On Topic: Tricia Heuring Episode One

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Tricia Heuring–a professor, curator, and arts organizer–both lives and teaches this idea of cultural leadership. In this first episode of the podcast, Sanjit and Tricia talk about her intuitive path to curatorial work, the creation of Public Functionary, and how she approaches teaching cultural leadership as a faculty member in MCAD's Entrepreneurial Studies program.

How do I teach leadership by teaching them to tap into who they are and what they care about?

On Topic is platform exploring the complex and lucid cultural conversations that represent the DNA of MCAD. If you like this episode, you can explore events, writings, and more episodes.

Tricia Heuring is a Thai American curator and arts organizer. As the co-founder of Public Functionary, a Minneapolis-based multidisciplinary arts platform, she supports emerging artists in developing resources, studio practice and exhibitions.

Advocacy for systemic change and equity in the Minneapolis-St. Paul arts sector has put her in collaboration with grant-makers, public art, and social justice organizations. As a thought leader and cultural advisor she has been a featured speaker, moderator or joined panels at TedxUMN, Pollen, Walker Art Center, Common Field, Springboard for the Arts, Creative Mornings, American Swedish Institute, and the Coven, among others.

More from Tricia:

• Context Unlocks Understanding | CreativeMornings Talk
• In Search of Space for a Future Art World | TEDxUMN
• Public Functionary

Full Transcript:

Tricia: No problem it's, you know right now during this time it's good to talk to people.

Sanjit: And you know I think that that is an interesting point which is that we're in this time of an incredible degree of uncertainty around the Covid-19 virus and its impact certainly on cultural communities, the economy, education, and beyond and those are so many systems that you intersect with. And so you know within that notion I just guess I'm wondering how are you doing?

Tricia: Um you know I’m doing, I’m doing well today. It's been you know several weeks now that we've been in this sort of shifted reality and it's been a week by week you know. I work very much in the Arts, I'm self-employed, I teach at a university so I've been impacted in all these different ways. I have family that lives in Asia right now so there's a lot of different factors that are influencing sort of what is on my mind right now. I'm learning a lot about myself and how I respond to change and and anxiety and all that but I'm doing good. I mean just embracing sort of the privileges I have and realizing how I have the ability to be safe and comfortable through this crisis, so yeah just taking it day by day.

Sanjit: Yeah you know from my perspective I've been doing a lot of reflecting and it starts to make me think of where I was three months before this all started, or where I was a year ago. And it made me think that as I start to want to engage with you right now to think a little bit about your own personal biography and you know I'm wondering for you how did growing up in Egypt, how do you reflect on growing up in Egypt now. What are the things that surprised you most about your childhood not experienced completely in this country and how do you think that may have provided you with the unique vantage point that you were able to apply the things that you are working on today?

Tricia: Yeah I mean so looking back going to the past as we reflect, I grew up in Egypt but I was actually born in Thailand. I identify as Thai-American being that my mother is Thai, my dad is American. Growing up in Egypt allowed me another cultural context and so I grew up there as well as Saudi Arabia and other other places around the Middle East. So I think that my perspective growing up was very much shaped by culture and the differences between culture. When someone grows up overseas like that you're generally considered a third-culture kid, in that you have you know different cultures from your parents and then a cultural context that you live in not being your own culture. And so I think I became very aware of just what the impact of culture is, in shaping who we are and our personal identities and also how we relate to each other.

In relation to today, I think that I'm reflecting a lot on how American culture and Americans are dealing with this pandemic in this situation as compared to how the rest of the world is dealing with it. I think we're all looking at that reflectively but it's something that as I continue calling my mom and dad in Thailand, and looking at you know the differences in responses to this, I think that culture is a huge factor in our weathering through this moment.

In terms of my work it's exactly what's led to my work in cultural leadership and in curating and creating space for art and culture and and trying to create what is like a multicultural understanding of being with other people.

Sanjit: Yeah and I'm wondering from that, I love the term third culture kid or there's something kind of interesting to unpack about that. Do you find yourself still in connection or in contact with some of the people that grew up in similar circumstances that were your peers whether you when you were in Saudi or you were in Egypt?

