REAL TALK
A day with Jessica Borusky
Executive & Artistic Director for Living Arts of Tulsa
REGION > TULSA, OKLAHOMA
SEPTEMBER 17, 2018
A Day in the Life…
Turns into a Week in the Life, a Month in a Life. Months have passed since Leah was so gracious as to give me a platform to discuss my process. But, there is something fitting to this lag between ask and product, as my days seem to blur into weeks, into months, and now I arrive at the end of my first year as Artistic Director and Executive Director of Living Arts of Tulsa: Chief curator and fundraiser, developer and grant writer, educator and community resource, head pragmatist and idea-maker, lead media and PR strategist, listener and writer, comedian and bearer of bad news.
What I can tell you, reader, is this: it feels impossible to consider breaking up my day into digestible bits, easily consumed and easily understood.
I often start my day, still laying around in bed, seeing what emails I can craft before my feet hit the floor; because I awake with work first thing on my mind, because the tasks at hand are endless.
From New Genre Arts Festival at Living Arts, 2018
Like many directors of (arts) nonprofits, wearing “many hats” is an understatement, as this metaphor suggests a circumstance in which I may remove one hat in order to don another one. Rather, my hat(s) is wildly vibrant, holds many contradictory colors, textures and fabrics. Sometimes the ten-gallon flower-flowing, felt-filled, painted, plastic, UV protecting, wide-brimmed, cowboy helmet/cap/hat/visor/crown rests on my head with grace, and other times, the messy, lopsided and heavy headwear falls off, leaving me vulnerable and exposed.
Let us switch to the juggling metaphor. Here, we may think juggling the same object, multiplied. Instead, I seem to juggle not only the objects of the everyday work environment (mostly staplers), but the emotions, needs, personal backgrounds, and opinions of local artists, visiting artists, board members, viewers, and staff. I juggle barbed wire and tinsel and video projectors and calendars and building alarms going off and intern schedules; excitement, sadness, disappointment and crossed expectations.
I hope this resonates with those of you who are also in this position. Particularly, those who are in these positions, trying to do this work, who are not cis-straight white men. I hope to be speaking to you.
Intricate hat(s) wearing and experimental juggling is daily choreography, but becomes all the more complex and knotty when the New Genre Art Festival rolls around (or any festival, or fundraiser for that matter). At this time of the year, my everyday job intersects with my curatorial style of showcasing multiple performances within a single space, over the course of 2 days, not including a patron dinner and artist talks. Altogether, the festival is 4 days long, the first artist arrives the day before, the last artist to leave does so the day after. A 2-day festival quickly advances, stretches, and builds fibers around my organizer bones.
And, again, concepts of distilled and neatly-packaged reflection become difficult when a weekend festival becomes a week within it, not accounting for the time and hustling prior, the getting documentation and handwritten thank-you notes out the days and weeks after. You lose time, time slips out from you, though you are glue with time.
Jessica Davenport at Living Arts, 2018
Living Arts’ New Genre Arts Festival is a 25 year+ staple for the organization. Usually, there is a mix of local and national artists who perform over the course of an extended weekend, at multiple locations across Tulsa. However, this year, I brought my strategy of curating performance art with my new tenure: shifting away from performances occurring at multiple locations toward exhibiting performance work in the same space, at the same time. This process of curating is not rare; however, certain spatial conditions are necessary for its success, as there needs to be sufficient space for each performance to breathe and to be considered both on its own terms, and in concert with the works around it; analogous to curating any group show, without the thematics. I was introduced to this style of curating through a mentor of mine and founder of Mobius Inc. in Boston, Marilyn Arsem, and began embracing it within my independent curatorial work in Kansas City and the Charlotte Street Foundation. Living Arts is well over 6,000 sq. feet, with outdoor spaces and nooks and crannies- providing ample opportunity for artists to develop their performances and consider site as a subject or non-concern for the work.
Over twenty artists participated in New Genre 2018 (historically, the festival would present 5-7 performance works, though these pieces often operated as experimental theatre or dance- with a static audience in traditional theatrical seating arrangement, production, staging unions, and casts) and--coining a term from one participating artist, Paul Waddell,audience had “radical choice” to enter or exit the work,chairs were provided for those who needed it--but in my curatorial practice, audiences weave and move between performances each night.
Think Michael Fried and his frustration with minimalist artwork and the physicality of the viewer in relation to the work.
When I curate performance, I contemplate not just the content and aesthetics of the work--similar concerns apply to a group show of static artwork- but also the personalities of the artists involved, as performance work inherently builds its meaning though a conjunction of time/space. When considering personalities of artists alongside the work they produce, it becomes important to curate a range of personalities: While I am not interested in drama, I am interested in creating a site for dynamic tension between and among viewers and artists. Furthermore, this style of curation (especially when foregoing themes) is also regarding the possibility of pedagogy within curatorial practice: how can I encourage my audience to witness a variety of performance art so as to engender a shared lexicon about the breadth of this genre? In a nutshell, I curate for the orchestra totally. I am not beholden to like each instrument, what it looks and sounds like; instead, my goal is to hypothesize whether it will produce productive tensions among all the instruments, conductor, crowd, and patrons. That tension can be an important experience for audience, participating artists, and myself.
