Beholding Art & Life: Jared Ledesma (Episode 20)
Charlotte Donlon talks to Jared Ledesma about his work, beholding art, belonging, and place. They discuss his recent show Grace Hartigan and the Poets, as well as some of the people and art that has influenced him throughout his entire life and more recently.
Learn more about Jared Ledesma’s work at the North Carolina Museum of Art here.
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Why It Matters: Jared Ledesma is a curator, runner, and storyteller whose work at the North Carolina Museum of Art bridges the personal and collective, the emotional and historical, and voices that are sometimes overlooked. His curatorial vision is shaped by a vibrant Latino heritage, a love for storytelling passed down by family, and a commitment to inclusion—particularly of LGBTQ+ and women artists. Through layered exhibitions and accessible research, Jared invites us to encounter art as living memory—a way to behold landscapes of belonging, honor complex histories, and trace connections between artist, audience, and place. By weaving together family rituals, moments of artistic awe, and the quiet encouragement of loved ones, his practice becomes a model for seeing and caring more deeply, both in the museum and in life
Embrace the nuanced, interconnected nature of your own creative and curatorial interests. Notice how histories, backgrounds, and experiences shape who you are becoming. Allow yourself to be moved by art and story—especially when it asks you to hold loss, resilience, and transformation side by side.
>>> Caring for art and history is a collective act—curators, conservators, artists, and audiences all contribute to preserving and reimagining what museums mean for communities.
>>> The memories and encouragement of loved ones—like family rituals, storytelling, and everyday support—nourish creative lives far beyond the gallery walls, connecting personal backgrounds to larger cultural stories.
>>> Allowing yourself to be emotionally moved by art—in moments of joy, awe, or even tears—affirms the power of creativity to help us make sense of change, resilience, and the landscapes of belonging.
After Listening to This Episode, You’ll Walk Away With:
Appreciation for the everyday beauty found in ritual and observation—like noticing light during early morning runs or in works of art—can deepen your sense of presence, reflection, and joy.
Reassurance that your cultural background, family history, or even lack of early exposure to art enrich your perspective and are powerful sources of inspiration in creative and professional journeys.
Motivation to see the act of caring for art—whether through research, collaboration, or simply being moved by a painting—as a communal experience that connects you to people, past and present, across time and space.
Please check out this fourth mini-season and subscribe on your favorite platform. I’d also appreciate it if you could take a minute to rate the podcast and leave a comment to help others find it. Thanks so much for your support!
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Creative Prompts for Listeners:
1. Think of a piece of art in any medium that altered your awareness of memory, belonging, or place. What emotions or stories live within it for you, and how do they help you see the world in new ways?
2. Reflect on a time when you encountered an artwork that was connected to your own personal or cultural history. What emotions or memories surfaced for you, and how did the experience shape your understanding of place and belonging?
3. Consider someone in your life-- a family member, mentor, or friend-- who supported your creative interests or encouraged you to pursue a path outside the familiar, as Jared's mother and aunt did for him. Write about how their encouragement influenced your journey and how you might pass that encouragement along to others?
Jared Ledesma, Curator of 20th-Century and Contemporary Art, Image courtesy of Daniel White
Show Notes + Links: (MORE LINKS & RESOURCES COMING SOON!)
October 2025 Update from Jared: “Starting in early November, I will be making some changes to two of the NCMA’s 20th-century collection galleries. We’ll be bringing a few works out of storage, including our remarkable Jean Hélion and Maurice Vlaminck, and borrowing select works, such as a gorgeous abstract painting by Cuban American artist Carmen Herrera, to create a broader presentation.”
Grace Hartigan: The Gift of Attention
Exhibition in Portland, Maine: Grace Hartigan: The Gift of Attention
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Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo
Episode Transcript:
Charlotte: [00:00:00] Welcome to all of this and more. I'm Charlotte Donlon, and I'm so glad to have Jared Ledesma here with me today for a conversation on beholding and art and some art that I got to see this summer. Jared, before we dive in to our conversation, I'd love for you to share a bit about yourself professionally, personally, anything that you'd like to share.
