Elena Ketelsen González

We worked with the artist jackie sumell and young people from the Lower East Side Girls Club for over 2 years, with the result of that collaboration culminating in the Homeroom exhibition. That was such a successful collaboration because we implemented abolitionist frameworks of collaboration and consensus-building in our curatorial model, and the result was an exhibition that celebrated the process as much as the product and was in conversation with an intergenerational group of artists and communities across Queens and NYC. I co-organized Malikah with Rana Abdelhamid, an amazing community leader in Astoria, Queens. We had 12 women from Little Egypt, Queens in residence for 8 months working on how to tell their migration stories through oral histories, photo archives, and portraits commissioned by Sandy Ismail. The methodology for Homeroom centers on collaborative curation, where groups often relegated to recipients of knowledge rather than makers become active participants in the telling of their histories, with me as the liaison between them and the institution. Recently, we had a huge Open House event where Malikah hosted performances and activities. At the same time, there was an Art21 screening of Daniel Lind Ramos’ exhibition, a talk by renowned anti-colonial thinker Silvia Rivera Cusicancui, and a performance by the avant-garde ensemble Standing on the Corner. It was a powerful moment of seeing this intersectional and intergenerational work come together throughout all of PS1 in a way that challenges traditional models of exhibition-making and public programming, as well as bringing together a diverse group of artists and audiences in celebration of each other.

GM: MoMA PS1 recently announced that you will be curating Leslie Martinez’s first museum exhibition in New York. What will the exhibition be about, and what has your experience been curating the show?

EKG: Leslie Martinez is an incredible artist whose work I have been following for a few years, hoping we would collaborate. They create sculptural paintings that explore place and ancestry in relation to labor and the handmade, drawing on formal legacies of abstraction, as well as generational practices of survival and sustenance learned from their family. The show will be spread across 3 galleries, so we have the opportunity to show various aspects of Leslie’s practice. One room will have work selected from the past 3 years that focuses on their process and recent material breakthroughs, while the other 2 spaces will feature works that are imagined specifically for these spaces. I am really excited because Leslie is working on a large-scale installation that will be unlike anything you’ve ever seen from them before, thanks to PS1 being a space for artists to experiment, along with the care and magic that is our exhibition team. Leslie spent 15 years in NYC before returning to Texas, so this show marks a homecoming for them in many ways, for which they are working on a monumental gesture. I’ve often heard people talk about my work with artists as one of “taking up space” in spaces where their presence was notably lacking I love thinking about how so many practices, from public programs to painting, can achieve this. How can a formal exploration of material and abstraction also be political? This is a conversation Leslie and I keep having, and I look forward to people seeing how that comes through in the show