Curator Rebecca Fasman on staying awake to opportunity in the face of failure

You are a curator. How have art and museum-like institutions shaped your life?

I think it’s interesting to think of what stories we tell to ourselves and to other people through the objects we present. There are , especially now, not a lot of spaces where I feel like some sort of faith restored in humanity. But museums are one of them. Art has been the only thing that I have cared about in my life. I’ve never been able to actually excel or focus on anything that I don’t care about. And art has been the through-line through all of it. I knew that it was going to be something that I did with my life, because I’ve always, always made art. I went to art school not knowing whether I was going to be an artist. I didn’t know where I was gonna land on the spectrum.

From growing up in DC, I love museums. They’ve always been a special place for me. By the time I was growing up, my parents were like “oh, she wants to go to a museum, fine, there are guards there, she’s not going to do drugs there.” Well, sometimes I’ve done drugs in museums.

When you talk about museums as actual places, do you have any particular ones that shaped you as a person?

The National Gallery and the Hirschhorn were always places that I would go to, but I remember this one experience. One of the first times I remember going to a museum, and looking around and being like “what is this place,” I was 10 or 11, and I was in New York with my mom. It was blizzarding and we were at MoMA before MoMA had moved into their new space and there were not a lot of people there that day. My mom and I were in Monet’s water-lily room, about which I have always been like, “oh, whatever, impressionism, super boring,” and in walks rock star Alice Cooper and his wife and it was just us in that room. I was like “wait, how am I in the same space? What is the vessel that is containing both, like 11 year old me, my mom, Alice Cooper, and his wife? What is this space?” That was the first time I really remember thinking about what the space is that allows us to be in the same game. I’ve gone back to MoMA plenty of times, but I’ve always been interested in what the space holds, what it can do, how it can bring people together, why it brings people together, and how we can make those experiences more interesting, more dynamic.

Museums have always been weird but safe places for me, and I felt like I was a part of it, like I could see myself like in a museum—not my artwork, but myself. It was just a place that felt exciting and interesting that I wanted to know more about. I landed at a lot of different museums. I’ve worked at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, at the National Gallery here in DC. I worked at the Guggenheim, I did a little stint at Japan Society. I have done a lot of different things within the museum world, even membership, which like—I should never, ever, ever be in a position [where the job is] to ask people for money. And it’s not that it’s not important, it’s super important. But I’m just not good at things I don’t care about.

You just said that you don’t love dealing with the monetary aspect of your job, how do you make it less daunting?

We have a development person too. In a grant situation, it’s totally fine, because I actually kind of love writing grants. In a weird way, I go into this weird mental hole. I remember the first big grant that I wrote that I [won]. I remember leaving my house after a big, intense writing day and being like,” Wait, did I put on clothes? Am I okay to be outside?” I was so in that space, and I was like, I kind of love that. It is creative, but it feels different. So in that way, I can totally do grant money.

I don’t speak any differently than I am speaking with you in any setting. I don’t have an academic way of talking. I am not slick. I try to be. I mean, I think I am a real-ish person, but I don’t have the skills our development people have. I also think when I was freelancing for a very long time, this job at Kinsey is my first permanent full-time job in eight years. I had been contracting, freelancing, and bartending for a long time before then. I always felt like, as a freelancer, I needed an agent because I hate the negotiating part so much.

As a freelancer, I completely empathize with the last thing you said. I too hate negotiating, but also, what I would love about a full-time job is developing projects with longer lead times, while what I am doing now—except for one vocational project—feels so much like a one-off, “monster of the day” type of narrative.

I think in that way, having many irons in a fire is helpful, because if one doesn’t work out, there are still more. I’m not closing the door on anything, it’s just like, we haven’t found a way yet. But even with grant writing, it comes to finding the right project for the right organization at the right time. It’s like, so many things need to align for money to appear. And so I feel like, I’m like, okay, not the right time. We’ll keep it moving.

So how do you prevent burnout?

I definitely burn out 100 percent. I should be better at taking vacations. I’m going on a vacation tomorrow, actually, to Mexico, where the sea turtles live—giant sea turtles. There are times when I am in group therapy for survivors of trauma, and the work we do is somatic, meaning it involves our body. It’s therapy that recognizes that our bodies and brains are connected. We talk a lot in somatic therapy about resourcing and what you do to calm your nervous system down. This has changed my professional life because I’ll find that I’m getting anxious or excited to the point where I can’t focus, and I rely on resources to bring me back.

Sometimes this means doing deep breathing, and sometimes it means going to see art, which has always been a wonderful resource, grounding and centering, and reminding me that it will be okay. When I’m burnt out, it doesn’t just mean I’m so tired that I can’t move; it can also mean I’m so worked up that I can’t calm myself down. Burnout, to me, is both of those things. At those moments, sometimes I just need to throw myself into a tub of hot water, which can be very calming. I think we all wish we had better work-life balance.

And what’s your relationship to failure?

It takes me a little while when I don’t get a grant or can’t move forward with a project. It’s really sad, and I try not to close the door on anything completely. I try to keep it in the back of my head that it might not be the right time for a project, but maybe there will be a right time, or maybe it will evolve to the point where someone takes a chance on the idea. It affects my self-worth.

In my current role, a lot of it involves grant writing. I write quite a few grants and, knock on wood, have a really good track record of getting them. When I don’t get them, I fall into a bit of a depression for a little while, but then I inevitably start working on something else. I don’t think there’s any magic to it. I think it is about keeping on doing what we do and remembering why we do it.

When it rains, it pours. Another thing I think about often these days is that I’ve dealt with trauma and a lot of death and sickness in my personal and family life. I hate to say it, but it puts things into perspective. If I don’t get a grant, it’s fine. I still have a job, I’m healthy, and everything is fine.

Online, everybody wants to be a curator. Instagram pages that do not feature original content but present a collage of content fished from all corners of the internet are deemed “curatorial.” In this day and age, selecting a few songs for a playlists or making a collage on Instagram awards you the moniker of curator. How do you feel about the popularity of your profession?

I laugh about it honestly. I’m like, okay, if that’s what you think a curator does, that’s totally fine. It’s not what an actual curator does. I guess it can be if you’re looking at curating in a very simple way as a presentation of selected things. But in practice, for me, it is so deeply research-based. I was talking to a friend about this the other day who is a curator, and she was saying that when people intern with her, they want to be curators but don’t want to do all the paperwork. Well, 80 percent of the job is meetings, grant writing, and paperwork.

Personally, I know a lot of people for whom openings and public speaking are wonderful things. I prefer not to do any of it. I wish I had a person who could step in and go to openings and do public speaking for me because that’s the stuff I dislike the most. I prefer to be in a library, reading, listening to something, or writing. Networking makes my skin crawl.

For people working in the arts and the creative industries, networking and being online have become synonymous. What’s your relationship with being online, as Rebecca Fasman the individual?

I am as online as I am comfortable being, which means that I do have an Instagram account. It is private, partially because of what I do, but partially because when I was in Bloomington, I had a stalker for five and a half years. My online existence has altered, has been changed dramatically because of that. It’s been a shift, but also, this is another thing: I don’t shy away from talking about it. Nothing happens in a vacuum. I need a shirt that says that, meaning we are all dealing with difficult things. My ideas and everything are influenced by this.

Wait, are you safe now?

This person is still in Bloomington and they’re not stopping. This is a person who was a complete stranger and just fixated on me for whatever reason. I don’t think it’s because of what I do for a living. There’s been no evidence to suggest that he even knew what I did. He does now, but spending the better part of a decade feeling scared in my body, scared constantly, altered how I work. It altered how I walk through spaces; I’m looking for things now. I walk everywhere. I don’t drive, and I take public transportation all the time, but even in those spaces, I’m attuned to different things now.

I’m very rarely on my phone when I’m in a public space. I think I was consciously doing it for a while, but now it’s just how I am. It has changed everything. My curatorial practice has made me think differently about safety and how these spaces operate. I am thinking differently. I see a lot about care in curatorial practices, museum spaces, and everywhere. Everyone is talking about care, and that’s great. However, it can be used inappropriately or in ways that are not meaningful. I am thinking in my shows very intensely about making sure that people feel safe in their bodies in my shows.

Speaking of your shows, are you ever wary of the fact that, in order to make them more palatable to mainstream audiences, exhibitions about them or containing their work have to appear more anodyne?