Tricia: Yeah, I mean I definitely, moving to the U.S. when I was 18, I went to college and went to Macalester College in St. Paul and that was my first time living in the United States. Like even though I was born in America through my father's citizenship, I hadn't lived here until I went to college. And so my home had been overseas in Egypt, all of my friends were either from they were International or they were Americans. And when we all graduated from high school we sort of left and we went to different countries, went to different colleges and there was never really this home that we returned to. So for a lot of Americans, a lot of college students especially when they think about going home and they go home and they see all the people that they grew up with, the people they went to high school with. My friends all sort of dispersed and so I've had to, even before Facebook, you know early on MySpace days, we had to stay in contact with each other globally. And so I still do have a lot of those contacts. Some of my best friends today are still my friends that I went to school with in Egypt for sure.

Sanjit: So what I'm interested in is in addition to that diasporic community that you're really connected with, is who are some of your major influences in your life at that time?

Tricia: So in the time that I was growing up overseas?

Sanjit: Exactly.

Tricia: Yeah, so you know I when I think back to that. I know that like my teachers and my school that I went to were hugely influential. The international school that I went to had an amazing arts program and so I was really fortunate to have in high school. I was in a ceramic studio, I was in a printmaking studio, I was a dancer and I was able to choreograph performances in an awesome theater. And so I had access to the Arts in a really amazing way and I know that that was sort of what shaped me. I also know that my parents were huge in terms of their way of influencing me. Just sort of growing up with an American father and a Thai mother and their differences in culture and the way that they embodied leadership just as humans, as people. You know my father being professionally, very much a leader but then my mother being a community leader. She has a very interesting story kind of growing up in poverty in Thailand and then meeting my father and then moving all over the world. So she had to kind of create community everywhere she went in these different countries and she did that by cooking and bringing people into our home for gatherings. And growing up around that I think really shaped my understanding of what it meant to create community. And so when I moved to the US that was a big part of how I started acclimated to being in the U.S. for the first time was to actually know how to build community and how to create community as I watched my mother do it growing up.

Sanjit: And talk about one of those intangible yet enormous and incredibly generous qualities to have.

And so when you go to Macalester, are you thinking about focusing on creativity in some form? It sounds like you were introduced to so many different forms of it while growing up. Were you thinking about a point of departure from that or something completely different?

Tricia: Yeah you know I think context is always really important and I went to college in 1997. And at that time we were not immersed in the way that we are with social media and with these platforms in which artists and creatives are able to build careers. And so at that time I didn't know that the Arts was a possibility for a career path so even though that was like every part of who I was. When I went to Macalester, I was thinking okay how do I make money, how do I get a job, what's practical. Obviously I chose a liberal arts school but I did originally decide to major in economics, which lasted about half a semester because that's just not my area of expertise at all but it sounded very businesslike. And you know I ended up specializing, majoring in English and Communications which felt very practical to me and did set a base. But I often think about a liberal arts education as an opportunity to just figure out who you are and how to live and how to build community. So when I came out of college there was a lot of soul searching for me and trying to figure out kind of where I wanted to work. And I ultimately ended up in the Arts and ended up working as a curator. And so a lot of what I do now is actually trying to help students and trying to help artists figure it out a bit earlier than I did. You know to not doubt that you can actually have a career in the Arts or work as an artist and kind of skip all that time I spent backtracking because I was in this you know cloud of “nobody works in the Arts,” when in fact they did. I just didn't really have access to see that or to see myself represented in any of those areas at the time.

Sanjit: You know and I'm curious, I say this but you know both from having immigrant parents too. How did your parents take your evolution t through college? It sounds like they provided you with some incredible life lessons and influences about the ways to look at leadership and the ways to look at culture. But I'm curious as to what were their thoughts or concerns as you started to go ahead and make your way through college and then out into the curatorial world.

Tricia: My parents were very much concerned about my money making potential and just like how are you going to pay for your life, how are you going to pay for your student loans, you know. And so definitely they continued to urge me towards something that was viable you know. If I would have brought up well I'm just going to be a dancer you know cuse I had studied dance, that wasn't a viable career path at that time. So they were supportive of my personal exploration, as long as I wasn't asking them for help or money or things like that. They couldn't actually pay for my life for me. So as long as I was working when I got out of college, I was bartending, I was working in restaurants, so I was able to make a living. They were really supportive of my sort of wandering exploratory path. I think had I ever been in a difficult situation where I wasn't able to pay my rent and I was coming to them for that it would have been like okay get a real job kind of conversation. But I think that's that when I think about my leadership story and I talk to students. I talk about the number one priority of like you can do what you need to do to find your creative path, but you have to understand how you're going to pay your bills in the meantime you know so what is your what are your revenue streams.

