I recently traveled to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive to see Sarah Cain’s exhibition.

This is where my curatorial life truly began.

Being back in Berkeley, I was reminded how much of what I do now started there—how I learned to look, to listen, and to build exhibitions with intention. It’s also where I organized more than forty one-person exhibitions, each one a conversation, a risk, a moment of belief.

Seeing Sarah’s work brought me back to an earlier chapter. I first showed her work in an exhibition I curated at the Aspen Art Museum called Like Color in Pictures. I included her in a section on humor—a framing she didn’t appreciate at the time.

Years later, in a conversation we had at the Orange County Museum of Art, she reflected on how her understanding of humor—and what it means to be playful—had evolved.

There was something meaningful about holding both of those moments at once.

While I was there, I went for a run around campus, passing by the building where so much of that early work took place. I felt both close to and distant from the person I was then.
The museum has changed. I have changed.

And yet, the feeling of being there—of returning to a place that shaped you—remains.

It’s a reminder that our histories are not fixed. They move with us, evolve with us, and sometimes, if we’re lucky, we get to see them again from a new perspective.

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