San Jose Museum of Artwork curator would like individuals to see their own tales

The San Jose Museum of Art is not just for “art” individuals, says Lauren Schell Dickens. It’s for all forms of men and women, including people with little little ones and all those who never ordinarily check out museums at all.

“Everyone comes from a diverse position and engages with artwork otherwise,” the museum’s senior curator says.

We recently experienced the likelihood to master more about this San Jose indigenous, who grew up in Sonoma County and now calls Oakland house.

Q How did you get intrigued in artwork museums?

A I normally appreciated generating artwork but don’t remember staying pretty interested in museums as a child. It was not until faculty, when I recognized that a museum expertise is much more than just hunting at paintings.

I researched theatrical gentle style and design in school, and that education in considering about lights, staging and the experience of viewing a painting are all portion of how the story of an artwork object is explained to. It is how art can be employed to tell stories that genuinely hooked me.

Q What is it about visible artwork that captivates your notice?

A I like all forms of art — tunes, dance, theater, literature — and a lot of of the artists offered at SJMA do the job in audio, motion, text, as effectively as visually.

Terrific artwork operates on a sign-up that logic or purpose or language are unable to touch. It can pull me in with natural beauty and then reveal or show me a thing about the globe, about people today and experiences around me that I hadn’t thought of or compensated awareness to before.

Q What are the most demanding areas of your task? What are the most exciting?

A The most complicated element of my career is also the most entertaining — I get to function with artists!

Artists enjoy such an vital position in society — giving us new views on the environment and imagining options for how we can inhabit this Earth together in means that are much better than what we’re doing now. And they have wild, entire world-modifying concepts. But artists aspiration huge — as they ought to — and managing logistics and expectations of the many players associated can be demanding.

It can also be tough to get audiences to sluggish down. Some men and women want to search at a sculpture and “get it” ideal absent, but being familiar with, participating can take time.

Q What was it like doing the job at SJMA in the course of the pandemic?

A The pandemic was undoubtedly tough. We had a superb exhibition on check out that seemed at artwork and prisons termed “Barring Liberty,” which was only open up to the general public for nine times. It’s sort of heartbreaking, for us and the artists, when so substantially get the job done goes into a venture that the public does not get to working experience.

But we had time to pause all through the pandemic and definitely look at ourselves, what we’d been executing properly that we wished to do far more of and what wasn’t doing the job.

Q What is the museum’s mission — and what is your part in that?

A SJMA is about nurturing group through modern artwork, highlighting tales of our different communities and next artists’ guide in participating socially suitable topics like prisons, local weather disaster, immigration and identification through artwork.

My task is to identify artists and artworks, each regionally and from about the environment, that resonate with the lived realities of our South Bay audiences. The hope is that a person traveling to the museum sees their have story — their background or desires or group or worries — reflected in the artworks.

We want visitors to not only feel linked to their geographic neighbors, but develop solidarities with communities all-around the environment.

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Dickens’ favored Bay Place museums

Headlands Heart for the Arts: Through public open studios, individuals can chat with residing artists and see works in development at this Marin Headlands artwork hub — and the meals in the mess is great www.headlands.org.