Sanjit: That kind of that kind of granular unromantic but so necessary life skills that you’re talking about imparting

Tricia: Yes.

Sanjit: The idea regarding curatorial practice is such an interesting topic and it's worth a series of conversations unto itself. And my sense is, and I could be wrong, is that there's the traditional curatorial pathway, which involves some formal study whether it's art history or curatorial practice per se, with that kind of keen trajectory to be a curator with a capital C. And then there's the accidental curator which comes often times from my perspective, out of a sense of necessity and oftentimes opportunity. And it sounds like you engaged in curatorial practice from the latter trajectory and I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about that. How did the term curator start to enter into your field of view?

Tricia: Yeah so I got out of college and I supplemented my life through just, you know jobs that could help me sustain an apartment, and a life. And in the meantime I was you know doing lots of personal projects at the time. So when I was in my early twenties I had started this local magazine, it was a printed magazine at the time we were not on Facebook yet. So I was thinking about okay, you want to be a makeup artist or musician or a DJ or a fashion designer, how do you get the credibility, how do you get the validation. You know we don't have all these webtools yet, so I felt like this magazine concept was something where people could show that they were capable of producing the work that they wanted to do.

So if you were a fashion stylist or something, you could style a photoshoot and then there was your name printed on those pages that proved that you were a fashion stylist. And I had met a lot of these people that I was, you know featuring in this magazine through working in bars and restaurants. So then again you know kind of cultivating the community that I wanted to work within, until I did these sort of like self-initiated projects that were essentially creating platforms and art organizing without really labeling it at the time. Just because it was what I was interested in and it kind of fueled me and gave me inspiration. I that came out of you know, I sort of saw myself as a Editor in Chief or that kind of thing and and through my twenties I kept kind of shifting between okay now I'm an editor and now I'm an art director, now I'm an art organizer you know as I did these very grassroots, DIY projects. And I ended up working for a corporate job at a certain point, like the one time I had a more traditional employer and I would say in like 2003-4 and they gave me the title of curator and I was actually an events coordinator. I coordinated like marketing events and they gave me that title they're like you're the curator of the social event space. And I had never really thought of that as a viable career, because as you said it's kind of tied to the institutions. And I connected to that I looked it up, I thought about it, I saw it in that context and just had this feeling of like, well this is what I do you know. And the idea of curator as someone who cares for art, who cares for artists, who is charged with the responsibility of connecting art forms to the public, that really resonated with me. And I ended up pursuing a master's degree then in Arts and Cultural Leadership at St Mary's and I did that because I have always been driven by education and saw myself furthering my education. And it clicked to me at that point, that that was what I wanted to do, that I wanted to be a curator. However I decided not to get a degree in art history because this is when I started to think more about my racial identity development in my late twenties, and was realizing that the art world did not reflect me. So I had this intuitive resistance to the traditional art history track and cannon and instead was was like well what would it mean to be a curator within community and so the idea of an Arts and Cultural Management master's degree allowed me to understand how we make those things happen as opposed to how we just study about them and you know operate within that academic context.

Sanjit: Yeah that idea of the intuitive resistance I think it's what you said, you know I think it is really kind of an interesting notion right? The notion that while there may be a traditional track for you to pursue, the ability to feel like that's not right for me is so important to see how do you go ahead and follow that instinct. And I guess I'm wondering was that hard or was that an easy decision that flowed naturally for you?

Tricia: So I think the decision you know of what I was going to study and where I was going to study it, in order to make this move towards what I saw as my potential career path, that came easily. But where it got difficult was once I finished that master's degree and I sort of okay well here I am, I have my Master's that should validate me. I should be able to go out into the arts and culture landscape in the Twin Cities, especially, I was very interested in the nonprofit arts world and I should just be able to do this.

