Curating Through Storytelling and Care: A Conversation with Rylee Eterginoso

Back and Song (Detail featuring Virginia Allen) by Elissa Blount Moorhead and Bradford Young part of Taking Care: The Black Angels of Sea View Hospital at the Staten Island Museum, 2024.

Melissa West recently sat down with Rylee Eterginoso, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Programs at the Staten Island Museum to talk about art, life, and the word “curator.” This conversation is edited and abridged for clarity and readability. 

MW: Would you describe yourself as a morning person? 

RE: To be honest, I am a total morning person. I have energy in the morning…I love this time of day. My best work is done in the morning. 

MW: Do you mean your best creative and administrative work? 

RE: I have clear thoughts in the morning. It's almost like your brain is dealing with the nightly residue of whatever your mind is trying to figure out/process at night, and then you take a shower and think, “oh, this is what I’ll do about that!” or make those types of connections. It’s a liminal space and a special time.

MW: As an aspiring morning person, that gives inspiration and hope. I am in a moment where I am thinking a lot about the practice of curating, and of the curatorial field and where we fit into it. When did you first decide to first go into the curatorial field, and was it an active choice or decision? What inspired your professional focus? 

RE: My career began in arts education and laid a groundwork for how I might approach things, and then moved into programming, the goals of each of those being, “this is the thing I want people to understand, or connect with, or question, and then this is the way that I'm going to go about doing that. This is how I'm going to get that result.” 

I didn't think that I wanted to go into curatorial work or programming. When I entered graduate school at Pratt, I thought I was going to go for leadership positions in arts education. No one really teaches programming. Programming is a weird, nebulous thing that people often take for granted. 

Rylee Eterginoso, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Programs at the Staten Island Museum.

My first major curatorial experience was in public art through Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn, a project by Creative Time and Weeksville Heritage Center. This was the first time I worked in dual capacities: programming and exhibitions. And the first time I learned that I didn’t necessarily have to choose between either.

It was a golden era of my life. I was deeply inspired by the people that I worked with, specifically at Weeksville. This whole conversation could be about that.

My next experience was with Art in Odd Places, a public art initiative created by Ed Woodham. 

Beginning my curatorial career in public art and programming has everything to do with how I approach this work and the considerations I take in my approach.

MW: How and when do ideas come to you? 

RE: Constantly. All the time. I think ideas come most frequently in those meditative spaces that we don’t recognize as meditative: commuting, cooking, gardening. These are all meditative spaces where your motor skills are involved in one thing and your mind is able to wander. 

MW: What was your dream profession as a child? Did you go through many iterations of what you wanted to be when you grew up?

RE: If you look in my fifth grade yearbook from P.S. 21, I think I wrote that I was going to be a chef. And I still relate to that. A lot of nonprofit experiences can look like Chopped, or to quote Mariah Carey, “I’m going to do the best I can with what I’ve got.” 

I think I always imagined creativity would stay central to my life. It was a value in my home and family growing up and an experience that was very regular to me, though it took different forms. 

MW: It’s interesting to hear about your family having exposed you to their artistic practices. As a kid, did you have any of your own? Are you coming to this curatorial practice as someone with lived experience creating your own work?

RE: Yes. Having art training, earning my BFA and BA in Art History definitely helped me talk in a certain way at certain times. But what has been more useful to my job are my early experiences as a teaching artist and grants panelist.

MW: One of the things I am thinking a lot about these days is a sense of community around curating on Staten Island, and what I feel that I lack sometimes is that intergenerationality of having a mentor. It sounds like Elissa Blount Moorhead was a mentor. I know the word mentor comes with a lot of connotations, but what has that relationship looked like? And are there other people who have had a similar role in your life?

Beryl Thurman and Rylee Eterginoso, opening event for Vulnerable Landscapes, 2023.

RE: Absolutely. A whole village. Mentors for me have predominantly been educators or people I’ve worked with. I think about mentorship a lot and want to acknowledge that it’s difficult to find a mentor without a structure like school or the workplace where the dynamic already has a place. 

Mentorship looks different throughout time, too. Elissa was my professor first, then my boss, thought partner, and friend. A lot of my mentorships have followed a similar pattern.