Jared: Sure. I am a curator at the North Carolina Museum of Art. I'm curator of 20th Century and Contemporary Art here. I've been here for about three years now and I've been all over. I've kind of, well, I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area in the East Bay, if you know the Bay Area at all. just about 30 minutes south of Oakland and made my way across the country as far as my career. I started at [00:01:00] the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, then went on to Des Moines, Iowa to work at the Des Moines Arts Center, and then in Akron, Ohio, and now here in Raleigh. So it's, it's been an adventure. I think what's surprising to some folks is my background of being Latino and especially Mexican and Puerto Rican and Spanish, And then often I get asked if I speak Spanish and, and I don't. And because I am a third generation. and also, I was primarily raised by my mom, who was raised in a family where were supposed to assimilate where English was the language in the household and outside of the house.
And although my dad's side, my abuela, she spoke Spanish, and to me, and so sometimes, you know, I hear it, I [00:02:00] can understand, and she always had novellas on in the background all the time. And so but I do like sharing that aspect of, of my background and
Charlotte: That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that with us. That aspect of your background and your professional sort of journey that brought you to North Carolina, to Raleigh. So now I'm interested in how your mom influenced your interest in art. And, and then I guess a question I have for you is, do you make any art beyond like the, the work you curate and your work as a curator?
Jared: I love talking about my mom. You know, she is a, she's a very strong woman and I didn't grow up with art around me. We didn't have an art collection. I wasn't really taken to museums as a child. My family's background is working class working in [00:03:00] canning factories and in. Strawberry fields and so on. And my mom was very, she was very encouraging about following my dreams and what I wanted to do in life. And after a failed attempt at going to community college, once I went back to school again and decided I wanted to be a curator, and, she didn't really have an, an idea or a concept of what that was. And sometimes I, I still don't think my family really knows what I do, or they don't really understand the idea of what a curator is, which is fine. I get it. I lived primarily at home throughout college and grad school to save money. And I would come home and just tell her about reading Foucault or Derrida and you know, all this theory and art history and methodologies and, and she would just listen and be like, wow, this is a lot. And [00:04:00] always incredibly supportive for every job interview and every rejection and every job I got.
And, just always there for me, which is a pretty amazing. I also had an aunt, Auntie Carol, who was an artist was an amazing person. She was also a counselor at Cal State East Bay in, in the Bay Area. She worked for a program that helped first generation Latino students find employment after college. But like I said, she was also an artist. She did watercolor. And she had a, a small library of art books in her home and there are a lot of memories of me sitting in that corner of the house going through her art books and especially Georgia O'Keefe. So that was very influential as well.
Charlotte: Okay. Very cool. So your mom wasn't super into visual art, but she listened to novellas.
Jared: The person [00:05:00] listening or watching novellas, that was my grandmother, my abuela. But my mom, she is a voracious reader. And now that she's retired, she'll go to the library and get maybe like five or six books. She reads about one book a week, maybe more, and she just, yeah, I mean, constant reading and, and she does like storytelling.
Especially loves books with more dialogue than narration or prose and she just, yeah, she loves the storytelling aspect. She'll often come to me and be like, oh, you know, I read about this museum, or this person is living in Paris and they're going to these museums, so that's always fun.
Charlotte: Thank you so much for indulging my interest in how parents and caregivers give art to their, to children and and how we give it to each other. My kids are 22 and 20, so I'm [00:06:00] definitely on the receiving end of what captures their attention often. So probably more so now it's, it's flowing that way instead of the other way.
I would love for you to describe a typical day or week
Jared: there's never really a typical day in my job which makes it fun. So I have a distinct purview here at the museum. There are 10 curators here. We all have different specialties and purviews and so mine is artwork created from 1900 to today. And you know, we have here at the museum both a collection of objects and then we also. or present temporary exhibitions. So a lot of my job is planning exhibitions for the future and also caring for the collection. You know, the word curate rooted in this idea of to care for. So in [00:07:00] terms of caring for the collection, that could be anything from conducting research on objects. It could mean looking for, if an object needs a new frame, for an example, part of my job would be to, if the work was made in 1950 look for archival images of work by that artist done in 1950 to see what the frames are. That's a form of caring for the object. Conducting research on the artists themselves. A lot of what you read on the walls and museums, especially in the galleries, that's typically written by curators with the help of interpretation teams and education teams. And, there's also like grunt work. A lot of emails unfortunately, you know it, it sometimes it's even a half day of or full day of emailing people but , I do love my job. I also get to travel. We're [00:08:00] very fortunate here at the NCMA where the curators are able to, to travel and a lot of my travel consists of looking at art, going to museums to see exhibitions, going to conduct research on artists and objects in the collection. Yeah, it's, again, there's no day is alike which makes the job a lot of fun.
Charlotte: Well, thanks for giving us a peek into what some of the the activities and responsibilities are for your job. I have one question for you. Are, as the curator and caregiver, do you make decisions about art conservation, like when a piece needs to be. Repaired or conserved in some way.
Jared: Yes and no. We have a team of very talented conservators here at the NCMA. We have a conservation department that reviews a lot of the objects in the collection, especially if we're [00:09:00] acquiring an object or adding an object to the collection. Their
Charlotte: job
Jared: is to review it before it's acquired by us. but it's always in consultation with the curators. So they all have their area of expertise. For example, we have a paintings conservator. We were just looking at a painting a couple weeks ago. And, you know, she'll give her opinion as to what she recommends to do or to have done to the painting, and then I typically would sign off on it because the object is essentially within the collection that's under my purview. So it's a, it's teamwork the process.
Charlotte: So I'm learning a little bit about art conservation thanks to the Georgia Museum of Art that's doing sort of a public conservation project of one of Joan Mitchell's paintings. So I've been learning about that and I know there are art [00:10:00] conservators if I'm saying that right.
But I, yeah, I was interested in the input that the curators get to give in those decisions and that sort of thing. Okay. So thank you again for helping me understand a little bit more about your work and you as a person too, and like the women who raised you.
Jared: Yes.
Charlotte: So my, so one question I love to ask guests on this podcast and in other conversations I have with people is how does engaging with various forms of others' art?
So music, film, tv, visual art, help you belong to yourself and the world?
Jared: Yeah, it's a form of expression that helps me kind of understand emotion and ways of seeing in different ways that I hadn't before. Trying to evoke certain [00:11:00] viewpoints or ways of feeling through visual art or music to me, is incredibly admirable. I think oftentimes when I'm watching a film or looking at art, I'll say, you know, either to someone I'm watching it with or just to myself, how do they do that? How do they come up with the idea to express themselves in this shape or form, or how did they see that in a landscape? And it just really helps me see the world in certain ways, or see moments or relish moments or time in certain ways that I don't think I would have before.
Charlotte: I love that how it, it sort of expands your what are you expanding? I don't wanna speak for you. It.
Jared: I would say maybe, perhaps my senses
Charlotte: Yeah.
Jared: yeah.
Charlotte: awareness. Maybe awareness is what I was thinking. Like expanding your awareness of things around you and things within [00:12:00] you maybe.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Charlotte: I do a lot of writing and work on loneliness and belonging, and I don't think there's any like one definition of loneliness or belonging. And I think that, you know, if we have a personal definition or something that makes sense to us, it could change next. Hour or next week based on our circumstances or season of life. So it's sort of a nuanced, always changing, nebulous sort of thing. And I think that's one reason I like to talk about it because we all can have just opinions and thoughts on it that change all the time.
I'll never run out of anything to say about it. So thank you. Is there some art that has nourished you over the past few months from any medium genre,
Jared: Yeah, so I was thinking about this and it just so happens that there's an exhibition. I was in DC. a few weeks ago [00:13:00] and was able to see an exhibition I'd I had been wanting to see. It's actually called Pictures of Belonging, which is really funny. It's, it's focusing on three artists, three Japanese American artists and I don't really remember the last time I've actually cried in an exhibition. It's been a while. Like it just brought me to tears, certain moments of the show, and it was incredibly moving and focusing on their careers. I'm trying to remember, I think three sections. starting with all three of them were raised in California. And this was kind of early to mid 20th century and one of them, actually, I think two of them were in the Bay Area and one of them lived in Hayward. which was crazy because a lot of my family is from Hayward and I actually lived in Hayward as a child for a little bit.
Hayward and Union City, where I primarily. Grew up is, [00:14:00] is formed from many immigrant communities. It's incredibly diverse. And and one of the artists, and I'm forgetting which one, but they actually painted a few landscapes of Hayward and they were in the show, and this is at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. To see that was amazing.
To see a depiction of Hayward, California. It was incredible. But they were all. Three, just very talented artists. So that was the first section, like California, and then it went into world War ii and the internment of, of Japanese citizens and their experience. Two of them were interned. One of them escaped internment and fled to New Mexico and about the art that they created during World War ii and two of them in the art that they created while interned and that was just in incredibly moving. And those pictures, those paintings were just. I think I was just gutted looking at them and incredibly [00:15:00] moved. And then the third section focused on what happened afterwards. So I think one of them ended up going back to the Bay area. One of them stayed in New Mexico, but passed away I think shortly after World War II and the third moved to New York City and kind of blossomed to working more in abstraction. And but it was just an incredible exhibition an amazing feat in storytelling and how, I think a historical exhibition should look and feel. I mean, there was a ton of research involved, but it was presented in a very accessible way.
And, you know, the art itself was amazing. so that definitely made a huge impact on me.
Charlotte: Wow, it sounds very powerful. Thanks so much for describing that. And I mean, especially right now in this like moment politically and culturally. One reason I love art and one reason I love the intersection of art and history and place and [00:16:00] time.
I look forward to researching it a bit online and maybe tracking down a catalog
I want to hear a bit about how you see like the act of seeing and how your work as a curator has formed you to see how you see.
Jared: I think it really starts with my training in art history. I went to San Francisco State and, I was fortunate to take classes with Whitney Chadwick who is an art historian, renowned for work in women in surrealism. And she definitely had a feminist art historical point of view that made a huge impact on me. She also wrote book called Women, Art, and Society. Basically, this tome of women artists. And I think it's been. I don't know how many editions.
I think it's in its sixth edition. It's crazy, but it's basically like the [00:17:00] bible for women artists in art history. And so she definitely made an influence on how I look at art history and my work even today. And, it was San Francisco State, which was awesome.
And there were queer art history classes. This was in the early oughts and I learned about Felix Gonzalez Torres who was a Latino artist making conceptual and minimal arts, and in the late eighties and nineties influenced by the Aids epidemic and the loss of his partner Ross. And. I immediately wanted to focus on him and his work because I just saw myself so much in his work and that was moving.
And you know, I, I had never seen anything like it. And at that point I had been going to some museums and it's never really felt a belonging in, in such a way as I did when I saw his [00:18:00] work. It was just, it's incredibly romantic. It's highly theoretical, but just so simply beautiful. It just really struck a chord.
And, so I think that, early on definitely helped shape how I see museums and how I see my work in museums and how, I mean, from that point on, I just made it an effort to work with queer LGBTQ artists and work with women artists. And even around 2010. just really set me on my path and started the nascent beginnings of a curatorial vision that drives me today.
Charlotte: Thank you. It, it makes me want to go look at everyone's art and read all the books that you mentioned, so I'm sure I, I will be dipping into some of the things you mentioned. I tracked you down after I saw the Grace Hartigan exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Can you tell us [00:19:00] a bit about how that came to be and your interest in her as an artist?
