| Glenn Seaborg |
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Dori Rawlins
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i met dori rawlins at this amazing thing
she used to do “critique with the curator” it resembled faith healing even more than art criticism some artist would toss three canvases up to the front of the auditorium and she’d look at them for a while perhaps waiting for the spirits to move her then finally she would speak: okay these are what you’ve been doing and they’re safe and I’m not going to talk about them but this one this is why you came here tonight to find out if it makes any sense if you’re getting anywhere and I’m just here to tell you this is really great and you’ve got to keep exploring this and then as if the healer had laid a hand on the artist’s forehead they would virtually faint really? it’s good? it’s okay? I can keep doing this… equally though i recall driving to a school with her to judge some student art and she feared that after all the false alarms that after fourteen years |
that the city was really going to do it really going to cut her position this time and she wondered what it meant to support, to develop an art community for a decade and more and then be told forget it she thought it was like a marriage that one day isn’t worth bothering any more and what did all those years of breakfasts mean? i thought it was just a big political matrix that art, that she didn’t really go from meaningful to not from important to not from providing culture and aesthetic and saving lives to not but that you simply went from 51% popular to 49 that virtually nothing had really changed and more importantly that surviving and thriving fourteen years in some political hot potato isn’t just an achievement it is extraordinary |
| Curator |
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12 June 99
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