Professionally in terms of when I was in undergrad, Randy Williams led the art department. The way he approached art education left an indelible impression on me. I remember being a freshman ​​and being so distraught by his assignments. I would ask at least 10 questions about them and he would never answer a single one. You had to accept that you were not getting that answer. The way he worked with young artists, with youth was unforgettable. After college, I went on to work with him for 9 summers at the New York State Summer School of the Arts. That experience changed my life summer after summer. 

MW: I think out here on Staten Island, there aren’t many institutions that have curatorial positions—it’s pretty limited, and these roles might be held onto for a long period of time, so there isn’t a whole lot of opportunity to work closely with someone in a mentorship capacity, or to have access.

RE: Can you define “curatorial work” as you’re speaking about it?

MW: I was going to ask you that question! I think of it as a practice or a verb, the act of curating. I think about Judy Hussie-Taylor, curator of performance and executive director at Danspace Project where she has been for many years. In Terms of Performance, she goes back to the Latin roots of the word, to care, to care for, this almost spiritual or soul-based nurturing of objects or a collection. I think about that a lot as a curator of performance and not working in a traditional museum space, and how a lot of it is about taking care of people. And that probably applies in contemporary art as well, where you’re working with a lot of different practices and there isn't so much a distinction between objects and people, necessarily. I don't know, I always go back to that sort of taking care of…taking care of the souls. Maybe that’s a bit metaphysical…but I was interested in asking you how you define the role of a curator, what does that mean to you?

RE: Same. Caretaking is a mechanism through which I understand and approach curating. One of the most succinct definitions of this work that I really latched onto is from Anna Mirzayan who “conceptualized good curating as community building.”

Even just going down the rabbit hole of care, I think about how vulnerable it is to care and share.

I think about curatorial work as storytelling. A lot of my approach was developed in that meditative space of the NYC commute. Podcasts like This American Life, Radiolab, and The Moth all taught me that you can make any topic approachable and compelling. These amongst others taught me that there are ways to unite what might seem like very disparate things, or that there are myriad corners to look at for stories that connect. That we don’t always need to look in the most obvious places to find relevance. So I look at curating very much as storytelling and I think about the physical experience of being in the gallery–there are very practical concerns, and then there are other considerations, such as the educational goals. I think about entry points, too. In terms of Staten Island, it might not seem like it sometimes but there are unifying agents no matter where you look.

MW: This also takes me to the title of the current exhibition [at the Staten Island Museum], which is Taking Care. What is that relationship…when you are in a caretaking role within museum spaces? In the exhibition’s context [Taking Care], you’re highlighting nurses and healthcare workers who take an oath to care for people. I don’t think the general public really thinks about that for, let’s say, a museum worker. 

RE: And they probably shouldn't. There is a huge difference between caring for the health of a person versus caring for a collection, or exhibition, etc. However, there are components that stretch across the full spectrum of caregiving: generosity, thoughtfulness, respect, responsibility, deep listening. 

MW: When you start to talk about that, it takes me to your two previous exhibitions, Yes, And, which is all about abundance, of adding on, and the framing of Staten Island artists in that, and then Vulnerable Landscapes, which is looking at the environmental crisis through our connection to place. Can you share a little bit about your relationship to Staten Island and how you are thinking about it in your work? What are the things you're hoping to illuminate, or question, or challenge, in your work?

Gallery View, Yes, And at the Staten Island Museum, 2022-2023

RE: There are like three questions in there, Melissa! I am a third generation Staten Islander living in the same house that my mom and grandparents grew up in. And so I've grown up in my own Museum of Staten Island. I've grown up with the anecdotes. I think that one of the most incredible experiences was growing up here and essentially taking for granted what I knew about Staten Island, and then learning so much more at the [Staten Island] Museum. Learning about what was hidden in plain sight, learning about the why’s and the how’s of this place, was so meaningful to me in ways that has everything to do with my identity that I’ve talked about. I also realized in graduate school that this was something that was unique to me. I talked about Staten Island all of the time—that’s when I started to rep Staten Island really hard. I talked about Staten Island all the time at Weeksville, too. It's very much part of my identity and I think that I'm also seeking to deliver that same inspiring experience that I had at the Museum about—there's something that sticks about learning about something you already thought that you knew or about finding the answer to a question that you've asked for years. 