And that's when you know this is now we're looking at 2010. I started noticing that there were not a lot of women of color running arts organizations, nor working as curators you know. There were not a lot of mentors out there, I wrote to Arts organizations, nobody wrote me back you know. And I just had all of this sort of okay I thought I was good to go and then I'm getting into this space and I'm realizing that like it doesn't reflect me here in the Twin Cities, in Minnesota. I'm very different you know, being Thai-American, being multicultural, this is difficult. And I started to doubt my intuition and that's when looking at others who would have been considered art leaders at the time generally white men I started to feel like, damn I'm doing it wrong. I'm doing this all wrong, my way of doing it is wrong, I'm not going to be able to do this. And so I started to go into art spaces and the communities in those spaces were not speaking in ways that I could relate to, they weren't filled with the people that I saw myself wanting to be around, the artwork wasn't the work that I was interested in. And so that's where it got to be hard was when I was faced with the reality that I didn't necessarily fit into the industry and landscape that I so much wanted to be part of.

Sanjit: And that notion of both identifying where you're seeing a great disparity and then I guess being obstinate about it, being obstinate about saying that someone needs to go ahead and create another pathway. I guess I'm kind of wondering where did you get that from, where did you get the gumption from to go ahead and say mmm no not so much I've got another way of doing things.

Tricia: Right, yeah well that’s where collaboration comes into play and that's where the importance of being surrounded by other people that potentially see your vision or that are willing to build something with you because they're also trying to get something started or get something moving. So in that time of, you know doing all those DIY projects and grassroots magazines and like small art platforms while I was bartending and working in restaurants. I had started to build up a collaborative community and so I knew people who were running small spaces, DIY spaces and someone who had ideas and who had energy. A lot of the work I had to do of course was very little pay or not paid at all but I was supplementing you know my income through regular work so I was able to do that and you know I think in a lot of ways I was lucky. Because it was the right time, the right place and the people I was working with, the friends that I was collaborating with were willing to sort of follow my vision that I wanted to change gallery culture. And I saw the potential for a Gallery exhibition space in the Twin Cities that I wanted to be in that that would be exciting, that would be dynamic, that would be messy, that wouldn't be sort of like what was already out there. And so when there are other people around you that are excited about your vision, then you feel validated and you can move forward with it. You know so I think that's where the gumption came from and then I think it goes back to how I was raised and the intrinsic qualities I had to naturally step into leadership. Being you know I'm the oldest child and the oldest of 27 cousins, like I have certain things that are built into me that just allow me to like move forward and take risks you know.

Sanjit: Yeah I think that's I think your ability to talk about that expansively both about where you are personally, as well as the opportunities and the community you've surrounded yourself is really important. So that takes us to this idea that you put into action called Public Functionary and it sounds like kind of a lot of what you’re talking about are you know I very much now see the ethos within this model. Can you talk a little bit about the gestation for Public Functionary? I feel like you have in some ways in bits and pieces here, but talk about what it felt like to actually get it off the ground and at what point did you feel like, you know I think this is working.

Tricia: Yeah, you know in that time following my Master's Degree I was doing quite a bit of independent curating and working in different spaces with different people and just sort of observing you know the function of gallery spaces and their ability to create social connection and the way in which it brought people, gallery spaces where the space where people could come together and exchange ideas. And you know thinking back to my childhood and what I was trying to create moving to the U.S. as an outsider was I wanted to create space where I could be and where I could feel you know comfortable. And so I love being in art spaces, I loved being in gallery spaces but I didn't always feel comfortable. And so I started to really sort of envision what does it mean to be comfortable in a gallery space, what does it mean to be comfortable in exhibition spaces and who do these spaces exclude, why do they make people feel a certain way. You know I used to observe things like the way that people would walk in and feel confronted by a title wall, you know like what does a wall of text at the beginning of an exhibition make your body language do, you know. I started thinking about just demographics and like who comes into gallery spaces . Do black and brown people feel comfortable in gallery spaces, do white people feel comfortable in gallery spaces, are our spaces full of diverse people or people who are all the same in some way. You know so there was a lot of observation happening and Public Functionary was this idea of, I remember how we used to talk about it we were like going to reinvent gallery culture and like it was going to be the space where you could just be free to be who you were. Everyone was welcome, it was super non-pretentious and this was you know seven years ago when we launched it. The Twin Cities was not as embedded in racial equity work, in any of the conversations that we have now and the deep awareness that people seem to have about the disparities systemically in this state. And then how they are perpetuated within arts and culture, so my language at the time was just I want an inclusive accessible space it was reflective of who I was as a woman of color running a space. I wanted it to reflect me and the other people in my community who similarly were like me in different ways or you know had intersections with my identity as well.

