB Memorial Fund for the Arts, and See Support Collect) for contemporary, marginalized artists and curators, stewarding exhibition and sales avenues, grant opportunities, public art projects, and community gatherings. To fund the first few years of this work I regularly lectured as an art historian in Italy and Spain for the Smithsonian. For a long time, I felt like I had a foot in two continents that were floating further apart from one another. It took many years for these independent projects with emerging artists and limited funding to align with the themes and quality of execution I was introduced to on a museum level. Eventually, I found balance within the braid that is my art practice, my curatorial practice, and work as an art consultant.
Rupture ~ Lyme Disease:
The ultimate catalyst in achieving that balance occurred in 2021 when I was diagnosed with Lyme Disease. I underwent an intensive treatment that disrupted and paused my life for almost 3 years. However, by surrendering to this experience, many of the concepts that entranced me at the Tàpies Foundation resurfaced in my art practice. At the darkest hour – amidst deep grief, pain, depression at times, betrayal, and very limited physical ability – I turned to creating, by repurposing the hundreds of single-use plastic IV bags used during my treatment. I felt tremendous guilt that, as just one patient, my treatment had contributed to the plastic waste that largely ends up in landfills. As I began researching the medical waste industry and its impacts on our Earth, ironically, the beaches closest to Washington DC closed to the public due to medical waste contamination.
This led me to create a series titled The Hidden Costs of Wellness, in which I photographed my IV bags in nature. The work aims to spark conversation around the magnitude of costs for treatments like mine which harm the Earth, yet stem from rising health epidemics that are very much due to lack of connection with the Earth. (For example, as the Earth continues to warm, co-infections will increase, particularly for Lyme as ticks will not die out annually). Most recently, I did a performance wearing a “cloak” of my IV bags on Miami Beach for Art Week, to bring attention to the prevalence of medical waste in our environment. I am currently working on a film and photography series produced in nature that, through somatic and trauma-informed movement and breath exercises, speaks to chronic fatigue, death, molecular rejuvenation, and healing. As natural disasters and co-infections increase (or as the Earth is increasingly mistreated and ravaged), it is ever more important that we rewild and honor her deeper. Mending that relationship is harder to achieve once you feel nature has betrayed you. How can I feel safe to walk in a forest after what I experienced from one tiny tick? How can those impacted by the current toxic air from the Los Angeles wildfires, which will undoubtedly cause long-term lung issues, ever feel safe enough to breathe the air without a mask?
Continuing this theme, I also took courses to learn how to forage ethically and paint with natural pigments; to fully alchemize my painting practice (as acrylic is a plastic and oils require toxins to bind the paint). The concepts and teachings of arte povera, materiality, land art, body ephemerality, earth stewardship, and ecofeminism have been evermore present in my artistic practice, and this alchemy has also augmented my curatorial eye, which recognizes a need for deeper involvement with these topics. It is my aim to merge both how I approach these themes as an artist and as a curator in this online space.
Arts support + collective healing:
The dark nights of the soul, deep surrender, and healing I was forced to confront during my Lyme Treatment is, I believe, synonymous to what is required as a collective body in this moment of deep inflammation on our Planet Earth. I’m interested in the lens of healing both on individual and macro-collective levels. This perspective also acknowledges a support/ecosystemic level within the arts sector. I believe this intersection is where my personal experience and practical experience will prove useful…
In 2023, I participated in a global cohort of curators, artists, arts organizers, and other workers that examined ways to deconstruct and rebuild the arts sectors: 1) how to create and bridge trans-local networks when a focus on hyper-localism is necessary for immediate impact yet isn’t sustainable, 2) how models and understandings of “support” for artists, curatorial, and community work can restructure as systems are changing, and 3) how to continue a cultural practice that bridges digital curation and programming adapted from the pandemic with society’s impulse to participate in-person. It seems that we find ourselves split along multiple spectrums of needed change all at once, and it’s difficult to find footing at times. I believe it is imperative for cultural institutions to explore these areas to determine what their curatorial praxis will look like in the future. Committing myself to writing and research is how I see myself best contributing.
I also feel a responsibility to confront the further study of these themes from a disability and chronic illness perspective, as my understanding of support (and sometimes, lack thereof) changed drastically during my medical treatment.
Why begin a Phd Program?
The Phd program I found presents a cross-cultural and engagement-forward approach to learning, which I find to be groundbreaking for the future of academia and a sustainable model for today’s students. In a way, this program is placemaking for scholars, and I am excited to be a participant. For years, I rejected the idea of pursuing a Phd because I felt it would have forced me to narrow my expertise to one academic niche while foregoing practical experience. Instead, I focused on weaving my skillsets in a manner that I intuited museums and culture institutions would eventually focus on as they challenge some of their traditional processes and priorities. I have spent the past decade “on the ground” as a culture curator, working with contemporary artists who are shifting the hyper-present moment’s cultural landscape, and witnessing the ways in which arts and culture institutions have tried to adapt to changes in audiences and engagement. Now, I believe this Phd program will enable me to merge and amplify my many interests and practical experience.
I feel strongly that it is time for me to return to academia and expand my research. My career has provided me with multiple touch points that have overlapped time and time again, and I now need to string the beads together. I am proud of the portfolio, business, and work ethic that I have built since completing my MA program in 2012, however I feel I lack the structure and resources to integrate theory, human consciousness, and critical thought in an impactful way on my own. I look forward to this aligned container to recharge my mind and exercise writing again so that I can make sense of and contribute to these themes with integrity in the future.
This substack thread will prove as my practice space. Thank you for being here, participating, and holding me accountable.