I am interested…I mean honestly, we're all interested in working with the complexities of Staten Island, that’s why we continue to work here. I want people to care about Staten Island... I want to care about Staten Island. I'm not just like an ambassador, I'm speaking to myself too. I want to keep this connection going and stoke the flames of curiosity. And at the Museum, with those three collections [Art, Natural Science, History], it’s just endless. I love that we can talk about so many different things in so many different ways. 

Gallery View, Vulnerable Landscapes at the Staten Island Museum, 2023

MW: How is it working with a collection, particularly when you are coming from a public art or contemporary art background, though you have also worked in historic spaces. What is it like riffing off of or working with the collection and then you’re telling this contemporary story or reframing the historical? How are you negotiating those different pieces?

RE: From a practical space, I am still very much learning about how to work with collections. Shoutout to the collections team at the Staten Island Museum because they know what is there and how to care for it. My colleagues are incredible thought partners, too, and I am lucky to work with them. And yes, sometimes I do come up with [bonkers] ideas that will never come to fruition because they don't make any sort of sense with the object or they go against the rules. But, also, I try to bend the rules a little bit as much as possible too. 

MW: How do you bend the rules?

RE: By asking “what if?” Sometimes the answer to that is not so clear cut. Thinking expansively about what we could do can result in different ideas and ways of thinking. 

MW: It sounds like you work in close proximity with your colleagues at the Museum who manage the collection?

RE: Yes, my colleagues all work with a different door, like Gabby [Gabriella Leone, Archives Manager]. She’s brilliant. I can ask her about what we have in the archives that could enhance our exploration of a topic, and she’ll come back with maps and photos [and other artifacts], so assessing what we have to work with internally, what we—I am just always going to go back to cooking—what do we need to go to the store for, what do we have in the house? What do we have and what do we need? This is really how a lot of these conversations start.

My colleagues are incredibly creative. Nothing gets done alone. We are forever collaborating. We have cross-departmental meetings where we actively brainstorm from various departments in terms of vetting programs, vetting exhibition ideas, because how good is an exhibition idea if Education can absolutely not use it? It has to fit into the whole ecosystem of the museum and that cross-departmental team really helps to make sure it happens—thoughtfully. 

MW: You have all of these exhibition projects that you’ve worked on from Weeksville to Art in Odd Places, to the Staten Island Museum. I am not going to ask you to choose your most favorite one—because how could you?!—but what is a highlight or transformative moment in your exhibition portfolio?

RE: I mean, if they were all partners, Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine was my first love, you know? So it's hard. I just learned everything from that relationship, you know, it was incredibly formative. That was ten years ago. Bradford Young was in that exhibit, and I worked on it with Elissa Blount Moorhead. Today their piece Back and Song is part of Taking Care: The Black Angels of Sea View Hospital at the Staten Island Museum. Black Radical Brooklyn taught me so much and I put a lot of that into practice for Taking Care. In terms of the collaborative process of that exhibition and how it developed, I was able to live through that again or revisit it…

MW: It is really the bookending of a decade. 

RE: It’s uncanny.

MW: Tell me your wildest art dream. If you had all of the resources and time in the world, what kind of project would you generate?

RE: I would start a residency with my dear friend and collaborator, Juliet Hinely. 

MW: Do you have any advice for young curators who are trying to enter the field, specifically anyone on Staten Island who might not know what options or resources there are out there for them in the field of curatorial work? 

RE: The phrase “curatorial work” makes me feel some kind of way. First, I would even back away from that term and ask, “What do you want to do? Is it being done? If it is, who is it being done by? If it is already happening, how do you work with it or get involved?” Ask questions. Let people know what you are good at and curious about, and hopefully someone will connect with that. Maybe that someone can be your mentor. 

Gallery View, Taking Care: The Black Angels of Sea View Hospital at the Staten Island Museum, 2024

To learn more about the Staten Island Museum and Taking Care: The Black Angels of Sea View Hospital, on view through December 20, 2024, visit www.statenislandmuseum.org/exhibitions/takingcare/

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Melissa West is a choreographer and curator based in Staten Island, NY. She is the Director & Senior Curator of the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor, and co-founder of the Shaolin Art Party. West is dedicated to creating local opportunities and innovative cultural experiences for artists and audiences alike. mwestdances.nyc