And so you know we started it with that and it was very much, it was crowdfunded we reached out to the community with a vision. I rested much on my reputation as a grassroots organizer, as well as the reputations of my collaborators who had run other gallery spaces. And we ended up raising you know that $30,000 amount of seed money which was not a lot. We had a space that we were leasing in Northeast Minneapolis which seven years ago was not as much the, you know, I don't say this negatively but the gentrified neighborhood that it is now. I also live in Northeast Minneapolis so it was space that was in the neighborhood that I lived in and those things just sort of led to this grand vision that within a few months of getting it up and running, we realized how hard it was going to be to run an exhibition space and financially how difficult that was going to be. And I would say that the six years following were continued trial and error, trying to figure out how I and my collaborators run a space while also building careers as arts leaders and arts organizers, arts consultants whatever it was, to continue supplementing our income. And understanding how a space could continue to shift and meet the needs and then also develop along with realities of racial equity and understanding of disparities in the Twin Cities that have so rapidly emerged over the last you know six years. All of this was happening and you know you're asking when did I feel like it was working, I don't even know. Like there were so many high moments and low moments and at this point today the space is currently closed because we are in the midst of opening a new space. So I would say that today I'm in a space where it works because we're growing and we're trying to open a new space but I don't know that in those six, seven years I ever really hit a moment of like this is working, you know cause it was always changing.

Sanjit: Yeah, in that notion of it always changing, always evolving, there had to have been some benchmarks though that you thought ‘okay people are coming to this, people are feeling supported’. Especially when you talked earlier about wanting to try to change a broader culture of the way that creativity is being supported and the lack of diversity in this community in terms of their support for cultural workers. So I don't know if you've got certain pinpoints that you thought that may have felt like things are working for you.

Tricia: Yeah I think so, that helps it to clarify. I think yes it became clear that it was working when the space was essentially not being programmed by myself or my co-directors but being programmed by community in such an obvious way. You know, when it felt like it belonged to more than one group. When I would be at a gallery opening, exhibition opening and realize that I didn't know more than half of the people in the room and that happened again and again. I used to feel like when I went to other gallery spaces that I saw the same community and if it wasn't what I considered my community I felt like an outsider. So the fact that we were always the sort of revolving space where lots of different people were finding it, discovering it and feeling welcome there, that's it, like it was working. The diversity of groups and artists that were approaching us to use the space. The diversity of groups and artists that felt like that space was their space to create, to do really important arts organizing work, healing work, gathering work. When we saw the programming that was coming to us, as opposed to us seeking it out, that's when I realized that we had created a space that was different, was unique, was meaningful.

Sanjit: One thing I want to start to move into is to talk about this notion of cultural leadership. It's something that I've been fortunate to have conversations with you about in the past but you know at this stage I'd love to know what you think cultural leadership means to you. If you were to create a definition for it or a philosophy for it, what do you think are the major components of cultural leadership?

Tricia: I think cultural leadership which is you know is such an interesting term and I'm sure you know there's a lot to consider around the nuance of it but it comes mainly from this idea of understanding culture, right? Because that's such a term that's used often like that's my family culture, this is our societal culture, this culture is a negative thing, it can be a positive thing. So it's this fluid notion, culture. So then to be a leader of culture or to have cultural leadership, it's like this constantly changing thing, cause culture is. I think of culture as sort of like it's our way of life, it's our way of being and that way of life and being is expressed through cultural forms and those are you know traditions, food, music, art, style. You know even language, media, all of these tools of expression that we have that sort of represent who we are. And so when I think about cultural leadership I think it's sort of this intersection between how we relate to each other and how we function as a society and then art and culture as an output of that expression. So someone who is in a leadership position around all that has to sort of be both an advocate and a facilitator or an organizer or a curator. You know so you're making a case for it, you're constantly arguing in favor of cultural development, the need for understanding of culture, expressions of culture. And then you're also creating space and conditions and platforms and resources so that it can actually happen-is that abstract?

