I still didn’t know where the artist lived, how old they might be, what gender they identified as, or what they did for work (if something other than art). I wished my partner was there with me because he would love this. Bennie and Clementine, whom I’d never met before, told me about the upcoming talk, the knit-in, offered me some exhibition catalogues, and asked me about my work—who I am, what I’m interested in, how I heard about the show.It’s not often I have such a warm, human-feeling experience at an exhibition space or art event.

Isn’t that odd? Why so much gatekeeping so much of the time around things that are made for everyone, intended so often to foster or communicate connection? Territorialism over access to something public—the making of something public, private—is confounding.

The weather was dreary the night of the artist talk a couple weeks later and, as somebody who is always looking for reasons not to leave the house, it took everything I had to muster the enthusiasm to venture out. Although I love artist’s talks, I almost always regret attending because nine out of ten times, the proceeding Q&A sessions are unbearable—so many people raising their hands not to ask generous and generative questions that allow everybody in the room to learn something more about the artist and their practice, but rather to go on about themselves—leaving me feeling torn between leaving during the Q&A (which always feels a bit rude) and sitting through it despite mounting anger.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy is teaching me about half smiles (which give me the look of a milk-drowsy toddler but actually did help me feel calmer during the germination of a road rage incident yesterday) and open hands, so I’m going to try to use that technique next time I feel my blood pressure rising during narcissistic audience member monologues.

Spoiler—the Q&A following Robins’ talk was spectacular. But we’re not there yet.

My husband and I decide to brave the mildly uncomfortable weather to go hear the talk.

We walk into Eliot Hall, a gorgeous chapel neither of us have been to before, and scan the room to see if we can figure out which person is Freddie. We can’t. What we notice, though, is that the room is absolutely packed. It’s humming warmly and there are several faces I know. There’s emotion in the room. The anticipation of grief. The air pregnant with goodbye.

I don’t know if what I’m feeling is inside of or outside of me, if I’m experiencing sensitive awareness or personal reflection pricked by the meditative murmuring all around.

Stephanie Snyder, the curator of this show and also the Cooley Director, begins thanking people—long-time colleagues, peers, and friends—for all the ways they have supported her along this journey, a portion of which, apparently, ends tonight.

She says something like, “This will be the last one these talks that I give here.”

I feel a rare moment of belonging. Collective grief. Grief. A familiar feeling. A thing I know what to do with. I’m transported to my single digit years in rural North Carolina.

My mother believed it made her look like a good mother to take me to church once in a while, but she didn’t enjoy it and never wanted to go somewhere she’d be recognized. So she’d pick a church at random one miserable Sunday a month, we’d get dressed up she and I, and we’d go. Always a guest, never a member.

I hated these Sundays, which marked the imposition of scratchy tights and my loathsome special occasion patent-leather Mary Janes, and I’d kick and scream the whole way. Then, once we were there and settled, the pastor or preacher or minister or priest (we were denomination-agnostic) always began by asking for a show of hands by first-time visitors. My mother always raised hers, enjoying the attention and warmth from people who hadn’t gotten to know her yet. A familiar feeling. Fleeting.

But this one time, she chose a church whose congregation happened to be in mourning because it was the preacher’s last sermon—the last one of a thirty some year career of shepherding and leading and mentoring and sharing grief.

The job of the curator is not so different from this, I think.

Everyone wore black, the sermon was about transitions, and there were so many tears. And for the first time, I didn’t want to leave. On the way home, I said to my mother, “I really liked that church; I think we should become members.”

She burst out laughing because loss was my reason for loving it. She told this story for years, any time she was trying to illustrate my particular brand of morbidity to a therapist, teacher, or, when I got older, a lover.

And here I am, all these years later, with my husband in a chapel full of people, realizing that what had been so alluring in that church all those years before, was a feeling of ease. Grief is disarming. There’s no energy for judgment or divisiveness or performativity and nobody expects anybody else to be any one way. The masks fall and postures relax, and vulnerable, complex, messy humans emerge.

I wonder if A.I.-driven surveillance technology has trouble with face recognition in a crowd full of grieving people—faces all more slack or scrunched than usual, people as themselves rather than their selves.

Stephanie’s and Kris Cohen’s introductions were ones of care, warmth, and holding—perfect prefaces to Robins’ talk, whose practice seems to be rooted in an ethos located at the intersection of preservation, compulsion, ardour, and slowness. Robins’ love for the apparently unloveable (I’m thinking about the little knitted stuffies she chagrins to collect), melts me.

Notes I made during the talk: