I have spent much of my professional life helping artists bring their ideas into the world. When an artist dies, that relationship continues, and I feel a particular responsibility toward those who were my friends. How do we keep their work and ideas alive, especially for people who never knew them?

The last exhibition I curated at the Orange County Museum of Art was Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden. Raymond died while we were planning the show, making the opportunity to share his work with new audiences even more meaningful. Earlier this year, students at UC Berkeley contacted me about Anne Chu/MATRIX 184: Untitled, an exhibition I curated in 2000. Anne was a dear friend who died in 2016. I loved that students who had never met her were researching her work and asking me questions twenty-six years later.

And then there is Paul Bloodgood, an artist and close friend who died far too young. I have a monoprint he gave me for my birthday that I look at every day. He also gave my first husband and me a painting when we married. My husband got it in our divorce, and although I haven’t seen it in years, I still think about it. I love that an artwork can remain present in our lives even when it is no longer physically with us.

These three artists remind me that keeping someone’s work alive can happen in many ways: through an exhibition, a conversation with students, or a piece of art we live with. Each is an opportunity to introduce someone we knew and admired to a person who may discover them for the first time.