Sanjit: No, I think there’s a lot to go on with this. In part I think, it seems to me that it runs up against a very traditional and almost dare I say, eurocentric model that artists are best served when they're left alone. When you've got this kind of romantic you know, isolated studio environment and that gestational process occurs in a solitary, monastic almost environment. And it seems to me that some of the more productive creative and cultural environments are ones that are rich with interactions, rich with exchanges of ideas and that then this notion of leadership starts to evolve beyond an individual with a position of power rather becomes people that are keenly invested in ideas around collaboration. And so I guess I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about leadership that you feel like has a greater degree of collaboration than one traditionally thinks of regarding leadership.

Tricia: Yeah I think when it comes to cultural leadership or you know leadership, I think for me it’s like a leadership practice, it's an artistic practice in a lot of ways. In which you're not really just concerned with making art or the art output itself, but instead what is going to be that impact on people, what are the longer-term effects, what are the ongoing effects. And for someone like me when I talk about creating an exhibition space and a gallery space I am, as much as I center the art and the artist that create those exhibitions and those art experiences, I am so much more concerned in framing the what it is that happens as a result of us coming into that space and experiencing the art. You know what is the actual impact on people who experience it as well as the people who have made that art and are sharing it with a community. And then how do I keep this sustainable, how am I financially making sure this can happen, how am I providing the resources so that this can happen. And on another note I feel like in terms of what you mentioned about collaboration, the leadership style is not to be like a solo leader that’s sort of like facilitating all that but it's much more behind-the-scenes. Because you're in a way creating a platform in which people discover their own leadership potential, their own voice, their own expression. So the space that I create allows for other artists, allows for other groups, other small collaboratives to experiment and to figure out how they want to create space within the space that I created. So it's not something I can do on my own and generally the output is because of others, right?

Sanjit: Right, and in some ways that's a really great segue to talking about you as an educator because you're teaching leadership right now, you're teaching aspects of leadership. And so what are the specific challenges you think there is in teaching ideas regarding leadership to people that are creative practitioners and all these different forms? Are there other things that you think are harder to go ahead and impart? Are there things that you think that you have to navigate in a different way versus a poli-sci student that you're talking to about leadership? I guess I'm wondering what are the unique qualities and challenges of an ecosystem like MCAD when you're teaching ideas around leadership?

Tricia: I think it's definitely different and I will say that I'm learning to teach leadership right now and it's an evolving process. What I think is so unique is that in the context of cultural leadership within something like MCAD, like an art school in an art context, is that the leadership is going to be intrinsic to each individual experience and to each individual student. So they all have these very specialized disciplines, even somebody who's going into the comic art field is very different than printmaking, than film. And so they have all these different disciplines first of all but I think what I'm learning is that the value is not in teaching them how to lead or what is leadership, what are leadership styles, it's more about how do I help them understand who they are. What their story is, what they care about, who their community is and if not how are they going to build community, how are they going to figure out who they are, how are they going to figure out their story. Because those are the things that drive leadership and drive your need to create art, your need to create platforms to become a creative entrepreneur, to become a cultural leader. It doesn't come from nowhere, you can’t just say I’m going to be a leader tomorrow, you have to be really driven by something and you have to care about making some change in the world or making some change in your community. And so that's what I’m trying to figure out, how do I teach leadership by teaching them to tap into who they are as people and what they care about. And that, if someone can give me the answer to that, you know it will get me quicker through the process.

Sanjit: Yeah, I think that this idea of thinking about expertise is really interesting, right? Who has the ability to teach about cultural leadership, for me I think it becomes about that notion of life experiences. Because as you're talking I'm also thinking about what you said earlier, working as a bartender, your first steps towards thinking about curatorial practice from your own vantage point. From a vantage point of less about an individual strategically thinking about the capture of objects but rather about the gathering of conversations and its relationship to cultural production. And so it does make me start to think about that balance between leadership and mentorship and in some ways I think mentorship is a really abused term, I think it's become synonymous with someone with more experience giving advice to someone with less experience. I guess I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the relationship of mentorship to cultural leadership. You know maybe provide a little bit more context about how you feel like that idea of mentorship is evolving or changing over time.