I do not suggest this is the “best” route; rather it is a route that I find rewarding for a number of organizational, educational, curatorial, and aesthetic reasons- I should never attempt to limit myself in curating and working with only art “I Like.” Preferences change and everyone learns.
Lucas Wrench at Living Arts, 2018
So, returning to “A Day in the Life” the New Genre Arts Festival exemplifies a sensory-overload, vibratory version of what I aim to do at all times. That weekend--while singing electrically at the top of its lungs--knitted my roles as Executive Director, Artistic Director, Curator, Educator, Fundraiser, Hand-Shaker, IPhone-Photo-Taker, Facilitator, Mama-Jess Caregiver into a rooftop housing myriad performances and personalities. To give details would be to tug at a thread as though it is disconnected from all the others.
“A Day in the Life”- for New Genre was about expanding the boundaries of my flesh and air, expanding my lungs to anyone and everyone simultaneously; opening up my processors and receptors without question, letting go of my own needs for 4+ days and allowing myself to submit to the needs and wants and desires of artists, viewers, community members, donors, my lover, and my cat. Conducting the orchestra that was New Genre 2018 was a durational performance piece onto itself. Immediately following the fourth/fifth day- Monday, I lost my voice and became sick for at least five days, a bedridden reminder that one of the basic rules of performance (art, anything, really) is to care for the body, as it is the primary material for production.
Each day involved (in no particular order):
Being in fantastic company
Listening
Delegating
Getting people where they needed to be
Smiling and nodding when it was hard, when I was tired
Making sure needs were met
Saying “Does that make sense?”
Wearing shoes that let people know I was coming, reminding myself that I exist
Picking people up
Listening
Appreciating
Reminding people I do not like my photo taken
Apologizing for anything and everything
Asking “Are you ok”
Listening
Sleeping with an anxious heart, fearing if I fell asleep fully I would not wake up for a week
Drinking coffee
Agreeing
Saying “Thank you”
Listening
Dropping people off
Reminding everyone that everything will be alright
But, isn’t this what we do each day, anyway- sometimes with vigor, sometimes with blistered heels and finger-cuts? This list can sky-scrape, multiply, and puncture any number of life-circumstances.
From New Genre Arts Festival at Living Arts, 2018
In the inspiring debris of the weekend-long palpating tornado, I can remember this:
If it were not the love, help, and support of Stratton Brooks, Chris Henson, Ken Wilson, Blair Summers, Laura Eccles, Julie Clark, Jessica Karin, Katie Norton, Calvin Frank, the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Flint Foundation, Christy Fell, board members and patrons, food donations, coffee from Fairfellow, 4$ burgers at McNellie’s, Airbnb, and various and overlapping conversations I’ll never know and do not want to, the weekend would not have been so seamless. And, this too, is a Kool-Aid concentration version of every “Day in the Life” at Living Arts, and my relationship to Living Arts. It is a constantly moving, thumping, grinding constellation of people and personalities, gifts and exhaustion, but always giving, giving, giving toward an organism that is not mine, but that I am a part of; an organism that presses its palms around and embraces the things in life that I care about, that many of us care about, all the while heart-drenched in critical and contemporary time/space/energy/efforts.
REAL TALK IS AN ONGOING SERIES THAT OFFERS A LOOK INTO THE LIVES OF ARTS PROFESSIONALS WORKING OUTSIDE OF NEW YORK AND LOS ANGELES
Jessica Borusky is the Executive Director/Artistic Director for Living Arts of Tulsa.
Living Arts presents and develops critically- engaged contemporary art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We are a platform for evolving ideas and aesthetics, interdisciplinarity and community empowerment through exhibitions, workshops, performances, films, lectures and education: engendering artistic integrity and experimentation for a thoughtful and rigorous arts ecology.
livingsarts.org
12-5pm Tuesday- Saturday, Thursday Evenings by Appointment
307 E. Brady Street Tulsa, OK 74120
918-585-1234
info@livingarts.org
REGION
A comprehensive feature on any state, area, or city that lacks mainstream coverage. Region considers the various factors that influence a particular art scene or art-making community, and how it sustains itself. Region also includes profiles of individuals influencing the area (be they curators, writers, artists, professors, etc.), and is always written by people familiar with the topography of the region’s art community. It can include interviews, op-eds, or dialogue in man other forms. Region aims to demystify specific art scenes for interested artists, educators, dealers, curators, advocates, and everything in-between.