Culver City

This is our second week interning here at the gallery, and I thought today would be the perfect time for my very first blog entry. One of the perks of this internship is that we all get the opportunity to talk to people who have made careers for themselves in the Art World. Today we went to Culver City to meet with several successful entrepreneurs. First we met Cliff Benjamin and Erin Kermanikian. They own a gallery called Western Project. It’s on La Cienega, and they are showcasing an exhibit by Arne Stevenson at the moment. Cliff and Erin talked to us about feeling out the social climate in the Art World. They also told us how important it can be to have a greater vision motivating you when you come up against hard times. They were really cool people.Next we met Patricia Hamilton. On Mondays Mary, the Director of the Williamson Gallery, discusses art articles with all of us interns. Sometimes we pick the articles, and sometimes she does. This week we actually discussed an article about Patricia Hamilton. She’s had a remarkable career. She worked at the Whitney Museum right after college, and then decided to open up her own gallery in New York. She was only twenty-five years old at the time! Patricia is definitely one of the most entertaining and successful people I’ve ever met. I was too shy to ask her all of the questions I wanted to, but it was great just hearing her talk about her life. Seriously! She’s fascinating.Mary and Patricia took us to see some galleries. One of them was Taylor De Cordoba. Heather Taylor, a Scripps alumna who graduated in ’02, co-owns the gallery. She talked to us about the importance of internships. They’re great opportunities to learn and network and get valuable work experience. Talking to Heather was great because she’s a recent graduate, but she’s also had a lot of success. So many of the job options I have been considering require more education and/or experience than I have right now. I’ve been stressing out about the fact that I may have to end up at a dead end job after I finish my Getty internship this summer just so that I can earn enough money to live on. Seeing Heather manage her own gallery was proof that it is possible to make a living doing something that I will actually enjoy at a young age. It’s just a matter of networking and being motivated.We also went to lunch with Mary’s son and daughter Matt and Amanda MacNaughton. They’ve started their own public relations business. You can check it out here. They’re yet another example of young entrepreneurs who have found success doing something they really enjoy. And they were fun to talk to as well. They had great energy. You could tell just by listening to them talk that they really loved their work.That was true of everyone we met today. Even though all of these people have found success doing different things, they all seemed to have a common trait: Patricia calls it chutzpa. That’s a Yiddish word that basically means having the guts to do something when others might see it as too bold or unnecessarily daring. I’m working on finding my own chutzpa. It’s tough, though. I clam up around new people pretty easily, and I’ve never been much of a risk taker.Okay, time to sign out. This has been fun! It’s therapeutic to write without worrying too much about structure or grammatical errors. I’ll write again soon.

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