Carol Bove’s exhibition at the Guggenheim is filled with extraordinary works of art. And what moved me most was the story she was telling about herself through them.

The exhibition includes works by artists who shaped her long before she became the artist we know today. One of them is Richard Berger’s My Couch, a sculpture Bove first encountered on a school trip to the Berkeley Art Museum when she was eight years old.Decades later, she tracked down the work, restored it, and included it in this exhibition. It is both an artwork and a memory made visible.

I felt an immediate affinity with that gesture. Carol and I grew up in the Bay Area at roughly the same time, and I couldn’t help tracing my own artistic formation as I walked through the exhibition.

One memory returned immediately. As a child, I visited an exhibition of Beat and Funk artists at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco with my parents. I remember them pointing and laughing, while I stood there realizing, perhaps for the first time, that they were not my people. I was looking for something else, even if I didn’t yet know what that was.

Carol’s exhibition reminded me that our artistic lives begin long before we recognize them as such. The exhibitions we see as children, the works we return to decades later, the artists who quietly shape our perception all become part of our own story.