Marcela Guerrero MA’05, PhD’15 can’t stand a cliché. She has little interest in the unoriginal, the stereotypical, the trite and true. As the DeMartini Family Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, Guerrero uses her influential role to uplift fresh voices that have historically been rare in — or absent from — museum spaces but whose messages resonate with a diverse community of art aficionados.
As the Whitney’s first Latina curator, Guerrero is especially interested in diversifying representation, not only of the artists featured in the space, but of the staff and visitors who occupy and enjoy it. One way she does this is by ensuring that their stories are reflected in the galleries. Her recent exhibition, no existe un mundo poshuracán, documented the destruction of Hurricane Maria in Guerrero’s native Puerto Rico through the responses of artists who processed the experience in their work.
“Art is not a mirror of say, an essay or a concept, but art itself can provide new knowledge that you don’t see [or] read about anywhere else,” Guerrero says. “Through the way we show things — the placement, the didactics, all the different things that we have at our disposal as curators — I want people to think about what it is that art can tell [them] that [they] can’t glean or learn anywhere else.”
Below, Guerrero shares some insight into a career in curation and the meticulous planning that goes into assembling an exhibition in one of the most prestigious art museums in the world.
What does a curator do?
I make art accessible to the general public. That means contextualizing artworks, giving more background on who the artist is, what you’re seeing in the work, and putting it in conversation with other works. That’s a very typical way in which curators can provide more information: by putting a work next to another work, you instinctively want to draw connections or differences.
You mention in the New York Times article that when you were a young woman, museums were like a church for you. What role have these spaces played in your career?
My identity was forming. I was finding out who I was, so looking at art and seeing things that I felt an attraction to were really pivotal. I thought at that moment of figuring out who I was and what I wanted to do with my life. Before that, I don’t think I had been to museums. … So when I went to those spaces, I didn’t think, “I could potentially work here one day,” but more “I can study art history, and I could be a professor.”
However, being in these spaces in D.C., whether it’s the National Gallery of Art or the Smithsonian Museums, there’s a really strong presence of European art and American art. I appreciate it as someone appreciates something that, because it’s a museum, I’m being told that it’s beautiful and it’s on me to discover why that is and if I find it beautiful myself. But there wasn’t really an identification there at a level of [seeing] myself represented here or [feeling] my story and my people with similar backgrounds and experiences in these spaces. So, as much as I was attracted to those two museums and what I was seeing, there was definitely a voice missing that I think now I can articulate, but back then, it was more of a feeling of, “Maybe there’s something I can contribute to this field.”
How do your previous experiences as a Puerto Rican woman visiting American museums inform the work that you’re doing today?
In these spaces, I’ve always felt a little [bit of] an outsider. I’m seeing things through this lens of colonization that’s a strong presence growing up in Puerto Rico, [while] also understanding how it’s not spoken about yet. We live in spaces that have been settled by colonizers. Luckily, that awareness is more prevalent today than maybe 20 years ago when I started. But [I notice] that this presence of colonization is always there in the background but not spoken so much about, and so [I’m] kind of always navigating these spaces like, “Well, there’s this other part to American history that it’s not all about celebration and patriotism,” and we have to question these terms because some people have gotten the short end of the stick. Who are those people who perhaps haven’t benefited from those more patriotic notions of Americanness? I feel like I’m always that presence or one of those voices adding to that conversation and bringing those reminders.
How do you see your role, not only within the museum space as a curator, but also as a partner with the artists whose work you feature?
That’s probably one of the most exciting parts of the work. With some artists, when you’re doing a show, it could be straightforward: “I want this painting that I saw. Can I borrow it?” And that’s pretty much the story. But with other artists, [it’s] a conversation explaining what the exhibition [is] about. That’s a crucial moment in the interaction with artists, because especially if I don’t know the artist, I want them to trust me.
Do you find that curation is an art form in itself?
I don’t ever want my artistic vision to supersede those of artists, so I take cues and ideas from artists. It’s a conversation, a dialogue. There have certainly been many, many shows in which the curator kind of becomes an artist, but I didn’t want that to be too over-determined or to compete with the work.
What is the process of pitching, curating, and opening a new exhibition?
The conceptualization phase involves visiting artists, going to museums, reading academic works to know [the] concepts, ideas, [and] discussions that are happening in academia and how they’re being talked about. A foil to that is [also knowing] what’s happening in the world, really, which can be through newspapers, but also social media. Social media has made its way into pinpointing preoccupations, especially of young people. All of that becomes this ball of inspiration.
We’re thinking about it, we’re talking about it with our colleagues in the curatorial department, and once we have a pretty solid proposal and we find the time slot to do it and it’s approved by the director, then we start communicating that idea with other departments. And every department is involved at very different stages of the exhibition. Exhibitions have a metabolism that’s very unique, and it starts with that research phase.
I’ve realized that part of the work of a curator is also communicating that idea to people who need different parts of that idea, and the delivery is a little bit different. The way I talk to an art handler about the exhibition is very different to how I talk about the exhibition to someone in development and fundraising. Those are diplomacy skills that you bring in because you want everyone in the museum to work with you and for you and for everyone to be proud of what you’re doing, of what we are collectively accomplishing.