Jared: I was introduced to Grace Hartigan in 2015 or 2016. I was working at SFMOMA and heard about a show at the Denver Art Museum. It was getting a lot of press, a lot of really good attention. It was called Women and Abstract Expressionism, and
I was a curatorial assistant. it wasn't often for a curatorial assistant to travel to use like museum funds to travel. But I remember I went to my boss at the time and I was like, I really wanna see this show. This show sounds really important and I would love to go. And, and she loved the fact that I wanted to go and I was able to go see this show and, it just blew my mind how many artists in that show that I was not familiar with and the work was amazing. I think what also helped me go was that the museum [00:20:00] lent a painting to that show, so I was able to go and kind of check on our painting and see how it was installed. But yeah, it was just an amazing exhibition. I mean, of course familiar artists like Frankenthaler or Joan Mitchell, but also lesser known Perle Fine, Mary Abbott, Mercedes Matter, and Grace Hartigan I'd never seen her work before and was just blown away by how dynamic her pictures are and how strong and bold they were for the time. Ever since then, like I, I was familiar with her. And so fast forward when I was preparing for my interview here for the job here at the NCMA, I was going through the collection online and saw that the NCMA has a Grace Hartigan painting, and was really excited and. I showed my husband John on our website on the collections page, it gives a little description of each object, [00:21:00] like the title, the date, and then it gives the credit line, which informs you how the work of art entered the collection. Either we purchased it or it was a gift from someone. And in the credit line for the Grace Hartigan notes that it was a gift from James Merrill. I had no idea who James Merrill was. my husband does, and he was like, that's funny. It was a gift from Merrill. And I was like, oh, who's James Merrill?
And, and he told me he was a poet. Mid to late 20th century poet. So I thought that was interesting and kind of led me down a rabbit hole and, and finding Hartigan's connections to poets of the mid 20th century. And, you know, for my interview a few days later, I mentioned this to our chief curator, Linda, because I think one of her questions was, has anything resonated with you in the collection?
And I mentioned the Grace Hartigan, [00:22:00] this idea of poets, and she was like. I love that. And after I was hired, I pitched an idea for an exhibition focusing on Grace Hartigan and the poets and how they influenced her. And, and that was it. I just started working on it. It was approved, and it was just astounding to see how influential they were on her work and, and in different ways. You know, there has been, Publications and a few exhibitions focusing on New York painters of the mid 20th century working with poets and how they influenced each other in many ways. But for me, you know, going back to my training. You know, Hartigan was never at the fore and it was typically like Frank O'Hara and his influence or his muses or how the painters saw the poets as muses or their, their words or their prose and, and so their verse. And so I wanted [00:23:00] to highlight Hartigan and especially because she, out of what we call what's been called the Ninth Street women, hasn't really received her due. I just felt like everything I was seeing made by her in the 1950s was just knockout you know? And so I, yeah, so there was that aspect of the show that was really exciting. And also a lot of these poets were queer. Many were gay. Daisy Alden, one of the poets, she was lesbian and I had uncovered a letter written from Hartigan to Terrence Diggory, who is a professor emeritus at Skidmore, who did a lot of work on Hartigan, where Hartigan confesses to Terrance that you know, that the poets were gay, really influenced her and liberated her. And her, her life and, and her painting her interest in painting and [00:24:00] taking risks. And, that to me was really fascinating and, and made me want to highlight the poets, especially the queer ones in, in the story. So that's, that's how the exhibition kind of formed. I just kept finding all this really fascinating material, like how some of the poets actually bought paintings by Hartigan and they wrote their collections. Some wrote art criticism. There's a great story about how one painting entered MoMA's collection and Frank O'Hara. Who he was working the admissions desk at the time to see the Matisse show upstairs for free whenever he wanted.
But you know, he calls Grace immediately and says, I'm literally seeing your painting kind of enter MoMA and, you know, so it was an interesting ways of patronage that was happening. James Merrill, of course the son of. Charles Merrill, who co-founded the firm Merrill Lynch. James Merrill, was incredibly wealthy and was [00:25:00] very philanthropic with his money, and ended up providing funds for many institutions to buy Hartigan paintings or he gifted them. So it was just all really fascinating to me and how the poets and, and of course you know, their verse and I think that, of all of them, definitely Frank O'Hara and his unconventional poetry was influential for Hartigan for her kind of moving in between abstraction and figuration and really never settling in a particular camp or style because, o'Hare himself, you know, wavered in between poetic styles intentionally smuggling images into his work just like she smuggled images into her paintings. And then we have Barbara Guest where her poetry was incredibly abstract at times. And you know, also very emotional evoked language, kind of evoking feeling.
