"Please tell the class a fun fact about yourself."
I dread this sentence. I know its coming and still, every single time, I feel unprepared. How hard is it to think of something interesting about oneself?! I don't consider myself a particularly boring person. I have done stuff, been places, seen some things. However, when it comes to sharing a single fun fact about my comings and goings over the last quarter century I go blank. I often find myself falling back on the excuses, this exchange is inauthentic, it's forced, who cares? So I, very uncreatively, say the same thing I always do when asked to summarize my identity in a single sentence... Hi, I'm Katherine and I was an art school student for over ten years, but I am not an artist.
Now, in the famous words of just about every liberal arts practitioner everywhere, "let's unpack that".
Being a product of a creative education is as much a part of my self-established identity as the fact I am a redhead or a female. It is always the first thing I want to tell people and it shapes the way I communicate with the world. Like most children who were a product of the 90's new wave of "not one size fits all" curriculum, I still remember taking the "what is your learning style?" test in elementary school. With just a handful of basic questions an algorithm was able to deduce I am in fact a visual learner. I took that information in my little 11-year-old hands and ran with it, and started my decade-long art adventure in sixth-grade at Bak Middle School of the Arts.
It is a fair question to ask, how does one attend art school without considering themselves an artist? Well, through an act of what I like to call, creative espionage.
As a student, I was always more interested in what everyone else was doing. I would complete my assigned projects with a detached sense of duty, but would then pour over the work of my fellow creative classmates. How did you do that, WHY did you do that, what does this mean, what were you thinking, where is this going? Under the guise of being one of them, they would candidly talk to me about their processes, their plans, and their problems under the assumption that this work came as naturally to me as it seemed to come to them. It did not. But the more time I spent in this environment the more I came to understand the minds of great artists. I recognized their strengths (creative problem solving and a unique perspective on just about everything) and their weaknesses (making their work accessible to the general public and trying to keep anything in their lives marginally organized.) The art world doesn't need another uninspired artist, it needs a translator. I have been training for that job. I want that job.
The choice to return to school was easy, it was one I had made long before I was forced out the doors of undergrad into the proverbial "real world". The question remained, return to school for what? Public relations may seem like an odd departure from the art world, however, at its essence PR is just the practical art of communicating. So while I may cringe at the thought of sharing a fun fact about myself, I cannot wait to make a career out of sharing, promoting, and bragging about the incredible artists and creators that make this world a more interesting place.
Me in my element during a curatorial internship at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum