#RSRSeesTheUSA Day 11: Santa Fe, NM
I’ve already written about how the museums I’ve visited on this trip have been reminding me of why I love museums in the first place, and why I still believe in their potential to change.
I’ve also written about how much I’ve enjoyed seeing friends in the actual, three-dimensional flesh.
Well, you know what I think after my first full day in Santa Fe?
Museums are neat, and I love my friends.
In the wet chunky snowfall of the morning, I headed out to walk a bit (fortified by a really good chai and a really good pecan chile oatmeal raisin cookie from Wild Leaven bakery) and see some of the town.
This mural took on a sad, Eeyore-ish vibe with the poor elephant all sat in the snow like that.
But Santa Fe street art was not the reason I was out and about, no.
Instead it was to meet up with Jennifer Foley and Koven Smith and to finally get to meet Koven’s marvelous wife and kiddo after literal years of hearing stories about them.
Jennifer and Koven and I have meandered museums together on the punchy days after MCN conferences. The karaoke duets abound. There have been numerous coffees and lunches and dinners and museum visits when one or the other of them came through NYC while I was still there. We have dreamed up so many odd business card titles for each other over the years. We’ve spurred each other on to make good come out of bad situations. We’ve talked for literal hours about how art museums make us despair and yet still hold onto hope. They’re both friends I relied on to talk through my decision to leave New York and take a gamble on a job at the Aspen Art Museum, and they’re both friends I relied on to talk through my decision to leave my job at the Aspen Art Museum without a clear idea of what was coming next.
I am immensely grateful to both of them for helping me from afar as I weathered some serious job and mental health misery in Colorado and cried to them both on Zoom, one one notable occasion, in a meeting entitled What the Shit, as illustrated here.
So yeah, it was really nice to see them both in the same space at the same time for the first time since 2019.
There’s a swirl of thoughts in my brain right now about the subconscious soothing of being in physical space with people and seeing them smile and listening to their voices and not being distracted by your own mirrored face on a screen. How important that is for human connection and how remote work/friendship will, of course, never be its equal. Yes, of course, also, there are things that are convenient about remote set-ups, but maybe convenience isn’t the thing we should be reaching for when we want to break out of the isolating, distancing patterns we’ve all had to use to cope with the last couple of years.
Also, there’s a lot of love for how many of my museum world buddies this trip is re-connecting me with. Here’s a photo of the three of us being goofballs. It is very fitting in that it seems like not one of us was ready for the picture to be taken (skillfully and stealthily by Madelyn… good job), which is very in keeping with the tenor of many of our conversations.
My museum love was a quieter, more internal one today. I often think of my subjective position as I enter a museum as one of multiple hats. I can put on my museum professional hat and dissect the visitor’s experience, even as I’m having it. Or I can put on my art historian hat and simply enjoy sharing space with visual art. That second one is what I mostly did today.
Jennifer walked me through the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, and I stopped in at SITE Santa Fe in the afternoon, too. It was soothing in its own way to find new-to-me work by an artist I’d known well (a Georgia O’Keeffe pond detail), an artist I’d known only a little (Helen Pashgian’s mesmerizing Light and Space works), and an artist I’d never heard of (Josephine Halvorson’s artist residency paintings from her time in New Mexico).
So, here’s to being in physical space with people and things that inspire us and refill our buckets.
Cloud of the day: this Helen Pashgian powder puff of an indoor cloud