This comes down to a museum director. At Kinsey, we have one gallery, we’re not a museum. We are a research collection, and we have one gallery, and we work with a lot of spaces on our campus. But by and large, for my shows, I have to engage with other institutions, other spaces to put on my shows. I work collaboratively. For instance, we had a show up at a space on campus, and there are other galleries in the building, and so, when thinking about placement of the of a show, for example, that might have some like nudity—nothing explicit, but nudity—I think about [if] there [are] going to be school groups walking by the entrance to this gallery, and I want to check to make sure that I don’t put anything I don’t want. I’m not going to take anything away from an exhibition: I’m not going to say, like, “oh, it’s fine if you don’t want to show penises.” That’s not fine, but I will work with institutions [on placement] because there are people who don’t necessarily want to engage with a particular subject matter, and that does not mean they’re homophobic.

Being at Kinsey kind of allows me to enter these spaces in a little bit of a subversive way, but, with shows that I’ve done in mainstream museums, it requires a museum director to be like, “okay, we’re gonna do this,” which is like, the content of the work requires, for better or for worse, the museum director and staff to take a risk.

What do you make of this year’s “hornissance” where fashion editorials, CPG brands, and even mainstream literature are all about sex?

I love that there are films, ads and stuff pushing boundaries or changing our understanding of how sex can be represented in mainstream movies. I’m thinking about Saltburn and the act of drinking cummy bath water. That was awesome, I was laughing so much during that movie. I like that these films and stuff are appearing in mainstream contemporary culture, but the thing is, it’s always been there, to me, it’s always been there. Think of queer people making art for each other, it’s just been a question of where to find it. It’s good that it’s becoming more of a normal thing, but I don’t necessarily see this particular time as being some wonderful open time period when we have laws about abortion and trans people and book banning and all of that. One of the things I’ve been working on for a very long time is an exhibition about the history of obscenity in this country and obscenity as a legal framework. So nothing about what’s happening right now is new.

My vocational project, an editorial and educational resource on Italian disco music, tries to make sense of the tension between Italy’s repressive society and politics and the way queer culture flourished through music in a way that’s patent, but also not too obvious to those who don’t have the instruments to “detect” it.

Here’s the thing, increased surveillance and repression require communities to be more cohesive and connected in protecting themselves and each other. There is, I think, a correlation between repression and community activism, working together in interesting ways. But I don’t want to say that it’s good for anyone to be surveilled or repressed. One of the human responses to repression, surveillance, and oppression, especially in artistic communities, is the knitting together of communities. As we’ve discussed, nothing happens in a vacuum. People start making art and figuring out how to throw a disco in a small town in Italy. There is a requirement to work together in a different way when there are dangerous and violent forces trying to repress you.

So, yes, I do think that’s absolutely true. Italy, for example, had the town of Taormina in Sicily, which became a safe space where queer people could feel some type of freedom. This required the hotel owners, restaurant owners, and many more people working together to create safety for everyone, not just artists. It requires a much bigger sense of community than what we might initially think.

Rebecca Fasman recommends:

Somatic therapy. This has been the best and most consequential therapy I’ve ever experienced. I’m currently in group therapy. Being in community with and learning from both younger and older people who have had wildly different experiences from my own has changed my life for the better.

Baths. When my brain won’t stop, when I need to rest and my body/brain won’t let me, depositing my body into a tub of hot water always works.

Walks. I work out A LOT of my ideas while walking. During the pandemic my walks became more mentally active - I started listening to articles using Speechify and taking notes using Otter. Walking continues to be an extremely important step in my creative process. I also love touching flowers and this mostly happens on my walks, but shout-out to the flower sections of every grocery store I go to.

Storage. I lovelovelove spending time in the storage facility where Kinsey’s collection lives. It is a massive, cold, windowless, state-of-the-art storage facility occupied by many of the collections at Indiana University and filled with the most spectacular items. I love taking researchers through our collection, I love collaborating with curators and artists on projects related to our collection, I love writing about items in our collection, but mostly I love being with the works themselves. I have an art practice of my own and feel a connection to the physical items and the people who made them. I care deeply about them both.

A cozy bar/restaurant. I bartended for a long time. I’m not a religious person, and my community hasn’t been built in houses of worship. Mostly, my community has been built in restaurants and bars. Even now, a decade out from working in the service industry, I still feel so connected to these spaces and when done correctly, they feel like an extension and elevation of a home.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Angelica Frey.

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