Tricia: Yeah I think with mentorship it's interesting. I've often found myself in the position to be a mentor more than to be mentored. I have had mentors through my educational experiences and my teachers and then most of my mentorship has come from my peers so in collaborating with others I found mentors. Today I'm very much inspired by other women who are running spaces, who are working in the arts field and those are my mentors though they're coming up at the same time as me on a similar trajectory. And I think it's one of the things with like representation and racial equity is we need to be able to relate to the people that are mentoring us in different ways. And you know sometimes I talk about a lot of my leadership ability comes from the fact that my father is a white male, he's a white man and I watched him walk through the world and that gave me a certain perspective and ability to carry myself in different ways. So you don't always have to have a mentor that reflects you racially, there's other ways. But I do think that that's sort of a problem is the lack of, for someone like me, finding other women of color curators that I could look up to that I could be mentored by. And so that's where in terms of education, it's having these different perspectives and having these different teachers that are that students are able to relate to and the non-traditional path of finding your career as much as a traditional path. You know those things I think happen in parallel and some perspectives are great for certain students that want that very traditional route and other students want to know what it means to have a wandering, grassroots sort of DIY lifestyle path and career path. So I guess it’s hard for me to talk about mentorship because I do find that there is such a lack of being able to find mentors that specific people can relate to. I run a studio program through Public Functionary where we have nine young artists that are working through building a studio practice and we do a mentorship program and matching the students with mentors, experimenting with what works out and what doesn't work out. And so I very much push against the traditional idea of mentorship of like okay let's find this one person that can be an expert and teach you what to do, because the individual experience is so unique that it's hard to kind of frame mentorship in that way.

Sanjit: That makes a lot of sense. It sounds like in part what we're looking for is a new word, a new terminology that can really more adequately express what were what we're trying to accomplish.

Tricia: Yeah, but I will say my way of being in the classroom as a teacher would be more of a mentorship style in that I sort of guide more than I teach. I try to create space for the students to discover themselves as much as possible instead of telling them a way that the outcome is. My class is very processed-driven and sometimes I think that the students struggle with that, it's not a very hard outcome. But being someone who's driven by artistic practice, curatorial practice I think it's all about kind of tapping into who you are and where your strengths are and what you can pull out of your own experience.

Sanjit: Again it's an evolution. One thing I wanted to touch on and I have to say that when I was first thinking about this conversation a while ago, I think it's taken on greater significance. As we're not able to meet face-to-face and scepter and the impact of this virus and this pandemic is so significant. But cultural leadership for me also feels like it lilts into the terrain regarding activism, regarding a more demonstrable degree of action on some of these pressing issues. And I wanted to get your take on how cultural leadership is related to activism or is it related activism for you and if so how do you see it manifesting itself or what are examples where you think cultural leadership and activism are really closely linked?

Tricia: You know I do think that cultural leadership is linked to activism and I actually think that as cultural leadership is something that can be more broadly understood. In a way it is an evolution of what we might have thought about as activism previously, because there are stigmas around the word activism and I think activism has evolved and changed. When I was first starting in the arts field, art and activism were very much separate. There was activism, there was art in activism practices but they were separate from the art world and now it's become very much part of the contemporary world for there to be social justice and activism embedded in the work that contemporary artists are doing. And it's not as separate, it's not just that the community spaces do activism and the contemporary art spaces do high art. You know those lines have blurred very much. So I think cultural leadership has activism running through it and then under it whether or not we talked about explicitly in that way. Because in being a cultural leader you do believe that society will change due to arts and culture. That arts and culture have the ability to make life better for us or allow us to see the world in a different way. And you know in the context of the pandemic everyone's talking about well artists, artists are going to come out of this, artists are going to respond to this, artists are going to show us the way. And it's like of course we're looking for artists because they're the ones that are going to help us make sense of what we are experiencing, and I don't think they are going to be doing that right now in the moment. But it's when we're through this, if we're ever through this, that looking back they're going to contextualize our experiences through storytelling, through film, through music, through all of the things that are then going to become a record of what happened. So that we can change our society and all of these holes and cracks that we're seeing in our systems, it’s going to be activists and artists and organizers that push those agendas forward once we're back in the space where we can start making change to our systems in response to what's happened with the pandemic. Yeah I mean there's a way to talk about it separately, but for me personally cultural leadership is underpinned by activism because you are dedicated to making the world a better place.

