036 ☼ Elegy to a museum location
once my thriving third space, soon to be an events location on Kumeyaay land
I worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego—specifically the downtown location—from 2014 to 2015, from one spring to a fall. I was there 2-5 times a week. I was spectacularly broke and singularly hot as I was in my mid to late 20s and had the face of a baby. I was struggling to finish college. I had bad skin and low self-esteem, but I was determined to be an art person, and to be in the art world, and I had to start at the very bottom and so I did.
An acquaintance recently tipped me off to the fact that the lease of one of the two MCASD downtown locations had been sold to the Navy SEALs for their own museum, used as a recruitment tool. I reported on it for The Art Newspaper, which you can read here. Here’s what I couldn’t include in my report.
It was the first job where my boss was a woman who liked me and who I liked. I had worked at multiple museums up until this point—having landed this job was what I felt was my final form as a museum girl, my gateway to my then dream of being a curator. Before that I stood for hours on hard cement floor making sure children didn’t hit their heads on sculptures at the New Children’s Museum and then later, on marble floor as a museum guard for the San Diego Museum of Art. I was a holiday hire at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum where tiny kids came in crying with excitement and left screaming in despair to leave so many tiny trains.
At the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), I combined the art I saw in classrooms at community college with the art whose rooms I was tasked with managing, turning on lights and counting cash. Starstruck, I volunteered when Liza Lou visited to make her Color Field, a sheet of small beaded sticks placed on a grid on the floor like blades of glass grass. I sat next to her for a few hours and told her my life story up until that point, and she told me about Marcia Tucker and making Kitchen (1991-1996) after her tiny L.A. apartment was damaged by the Northridge Earthquake. She told me I was a self-made woman. I carried that compliment with me until I didn’t need it’s talismanic properties any longer. It was my first interaction with a famous, successful artist and she had been so cool and kind.
People used to think the entrance to the museum was also the entrance to the train depot as the Museum shared a building with the historic Santa Fe Depot which ran the trolley and Amtrak lines. Men in business suits and attaché cases used to fling open the glass doors, running for their lives, then stop, confused, having found themselves in the center of a Do So Huh installation or blocked by a sculpture. A man once crushed a corner of Liza Lou’s Color Field running for the train. He looked horrified, confused, but still late and fled the scene (the security guard let him out the back way just to get it over with). I think the curator cried.
One of the most vibrant but hardest and brokest summers of my life was spent in the basement doing research as part of my internship with Jill Dawsey who encouraged me to list my work as “curatorial research assistant” on my resume, instead. I learned about so many artists I now love like Lorna Simpson, Martha Rosler, and Dan Graham’s Homes photos. I loved digging through the archive closets with the registrar Tom who confessed he carried a near-constant thrum of anxiety because at least seven significant and expensive works of art were in transit or in other cities and every document had HIS name on it. That summer I organized a project where my artist friends made trinket-sized versions of their art based on a memory and we sold them at the swap meet.
I found a rare Allan Sekula slide of a shot of one of his San Diego performances that no one ever talks about even though its good and in his peak career years. (I also found slides of Bob Irwin’s elusive paintings whose compositions I’ve since banished from my memory, at the behest of whoever I turned them into). Parking in La Jolla that summer (my internship was NOT at the Downtown location), had earned me so many parking tickets, the amount of which was more than what my old Volvo was worth.
Back downtown, I was the front desk girl. I studied Marxist pedagogy and then memorized the faces of museum donors at the $500,000 plus level. I had yet to learn what the term “ontology” meant. Devendra Banhart came to the museum once, and I met John Baldassari for the first time, his hand engulfing mine when he shook it. He was nicer to me than the Director was at the time who, despite seeing me nearly every day, could never remember my name. Working there almost crushed my love of art. I hate hot dogs from the 7-11 across the street because I was so broke. Towards the end of the day, the museum was often empty, and the light was very beautiful streaking through the Spanish Mission-style train depot windows, casting weird light diamonds across the walls while skateboarders left their Sprite soda bottles atop the hulking, metal Richard Serra squares sitting heavy on the train platform. They’re still there (the box-sculptures, but probably also the Sprites).
By the end of summer my car had been towed and my Grandmama had to help them get it out of the cities dungeon, only a mile from the downtown location. I had organized and created a painting show based on Frank O’Hara’s time spent working at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art and his relationship to the painter Grace Hartigan. We had rebuilt a model of his desk for people to sit in and stare at the paintings, in the exact way I had sat at the front desk at the Downtown location for hours on end, stomach growling, homework waiting, my love for art waning and changing. A magazine took a photo of me sitting on it while pretending to talk on the old black telephone—the exact model O’Hara had. I didn’t know it then, but I experienced the best of the “art world” in the friends I had made, in the scrappy little projects we organized in the borrowed lofts and storefronts in a not-yet gentrified San Diego. We made it to Los Angeles, then Manhattan and upstate New York. By the time grad school was over six years later, I realized I had had it made back home in those days of being the underpaid front desk girl, desperate to fit in to a world I wouldn’t care about in ten years, loving art more than I ever would and reaching for a place that simply just no longer exists.
Rumor has it the second of the downtown locations went up for sale last week, meaning the chapter on downtown has officially closed. MCASD is still open in La Jolla.
Here’s the ending to my Art Newspaper article that got clipped for word length:
No longer will frazzled commuters accidentally run through the foyer of the museum at 1100 Kettner, looking for the train platform on the other side of the building's glass facade, but rather finding themselves surrounded by and surprised by, contemporary art. ☼
Recommendations: Well shit, that was sad. Ten years goes by quick. Here’s what I’ve been up to lately:
I wrote about bunkers becoming middle class again and why we need to buy less stuff for Dwell.
An exhibition popped up in Mountain View Mausoleum in December and I lamented the lack of artist’s spaces for Hyperallergic, AND THEN two different writers each wrote great pieces about artist spaces that do exist.
I visited a gallery in a former water tower out in the desert that was filled with mushrooms, also for Hyperallergic.
I’ve been reporting on protests from art fairs to The Oscars, as well as about open source posters of Palestinian martyrs. 🍉
I visited Desert Christ Park, some MCM houses in Sarasota, and the Eames Archives!!!!
I’m trying to write this newsletter more. What would you like to hear about? Drop me a note in the comments or respond to the email. I’m a crowd pleaser. I should probably take more road trips, right? Y’all wanna hear about gator farm?