And we [00:26:00] see Hartigan responding to Guest's poetry in similar ways too. So I could go on, but it just was just amazing show to work on. And, you know, as a curator, we, when we organize exhibitions, we try, there's there's an attempt to see things show. Beforehand, just in case, you know, they're, they, they could be a dud. So you don't want a dud at the show, so you try to go see things. If you have questions or if, you know, if it's a little sketch. So there were just some works I couldn't see, I couldn't get to that are in the exhibition. And there were some moments where, you know, during installation, our team would be opening the crate and I'd just be like holding my breath like, I hope it's a good one, you know, and it looked good. But everything blew us away, like everything in the show. And like I said, she was just hammering them out in the fifties and sixties. [00:27:00] And that was another thing too, that I wanted to come out the show is that, you know, I think this is changing now, maybe in the past few years. But there was this trend of saying these women artists in the mid 20th century were overlooked even during their time, not Hartigan, you know, she was successful like very early on. I mean moMA acquired her work in 1953, and that was the first painting she had ever sold, and it was to MoMA. And then from then on it was just done.
Like she sold everything in the 1950s. She said she couldn't even, she wasn't making them fast enough. And so that was also something I, I wanted to hammer on too, that she was successful really from the start.
Charlotte: Yeah, she was, and it's, I mean, the exhibition was stunning and, I was able to go to North Carolina over a weekend to see it. I was like, oh my God, this is here. I don't know how I missed it. I mean. I mean, it's hard to keep track of what every museum within driving distance has going on, and my like interest in [00:28:00] abstract expressionism is sort of picked up earlier this year because my local museum brought one of Joan Mitchell's pieces out of storage and onto the wall for the first time in a long time, which started one of my rabbit trails, which led me to Ninth Street Women and to the whole movement and to the poets. And, and I just, it is like, oh, all these pieces started coming together with Frank O'Hara and his work and writing the lunch poems and I was like, oh. So it's just fun seeing how the dots connect and then hearing about their lives and their stories and how that intersection of, poetry and art. And I love how in the exhibition there's a conversation happening between Hartigan and Guest in that one painting where, Guest was trying to convince Hartigan that it was finished and she disagreed with her, but then she was like, okay, yes, it's finished and you can have it. Like I love that story, that detail, and getting to [00:29:00] see that object and I don't know, it's just a very cool way that the past, present, and future are able to mingle together.
I think that's one thing art does for us. So it's so interesting to hear about how it came to be in your personal, like story of it and how it will be tied to your work in North Carolina for your whole life, you know? And shout out to your boss who found funding for you to go see that exhibition in Denver.
Denver. Is that right?
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Charlotte: Yeah. So that's great. I love all of that that you shared. So. Which piece is in the permanent collection at
Jared: So
Charlotte: in North Carolina?
Jared: Interior with
Charlotte: The interior.
Jared: Doll, it's from 1955 and it features depicts paper mache doll that Hartigan bought while living in Mexico briefly in 1949. And then a, [00:30:00] Kind of the face of a classical bust that she would have in her studio that she would use to hang her hats on.
Charlotte: Okay. I remember that one. I liked that one. I, and I love how, so I'm not an art expert. I just look at it and like it, you know, that's kind of how I am with everything I'm interested in. I mean, I'm a writer. I know more about that. I have an MFA in creative writing, so that's the closest I get to being knowledgeable of anything.
But like getting to see the wedding, the bride one called Grant. Oh my God. Like getting to see her work was such a like this luxurious feast of all of it together. You know, I think that's what I love about these sort of special exhibitions that are focused on one artist or one theme.
