#kim drew

[traceloops]

[fashion]

Tumblr NYFW SS18 dinner at the Library, Public Theater. Photos: Matt Borkowski for BFA. 

[ellacepeda]

Kimberly Drew Is the Future of the Art World    

Stylist: Ella Cepeda Photographer: Eric T. White Hair: Cirsty Burton Makeup: Mimi Quiquine using Glossier

[-fickleminds]

These 6 Women Are RUNNING the Art World on Teen Vogue Video

[blackcontemporaryart]

Hi Tumblr, it’s Kimberly Drew (aka @museummammy) reporting live from Art Basel Miami Beach and I’m going to be answering your questions for the next hour. Submit your questions now: http://blackcontemporaryart.tumblr.com/ask

[grayarea]

KIM DREW ON WORK AND WELLNESS

— as told to The Creative Independent

The Creative Independent: Do you find it helpful having a day job, and these other things you do outside of it? Or do you see yourself eventually working into your own project full-time?

Kim Drew: You know, I encourage everyone, especially if they’re working in the non-profit sector, to have something else outside of work. My something else outside of work just so happens to be why I have my job. That’s a very unique marriage. Your work, the work that you do, even if you are lucky enough to be a person with a “career,” there has to be something else that’s meaningful to you.

I think the private life, and understanding the things that can make you feel whole, and constantly interrogating that… especially if you are younger, it’s really important. You’re going to wake up one day and be like, “Okay. Did I just waste my life in service of someone else’s vision?” It’s really important to have your own thing.

I am a person who is very public about their anxiety. It’s something that I felt really strongly about communicating to others because I think especially as a person who is seen, I want people to understand that all of my wellness is worked for.

With respect to having a day job, for me, I love the institution, which is something that I think people don’t understand. Not like there’s people waiting for me to talk about it, but I believe so much in the power of power. I’m constantly trying to push myself closer to it just to figure out both how to learn from it, learn the choreography, and then to be able to report back to other communities. It’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about. A lot of people want this dismantled system, but if you don’t actually learn how those systems operate, you’re kind of stuck out of luck.

I respect people who are doing grassroots work—so deeply—but there needs to also be someone who can be the interloper. I try to be that person in the way that I can be and be really true and honest to both parties about what that means. I learned so much from institutional structures. I want to be able to take that knowledge to build new structures, ones that are better for traditionally underserved people.

It’s great, too, because I have benefits. Just the logistics. If my tooth aches, I can go to the dentist, and that’s important to me. Also, I work at the Met, where I work with experts in their field. There’s such a wealth of knowledge here. There would be a kind of quiet if I wasn’t in this space. I love that part of it, too, not even on the radical tip. I love coming to work every day. It’s a magical place.

TCI: You have a day job, and a ton of other projects. From the outside, it seems like those projects are becoming what you do full-time. As your personal projects grow, how do you navigate these different kinds of work?

KD: [...] For me, what’s most important is understanding that within any practice of multi-tasking, I have to have a seat at the table. In saying that, I mean that I’ve been focused on creating systems that privilege my wellness through all of it.

TCI: The internet’s a useful tool. As a social media expert, has it been helpful for you to get your various projects off the ground? To know the strategies and to know how to be smart about these various social media, Twitter, Instagram, etc. having that kind of knowledge has been helpful to you to further what you’re doing?

KD: [...] When you’re adding to this noise, in what ways are you improving upon silence? That’s something that I’m always thinking through. I want the information that I’m sharing to be able to do that. To be able to help people in their pursuit of something else.

Especially in the world of art—curators and art professionals are trying to mount exhibitions that can better respond to the time. The discourse has gotten faster, and so I want to be able to share images so that there’s so many different people to choose from and you don’t have to keep going to these particular narratives. Narratives can continue to grow and evolve, and really keep up with these major cultural shifts. It’s an urgency that I think a lot of people feel to be able to cope in feeling some sort of… “Safety” isn’t the world, but people are looking for some sort of solace in themselves or what they understand about history and culture. And so I want to be able to provide a resource for those who are able to build exhibitions or start conversations that can help and reach farther than I could ever reach.

[hard-work]

@museummammy’s piece on #anxiety in the August issue of @artpapers has me feeling a lot. “anxiety is the opposite of freedom. anxiety is like wading in fear. we’re all buoyed by what we have and what we’re willing to do to keep it. and there’s a fine line between inner peace and ignorance.”

[depauluniversityarthistory-blog]

Black Art Incubator Aims to Invert Art-World Normal

She [Kim Drew] runs social media for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but she's credited with starting a slow-burn revolution via Tumblr, arguably the lowest-fi gallery there is. Her high-traffic account Black Contemporary Art — a simple visual catalog of work by black artists — operates on the premise that black artists have been left out of art history. She slots them in without bitterness. "It's either that people are recorded, or they're not," she tells me matter-of-factly.

That same current of low-key, savvy correction undergirds the Black Art Incubator, Drew's new project, birthed with three other black women also in their twenties. Billed as a "social sculpture," the incubator takes blackness — and all that racial identifier suggests about what a person might know or feel — as a given. To see the space as a critique, Drew says, is reductive. The project isn't so much oppositional as an inversion of what we tend to expect. "Most art institutions are rooted in whiteness, but it's implied, it's this normalized thing," she says. With the project, "we're normalizing being rooted in blackness without beating people over the head with it."