Growing up in New York City, in a family that cared about art, meant a life filled with museums, books, and movies for Kara Felt. It made sense that she would go on to earn degrees in art from Yale and New York University, carving out a professional path as a curator, lecturer, and writer on the topic.
“I had many formative experiences in cultural spaces, of leaving the museum, gallery, or theater looking at the world at a slightly different angle than before,” she says. “I knew since I was a teenager that I wanted to work in this direction, to fuel curiosity and inspire dialogue through art.”
Felt, 37, recently ed the San Diego Museum of Art as their curator of photography, overseeing the photography and new media collections at SDMA and the Museum of Photographic Arts. She previously worked as assistant curator of art at the Denver Botanic Gardens, organizing multiple exhibitions in a range of media, and as exhibition curator and postdoctoral curation fellow in the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art. She lives in San Diego’s Bay Park neighborhood with her husband, Craig, and their three young children. She took some time to talk about her affinity for photography and working with living artists, her creative process for curating exhibitions, and getting to know San Diego.
Q: Congratulations on your position as the new curator of photography at the San Diego Museum of Art. Can you talk about your path to pursuing an education and career in the arts that led you to a focus on photography?
A: I wrote my first essay on a photograph when I was 15, but I fell in love with photography in college, when I took an art history class on American photography and a black-and-white photography class in the art department. Those experiences converted me — from the magic of seeing the photographic image materialize in the developing tray, to learning about all the stories that photographs can tell us about history, society, and culture. Photographs obviously have a special relationship to everyday life since we are all photographers and interact constantly with photos on our phones and in our environments, which raises fascinating philosophical questions about intention and quality.
Q: What are some lessons you learned about curating during your time at the Denver Botanic Gardens that you’re bringing with you to the San Diego Museum of Art?
A: I worked on photography shows at the Denver Botanic Gardens, but also on shows in a range of media, from botanical illustration to sculpture and installation art. I think it’s made me a more versatile curator to have that experience installing different kinds of artwork, since photography is most often two-dimensional and relatively small. My time there also offered an important lesson in working with different audiences, since many visitors to the gardens come because they love plants or simply as a respite from a busy day. It’s not always the same kind of visitor that you get at an art museum. I’ve learned how to make these diverse audiences feel included, welcome, and excited about the art on view.
What I love about Bay Park…
The views of the bay are very beautiful.
Q: How would you describe your approach to curating, in general? What elements are important to you to bring to curating exhibitions?
A: I think of myself as a facilitator creating experiences that are sensory and intellectual and that ask visitors to question their preconceptions and wrestle with new topics and perspectives. It’s very important to me to bring attention to underrepresented artists, especially women and artists of color, and to expand and diversify received canons of “important” photographers. I’m also drawn to overlooked topics and working across disciplines. My dissertation, for example, examined how religious beliefs motivated early photographers, which is an issue that has been barely addressed in the literature (Felt earned her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University). Photography lends itself to interdisciplinary inquiry since it touches so many different aspects of our lives.
Q: Walk us through your process when you’re working on a curatorial project.
A: Generally, I see something that sparks an idea and then develop a sense of the state of the field on that theme or artist, from literature to past exhibitions. I then identify what is missing from the current conversation on a topic and try to articulate what new story can be told and why it is important. I’m always motivated by the question of relevance and how a particular subject bears on or potentially reframes critical issues today. From that big picture thinking, I shift to the concrete, thinking about how much and what kind of work would fit into a certain space to activate it and tell the story most effectively.
Q: Where have some of your ideas from past projects come from? What does the conceptualizing and research process look like?
A: I have a strong commitment to originality, whether that’s bringing a fresh perspective or a new lens onto well-covered subject matter, or developing new and compelling themes and working with artists from historically underrepresented groups. I’m often motivated by what I perceive to be gaps in representation or understanding, when something has been presented as simple, but is, in fact, full of complexity and nuance. The inspiration for an exhibition that I curated at the National Gallery of Art last year came from seeing a show featuring the work of two British photographers in Liverpool in 2015. I was amazed at the similarities and differences I saw with American photography of the time, which planted the seeds of an idea that I nurtured until I was invited to do research on the collection of British photography at the NGA in 2018. This morphed into an exhibition on artists using their cameras to respond to a time of intense social unrest in 1970s and 1980s Britain and featured many women, immigrants, and artists of color who often went unmentioned in the official s of the time, but made a huge impact on the photography scene. The research process usually involves learning as much as I can about a topic, devouring books and articles, digging through exhibition lists and periodicals, and speaking to experts in the field, especially artists.
Q: What are you thinking about, visually, when imagining how you’d like the exhibition to look? What you’d like viewers to see and feel as they make their way through an exhibition?
A: It really depends on the content of the exhibition, but if it is a historical show, I’ll often borrow from some of the aesthetics of the time in graphics, paint colors, and design.
Q: As an arts patron, who are some photographers whose work resonates with you, artistically?
A: I love it when photographs offer me a sense of proximity to an artist’s psyche; there’s something so intimate about seeing something very close to what the photographer saw looking through the lens in the past. Photographs can cut across time and culture and reveal so much about the artist’s very individual outlook. I’m especially drawn to photographers with a sense of humor about the social world, artists like Garry Winogrand and Tony Ray-Jones, and to those who picture aspects or of society that often go unseen, such as Dawoud Bey or Chris Killip. I also really enjoy artists like Grete Stern or Toshiko Okanoue who use photographs to express interior or alternate states of being.
Q: What’s been rewarding about your work as a curator?
A: It’s really rewarding to help inspire a sense of discovery in people, whether that’s exposing them to a new artist they might not have known before, introducing a new perspective on a well-known artist, or simply connecting a visitor with a part of themselves — a curiosity, perhaps —that they didn’t know about.
Q: What has this work taught you about yourself?
A: This work has taught me that I really enjoy working with living artists and helping to materialize their visions in physical space. It’s often easier curating shows of work by artists who are no longer living, but it’s very rewarding to have a rich dialogue with an artist about their work as you’re organizing a show.
Q: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
A: Someone taught me the value of taking compliments rather than deflecting them, and that’s really stuck with me and inspired me to share positive with those around me. It’s a pity that so many nice sentiments go unsaid.
Q: What is one thing people would be surprised to find out about you?
A: I don’t own a camera beyond my iPhone.
Q: Please describe your ideal San Diego weekend.
A: I would say checking out a new playground or beach with our kids and eating fish tacos. I’ve only been here for a few weeks, but so far, I’ve been very impressed with the quality of the playgrounds.
