Elena Ketelsen González

GM: Over the course of its history, MoMA PS1 has a big emphasis on artist activations and interventions. Do you believe that society is receptive to art that highlights community engagement?

EKG: It’s funny because I often see my work framed as community engagement, which is such a loaded term. Whenever an institution uses the term “community” without defining it, I know what they mean

BIPOC and/or the working-class. But community engagement operates at every level of the museum –the workers are a community, artists have their communities that intersect with others, and then there is the neighborhood, the borough, the city, and global networks. None of these are monolithic. I would argue that PS1 has always foregrounded community engagement, because when Alanna Heiss took over the building in the seventies with a group of artists that were living and working there, that was a community! I see my role as one that works to expand the definition of who gets to be in that community, and in what capacity What happens when you give a group of young people from Queens the same resources you would offer an international artist having a solo exhibition? The results are undeniable, and we can see a huge culture shift when that work gets recontextualized – not as community engagement, but as a part of this incredible lineage of artist activations and interventions. As to whether society is ready for that or not is not a question that interests me, as dominant culture has never welcomed work that questions its authority. So many people are held by the work we are doing collectively, and that is the who and what I am invested in – everybody else will catch up eventually.

GM: In 2019, you founded La Salita, which is described as “a curatorial project and long-term investigation dedicated to researching and exhibiting contemporary practices of artists working across Latin America and its diaspora.” Why did you begin this project and what have been some of its highlights over the years?

EKG: I founded La Salita out of a desire to create a space in which we – intergenerational artists and curators working in the borderland space between NYC, Latin America, and the Caribbean –could create exhibitions, gather, and think and write critically about our work from our own positions and contexts. In every museum I had worked in until that point, we were always positioned as marginal, despite that not being how we perceived ourselves when in community At the time, I was living in a space that worked well for exhibitions and gathering, so in 2019 I took a chance and started programming it. We hosted 7 exhibitions before the pandemic, as well as programs like Eva Mayhabal Davis’ El Salón. The last show before the pandemic, and before I left that living space, is one I will never forget: it was a great exhibition that we inaugurated with an El Salón potluck that turned into an absolute dance party. We didn’t know it would be the last in the space, and people still tell me today how special that moment of gathering was. (Continued)