“From musical compositions to recipes to instruction pieces, people have been sharing their making, meaning, and authorship with others. When a pianist follows a score, a chef cooks a dish, or a person follows an instruction piece, variations and interpretations are made and shared.
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When I first moved to San Francisco, over six years ago, for a job at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the recurring refrain I often heard from people living here and working in the field of contemporary art was that the region’s art scene tended to be rather “provincial.” I found this pejorative qualifier highly problematic, and in many ways it remains a perception artists living in the Bay Area struggle to overcome.
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A few years ago the Center for Art and Public Life facilitated a collaboration between a ceramics course and the design group Rebar to create nesting modules for a species of concern on an island off the coast of Santa Cruz, California. The project was very specific in nature. The birds: Rhinoceros Auklet. The concern: nests being crushed by large elephant seals and sea lions. The material of choice: the pliant and durable medium of ceramics. The location: Ana Neuvo Island.
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In 2004, a small wing of the House of the People in Bucharest was rudimentarily converted into a National Museum of Contemporary Art, and I began work as a curator under circumstances that were an apotheosis of the local. Built during the ‘80s, the edifice was to converge the archaic strata of the collective psyche and the political destiny of the Romanian nation, in other words to bring a propagandistically deformed past into an unlikely future of anonymous collectivism and amputated souls.
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