It was just sort of blew me away and I was so glad I got to go two whole days, although I wish I lived in North Carolina and could go every day, the whole time it was up. [00:31:00] So now that it's down, it's down now, right?
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Charlotte: Yeah. Like a couple, like in the last week or so. What happens afterwards?
Like, do you miss, will you miss it? Will you miss your art friends?
Jared: Yeah. So well I'm very thankful we were able to publish a catalog. So, you know, the catalog continues the story. And also the show will continue, it's traveling to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. It'll open there in October, and then it'll go on to the Sheldon Museum of Art, which is in Lincoln, Nebraska. So, it's still going and it'll, it'll look different
Charlotte: at
Jared: both venues which is exciting and especially at the Sheldon. So it's not done entirely, but I will say. I looked down at the gallery yesterday. Our offices are on the third floor of the east building and there's a area where we could look down into where Hartigan was and, and [00:32:00] everything was gone and it was, it was sad. It was just really amazing having all of those pictures and like you said, in one place and being able to go downstairs and see them was pretty incredible.
Charlotte: Yeah. Will you get to visit the, the shows at the other locations when they're installed?
Jared: This is typically what happens when a museum takes a traveling show or the, the curator at the institution that's receiving the show, they'll lay out the show according to like their space. And then kind of run that layout by the the original curator who organized the exhibition.
And so I was able to see how it's going to look in Portland, and it's, it's going to look glorious. They have a great space and and I'll go out for the opening and I'll give a lecture as well to their members and I'm excited.
Charlotte: So we have a few minutes left and I've, I'd love to [00:33:00] hear how the season of summer, like what you see during the summer and what you behold. Are there any rituals or any things that like remind you of summer?
Or anything new from this summer that will remind you of summer moving forward? Just any thoughts you have on that.
Jared: Yeah. You know, I am a runner and, as you know, I grew up in the Bay Area where like the weather is just perfect for running any time of day really. And then I moved to Iowa where in the winter it's negative five, and in the summers it's 90 something and, and actually humid. Some folks are surprised, but it does get humid in Iowa.
And that definitely changed my running habits. But, you know, in the summers, I definitely appreciate, especially now living in a climate where it gets very warm in the summer and it gets cold here in, in Raleigh, it gets, you know, about the twenties. So in the summer I really appreciate because it [00:34:00] gets too warm in the evenings or during the day.
I like getting up early and going running, and I really appreciate the light that there's sunlight, you know, at 5 45 or 6:00 AM. I really cherish those moments. I think it's really beautiful and, how quiet and still the world is. And and I just noticed it was yesterday. I got up to go running and it was dark and it was sad. It was like, oh no, you know, the time's already changing and it season's changing and, So that sucks. But I also love, you know, the long nights in the summer.
Charlotte: I love how you you notice the light in the dark, you know that's very artistic of you,
Jared: right.
Charlotte: In my research and learning about, like Joan Mitchell for example, and is probably who I've studied the most.
And i've just been paying more attention to light in, in [00:35:00] paintings and how artists are able to make light happen in their paintings. Even if I don't know the right words to describe it, I can at least go, oh, that seems like light right there.
And I'll get as close as I can without getting in trouble and see like what. You know, marks and gestures, like made the thing, and it's, it, I think hearing her words it just made me pay more attention. It's so fascinating. And so I think even by the time I was in North Carolina and like looking for the light in Hartigan's work and, and the shadows and the darkness
I I don't wanna keep you too long. I really appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation. I think hearing more about your story was great well it was so good to hear some of, like your story of Grace.
Was just lovely. So thank you for sharing it, and thank you for being willing to have this conversation with a stranger who contacted you out of the blue, one of those emails you had to respond to one afternoon.
Of
Jared: [00:36:00] course. It's been my pleasure.
Charlotte: Okay, well I hope you have a good day, good rest of the week, and I look forward to seeing how the Grace Hartigan show like travels. And anyone who's listening, I'll put information about the show and the two other locations it'll be at on the show notes and more of Jared's mentions and recommendations will be listed as well.
But thanks so much for joining me.
Jared: It's been fun.