Don’t Give Yourself Away

Our car sped up Mulholland Drive, as the sun was just setting. The light was yellow and gold, and filled with shadow. The song that would change everything, and eventually mark that moment came on: ‘Both Sides Now’ by Joni Mitchell. 

Mom reached over and turned the volume way up. The warm air flooded the car from the open sunroof and windows, as the words echoed deep through the canyons of our souls and dreams. The pain of the past year felt like it slipped down the canyon.

The last year was crap. It was layered with tension and heartbreak. I’d been pushing so hard to reach some imaginary horizon composed of peace and prosperity. The thing about a horizon line is that its always the same distance away from you.

Our art advising and curatorial business, KIN, had been doing well. We work with great people, have the privilege of getting to work with amazing artists and their work, and built a contemporary art advising and curatorial firm from a small town in Arkansas. The pride in success was overshadowed, for me, by a deep sense of loss of purpose. I wanted to feel alive in my career. I wanted to connect with people on an intellectual level about art and words and the things that make us human. I wanted to remove economics from every conversation.

I got into the arts 14 years ago because it made me feel alive, but I’d allowed that passion to get swallowed up by all of the bullshit of life—economics, politics, gossip, and self-doubt. It was just one of those years where what you have to do doesn’t align with what your heart needs to do. 

People who build businesses talk a lot about surviving your fifth year. The fifth year is a legitimate tension point between the hard work and exhaustion of the past years of getting that far, and the necessary requirement to evolve and grow. We were going to have to find the strength to push harder for a little longer. It was time to grow—in business and in life.

In August of 2022 I ended my time at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. It had been a part of my life, in some form or fashion, for ten years. I started as a college volunteer when the museum first opened, worked my way through the curatorial department, and spent the last four years there as an at-large curator working on a dream project. An architecture show that would merge beauty and artistry with the housing crisis.

I’d hoped it would be the project that I would become known for—the thing that might actually do some good. The project started off from the right place—filled with promise and good intentions. The museum was right there with me supporting each step, the architects jumped in the deep end and gave it all they had. As things progressed, tensions began to build. The project was riddled with problems. The final four months before opening were some of the most stressful in my life—my hair literally started to fall out. In the end, it fell flat and most people don’t even know the exhibit exists. 

I attended the opening reception feeling defeated. I left that evening and never went back. I've never walked through the show again. I’ve never stepped foot on that campus since that party. I couldn’t bring myself to see it outside of how I wanted to see it—I didn’t have the energy to see all the things we didn’t do and the ghosts of what could have been. 

It was hot as hell in Arkansas. So, we did what anyone would do; got in the car and headed west. The roadtrip became a therapeutic adventure—searching for the meaning of life—searching for the truth of what we are meant to do. The car, and the infinite expanse of the atlas, became the only place where dreams felt possible. I felt at home on the road—safe even. 

The dogs were in the back seat,  the trunk was packed with everything we might need, and mom was the ultimate DJ. That year we drove from Fayetteville, Arkansas to Miami, Chicago, Santa Fe multiple times, Los Angeles, and all of the places in between.

Viewing the world through a car window is an interesting experience. The landscape becomes a sort of moving picture, perfectly framed in the outline of the car. I’d grown up in a family of people who never shied from a roadtrip—actually preferred it to the drop in and out experience of air travel. The road was a way of seeing the in-between—the connective tissue of the country. 

‘Both Sides Now’ is about connective tissue in the in-between. That sometimes we can be two things at once. That our understandings of things can be rooted in our deepest self yet profoundly influenced by our current self. It is that perspective that allows us to truly be open to the complexities of humanity.

I looked across the car at my mom singing the words full blast. She was happy, I was happy. It was the first time in a long time that possibilities felt like they were directly in front of us. 

It reminded me of a photograph of my grandmother Loretta. It’s a small photo that sits on a table in my bedroom. She is standing on a rocky red cliff—a sea of deep blue ocean fills the majority of the frame behind her. Her arms stretched out big—pulling the sun and the world into her. Her curly, massive hair blowing in the wind and a smile across her face. I’d seen this pose a thousand times. 

She was the only person I knew that felt how I felt about experiencing places and people. The unfamiliar was a fuel for life. Visiting spaces we know nothing about helps us expand as people. She taught me that. That the most incredible thing about humanity is the uniquenesses of people and how they choose to live, eat, write, dance, talk, love, and make things. 

That photo was taken along the southern coast of Spain. I’d never been to Europe with her, but she wrote me postcards from every place she went. Postcards with stories about a small monastery in southern France, or a vineyard in Spain, or a palace in Portugal. She wrote with such freedom. Her words instilled in me a desire to do the same thing she did. 

The image of her with her arms raised to the sky collided with the words of Joni Mitchell and it hit me. I’d given myself away. I’d given away the only thing that is truly mine—my heart. I fell victim, as many people do, to the illusion that if I put everything I have into something it will keep it clean of the soot of the world. 

You can’t give everything away. You have to keep your most cherished thing safe and protected from the talons of the world. The vultures never sleep.

Don’t worry, you can grow back and better. I had to leave behind things that I cared about at one time. I had to let go of wrongs made against me. I had to let go of ideas that were stolen from me. I had to undo a lot of assumptions.

We talked about it all. The roadtrip was about seeing as much on the outside as the inside. While we drove across the country we soaked it up. Restaurants were like the missions and chapels on our pilgrimage to somewhere. I don’t know anything better than a fantastic restaurant—maybe a great painting, but that is another conversation. 

The experience of sharing a meal, a cocktail, or a bottle of wine served as foundations for conversations about life, love, desires, the pains we feel as individuals, and the people we saw and met along the way. During the past fall and winter, mom and I talked about it all over meals at Joseph’s, Harry’s Roadhouse, Antico Nuovo, Damian, Barbuto, Balthazar, and Petit Trois. Shout out to Ryan at Petit Trois who knows how to make one glass of white wine turn into a bottle without you ever noticing. 

Absorbing the creativity and innovation of someone else was literally giving us the fuel we needed for our next chapter. People ask us all of the time about what it is like to work with your parent or child. In all honesty, I have no fucking clue. For us, it just works. There are layers of genetic entanglements that when aligned just right create an uninterrupted connection. We are very different, but the same in the respect and awe we have for one another. 

Somewhere in some place it just all kind of happened. We were free and leaning into who we are—no curbs or obstructions. We decided that we wanted to grow our business in whatever directions we felt like. We wanted to make something for us. We knew it would be about places and spaces and things, because that is our world. 

In LA we decided that we would embrace the legacy of my late grandmother Loretta. Her spirit of collecting and adventure would be our next project. 

We decided to put most of our life into storage, and bought an atlas. Loretta would become a place where we shared the places, artists, stories, things, of our travels with others. 

As we drove out of LA, through Death Valley, and out of the other side, I realized that we were leaving the death valley of the last few years behind us as well. We are on the other side and can see both sides now.