Elena Ketelsen González

During the pandemic, I collaborated with Amor Fuego in San Juan, Puerto Rico to host a solo exhibition with Camille Rouzaud that included works they created while in San Juan, New York, and later in France, while waiting for approval of the O1 visa. In late 2020, I curated a show of Cassandra Mayela and Basie Allen’s works in their backyard studio, which was built by Basie Allen and is still one of my favorite projects I have ever worked on. I love showing work in places that weren’t intended to be exhibition spaces; it is a fun challenge and opens up conversations about the material realities of the way artists make work and the long history of artists making and showing work in alternative spaces across NYC.

GM: Do you have any upcoming plans for La Salita?

EKG: I am really focused on bringing that La Salita energy to my work at MoMA PS1, and utilizing the means available to me to open up the museum. I am still in close contact with many of the artists who showed through La Salita; I will always champion their work and look forward to collaborating with them in many contexts in the future. With La Salita, we were all operating from scarcity to create moments that felt plentiful. While there was something beautiful about that, I want to be very honest – the reality is it wasn’t sustainable. I founded La Salita in part due to the systemic exclusion of artists and practices I was passionate about in all the museums I had worked in. Now I am in a position where I can work with others to create the conditions for these practices to thrive over time, and I very much want to lean into that abundance. I saw La Salita as a curatorial project within the legacy of alternative art spaces in NYC, for which PS1 was always a blueprint to me – I wouldn’t be at PS1 if not for the experience and relationships I built through my independent curatorial practice, so I see my institutional work as a continuation of all of that thinking. I also don’t see any of this as linear – La Salita will always be there. It is life-long work, and it is very present in all the work I do.