I spent the first half of last week in San Fransico with my oldest sister, Amy. It was my first time back in the city since 2005, when I visited as part of a student journalism conference. We did the usual touristy things - a visit to Alcatraz, shopping on Pier 39, a hike in Muir Woods, etc. One of the things I most wanted to do, though, was visit the Keane Eyes Gallery.
The story of Margaret Keane holds special significance to me. During my last trip to San Francisco, my friends and I all went out one night looking to see the sights - only to discover the part of San Francisco we were in shut down super early. Before we knew it, we were wandering around a ghost town, looking for something to do. On our way back to the hotel, we stumbled into an art gallery that had a bunch of kitschy paintings. You can probably see where this is going.
While my friends looked at the paintings, I talked to the gallery manager. He told me about Margaret Keane and her struggle to reclaim her art from her husband - a man who pressured her into letting him take credit for her paintings. If you don’t know the story of Margaret Keane and her artwork, it’s a fascinating tale. Keane agreed to let her husband take credit for her paintings but, when she realized her mistake, sought to reclaim her rightful credit as the artist behind the increasingly popular paintings. The battle culminated in a courtroom trial and a paint-off, in which Keane showed a jury that not only was she the rightful artist behind the paintings, her husband - a self-proclaimed lifelong artist in his own regard - wasn’t even able to successfully paint anything of his own. While we talked, the gallery manager told me that Hollywood was trying to make a movie about Keane’s life (Kate Hudson was going to star in it, he said). It took a while, and a new batch of Hollywood it-girls, but the movie was finally dramatized in Tim Burton’s 2014 movie BIG EYES.
What really struck me, though, was the larger conversation I had with the gallery manager about my future. We ended up having an hour-long discussion about my dreams, my goals, and my ambitions. Honestly, that conversation is one of the top three pep talks I’ve ever received in my life. The gallery manager asked what I wanted to do after college and I told him I wanted to be a filmmaker. I explained I was unsure about the likelihood of actually becoming a filmmaker, though. There are a lot of wannabe filmmakers out there in the world, I explained. How am I supposed to get my voice heard above everybody else’s?
“Have you thought about spending your time helping other people be heard instead?” he responded.
The gallery owner went on to elaborate - yes, there are a lot of artists out there and they are all shouting over one another to have their voices heard. The struggle to break through the noise is real. Instead of fighting to swim upstream, though, he suggested I seek a different path - that of a curator. Good curators champion the art that speaks to them - raise that artwork up and help it find an audience. They essentially speak through other people’s artwork. They are highlighting the values and messages and stories that are important to them but instead of creating their own art, they are speaking through other people’s work. There are a lot of artists out there, there are significantly fewer curators.
At first, this sounded only like giving up on my dreams. The gallery owner explained that I should think of it as dreaming in another language. He asked what stories I wanted to tell through my films and every answer I gave him involved a comparison to another movie I loved. He pointed out that I was clearly a fan of cinema but questioned if I loved watching movies more than I loved making movies. He pointed towards himself - he loved artwork but knew his real passion was appreciating paintings rather than making his own. There’s nothing wrong with being an appreciator, he said. If anything, appreciating - really appreciating - art teaches you how to make your own when you are finally ready to do so.
I walked out of the gallery that night feeling good, even if I couldn’t quite articulate why. The majority of my happiness was born of the fact that I felt listened to for the first time by a strange adult. Even though I was already twenty years old, I still felt like a kid, and here was this random dude in an art gallery in one of the biggest cities in the world paying attention to me as I waxed poetic about my ambitions.
As the night went on, though, and I thought more about what the gallery owner had said, I realized he was right. I wasn’t driven by a desire to tell stories as much as I was driven by a desire to revel in the idea of stories. I loved films because of the way they made me feel as I experienced them and I wanted to chase that feeling by diving headfirst into the source. There were other ways to tap that source code, though.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my becoming a film programmer in 2011 was 100 percent me following the advice of that art gallery manager. I was choosing to make a career out of helping to tell other people’s stories. And, twelve years later, I have finally begun telling my own stories. Without the last twelve years working daily in the language of cinema, though, I wouldn’t have made the version of WHERE WOLF that I’m proud to have made today. And I certainly wouldn’t have been able to release it and market it in the way I needed to without my experience in movie exhibitions.
I owe my professional and artistic career to the Keane Eyes Gallery and - even though both times I walked by the gallery it was closed and I wasn’t able to actually visit - I wanted to pay a pilgrimage to the location while in San Francisco. So, thanks, random art gallery manager for setting me on the path that has led me to where I am today.
I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.