Sanjit: And Tricia, give me an example where you see that whether it's something from your own experience or things that you've worked with at Public Functionary or something that you just seen out there in the world. That you think really exemplifies this idea of cultural leadership being partnered with or really integrated with the notion of activism.

49:23 Tricia: Well I think that in terms of the community that I'm directly embedded in and the work that myself and a lot of other arts organizers are doing, is that we're trying to create opportunities for artists. But we're very much concerned with racial equity and we're concerned with access. So everything that I do in the arts field is always advocating for black, indigenous, and people of color. That's the platform that I'm always working towards. is how do we change the disparities for people of color working within arts. It's a broader thing but I'm concentrating on artists. And so I think while we create art spaces, art opportunities, art studios, all of this were really just working for a better quality of life for people who generally have not had access, have not had the opportunity to pursue a career in the arts because they didn't think it was possible for them being a person of color. You know just so many things that would be barriers or spaces where they didn't see themselves reflected. So I think in the deep racial equity that we’re working in within the arts where it's very much about contemporary art and it's about art exhibitions and art talks and all of these different things that are are standard with in the art world, underneath that it's about changing these disparities in the Twin Cities where people of color are less better off. If that makes sense.

Sanjit: It does make sense and it makes me start to wonder about what opportunities that you think exist now, whether it's regionally in the Twin Cities area or beyond for people that are listening to this podcast, that they can do to try to change the equation. To try to shift the balance even further to make sure that cultural access and creative practitioners that are coming from diverse environments have better opportunities for access. Oftentimes my sense is that people feel like cultural leadership is a phenomenon that's out of their reach, that they weren't trained to do that and they don't have the skill sets, the opportunities weren’t presented to them. I guess what I'm asking you for as we start to round up this conversation is advice. What are steps that people can take to start to either build a practicing cultural leadership, or how can they start to change communities that they see around them?

Tricia: Alright well I think first off you should be working within your own community. I think it makes sense to make change within the community that you understand and that you're embedded in. And so even trying to understand who your community is and your communities because often we are a part of diverse communities as opposed to just one. But I think it's again tapping into your value system and I've been really fortunate to have the time that I spent to understand what I cared about and to realize that I very much valued artists and I very much valued what arts and culture could do to make the Twin Cities a better place. You know I moved here over 20 years ago and the grassroots art scene, the cultural communities that are now making Minneapolis much more vibrant, much more interesting of a place to be I feel like I saw that potential a long time ago. And that's kind of why I've stayed in the Twin Cities. So understanding what you want your community to be and what things you care about and then really building your work and your life around those things, I think that's the starting point. It is what matters to you.

Sanjit: And lastly I guess I'd love to know what's a project that you haven't worked on yet that you can't wait to work on? Either because you haven't had the resources to or you haven't had the time to. But I'm curious about what's next, what's the big thing that you wish you could grab onto and pursue if you had every opportunity in front of you?

Tricia: Well I mean I think the practical one is that I really want to get the new Public Functionary space up and running in conjunction with the studio program that we have, Studio 400, I want to expand that too. It’s nine artists, I'd love for there to be 25 artists in a studio residency program. And then have those two, the new exhibition space and the studio program, be quite influential as a mid-sized arts organization that is really building up the capacity of artists of color and the sustainability of their careers. And that is something that I'm doing. On another note if there was like a dream project, I'm actually really interested in defining the future of cultural leadership. And thinking about, in teaching leadership now, how I did all this research looking for books and looking for materials and I'm having such a hard time finding books that are one, in that context written by women of color, written by marginalized voices. So I would love to do research and figure out putting together a book or something around cultural leadership and activism. As it's changing and shifting in our current context, written through the perspective of women of color who are finding themselves in new leadership positions.

Sanjit: That sounds exciting and I look forward to hearing more about that in the future. It's been a real pleasure to have you join me Tricia, even if virtually. I look forward to the next time we can have a conversation in person. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Tricia: Thank you!