Go West

Once upon a time, I lived in San Francisco. Then, a decade ago, I piled all my belongings in a dusty old Saab and drove across the country from San Francisco to New Jersey on two-lane highways. I spent the next ten years doing a PhD at Princeton and a postdoc at Brown, learning how to write and play and think about music, expanding my work into visual art contexts and then into the city at large, writing about the ways that play and sound and public art and creativity and public space collide, and teaching hundreds of college students how to harness their creativity into music, video, and art projects. I worked with some incredible people and saw a lot of creative projects through. It’s been a good ten years.

Last February, after finishing the Providence Postcard Project, I realized I wanted to do something new, and I headed off to Asia with my backpack to figure it out. When I wasn’t doing the backstroke, taking photographs of ruins, speaking Khmer badly, or reading about the history of Cambodia, I was usually hunched over a notebook with some color pencils, sketching pictures and scribbling ideas about what my next step might be.

Little did I know, it was about to find me. (Isn’t it hilarious and amazing, btw, how sometimes the turning points of our lives often seem to come out of nowhere? I’m endlessly grateful for that; it makes life so much more interesting not to be in charge.)

When I got back to the west coast, I stayed with an old, old friend who told me about his new and exciting venture – starting a nonprofit working with BART and MUNI to bring public arts projects to Bay Area transit stations. He had no idea I’d spent three years writing about “the ways that sound can be used in public art to intensify the public’s engagement with the spaces surrounding them as well as their own creativity; to create a sense of connection between their outer and inner worlds.” (That’s a direct quote from my abstract. It’s a perfect fit.) So with little more than a plane ticket and a few dashes of serendipity, I’ve decided to move to San Francisco to help launch SubART, an organization that will bring exciting and engaging public arts projects to BART and MUNI stations throughout the Bay Area.

It’s nice to be back in San Francisco. It’s both happy homecoming (I lived here for ten years and have wonderful friends here) and bittersweet departure (from family and friends and the university). For the first time in a decade, I’m not preparing a class to teach this fall. I will miss it, especially my one on one work with students, and I’m sure I’ll continue teaching in some capacity in the future. But for now, it feels really good to be brainstorming, designing, and launching something so big and new that will have such a large impact and will let me continue my research about play, creativity, and place.

And I like that the Bay Area has such a utopian vibe. The business and art worlds seem to coexist more easily here. It’s easy to be cynical, but in the end there are still a lot of people here working hard to try to build new things that make the world better. I’m happy to be part of that for a while.

Love, Betsey