March 19, 2025
Collaborations take on many forms and beginnings. Ours took root at the 2019 Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) conference in Minneapolis, where a number of Jesuit university gallery and museum directors gathered together and exchanged contact information. Following that meeting, and in response to the pandemic, Carey Weber at Fairfield University Art Museum invited us to continue the conversation in quarterly meetings on Zoom. In these informal gatherings, we described our upcoming projects, talked about which campuses were open and closed, and compared our programmatic pivots. From art handling to leading tours, care is an essential aspect of all museum and gallery work. In this space, we were creating community and caring for each other. These meetings have continued post-pandemic as a time to welcome new colleagues and share challenges, best practices, and projects. Within this context, two California galleries—Loyola Marymount University (LMU) and the University of San Francisco (USF)—began a conversation, exploring how their galleries could support and share in each other’s work.
At the time, director and curator Karen Rapp at LMU’s Laband Art Gallery was planning a survey exhibition of Sonia Romero (b. 1980, Los Angeles, CA). USF’s Thacher Gallery director Glori Simmons was leading a guest-curated retrospective of Yolanda López (1942-2021). The first exhibition featured a prolific studio and public works artist in LA and the second a Bay Area leader in the Chicana arts movement reaching back to the 1970s. Could these two exhibitions work as an exchange between institutions? What could that look like?
With this collaboration in mind, we began the development of each exhibition. The processes were quite different. Yolanda M. López: Women’s Work is Never Done was created with two guest co-curators, a USF exhibition design class, and with the help of a USF intern archivist. Sonia Romero: Taken Root was the product of sole curator and director, Karen Rapp. Once the exhibitions were installed, Rapp and Simmons visited each other’s galleries and were excited to see the ways in which the two exhibitions were complements of the other with the potential to resonate with students on both campuses. As it turned out, the López exhibition moved on to a museum in Riverside so the prospect of bringing it to Los Angeles was dropped, but Sonia Romero: Taken Root stayed on course to travel from LMU’s hilltop campus to USF’s.
In teaching galleries with few staff members like Laband and Thacher, the director wears many hats. Curating multiple shows a year can be daunting. The curation of survey exhibitions, especially, involves research into the era and place of the artist; the study of processes, materials, and art practices; the time-consuming search for artworks no longer in the hands of the artist; the many-phased process of writing about the artwork for the walls, educational materials, and publicity; the creative work of design and layout; the logistical and physical labor of installation; and the development of programming. At the heart of all of this is the care of the collection, the artist, and the audience. It’s worth noting that both cura personalis and curator are derived from the same Latin verb, curare. For Rapp, this meant bringing together Romero’s studio and public art practices from twenty plus years of work.
Having previously shown Romero’s work early on in the artist’s career, it was Rapp’s goal to focus attention on Sonia’s artistic evolution and her many-layered artmaking practice to demonstrate her growth and the ways in which her studio practice has informed and shaped her public art practice. The result of these labors, Sonia Romero: Taken Root, includes more than 50 pieces spanning from the late 1990s to the present that celebrate the artist’s signature visual language that has always and already expanded the possibilities of the mediums of printmaking, painting, and paper cutting. The exhibition considers how Romero, known for her methodical, and sometimes playful, art-making processes, blurs distinctions between the mediums of painting and printmaking, creating varied and complex artworks that belie a mere surface reading. In addition, the exhibition features five of Romero’s public works located throughout greater Los Angeles.
As Jesuit universities, both LMU and USF educate students to participate and contribute to the community; Romero’s work and the exhibition exemplify this value. Bringing the studio and public art spheres together in a gallery setting establishes that both forms of artmaking fall into the realm of fine arts and are equally important elements of Romero’s practice. To celebrate the collaboration and opening, USF hosted both the artist and curator in March, developing programs bringing Romero into conversation with two “Artist as Citizen” classes to discuss community involvement in public art projects. Rapp presented a public program that helped audiences better understand her many roles as curator.
At the heart of this collaboration, care and recognition of each other’s expertise and time became a priority for both of us. For this reason, it’s been a mutually beneficial collaboration. While Thacher Gallery and the USF community benefit from Rapp’s expertise and exposure to Romero’s art practice, the artist and Laband Art Gallery gain a new platform and audiences. Through the process, we have had an opportunity to experience the unique ways each peer institution accomplishes their work and the possibilities when we bring together our strengths and highlight each other’s curatorial practice. For two directors in smaller galleries, this exchange has been a way to strengthen professional relationships and create a new collegiate community, built on the foundation of care.
Sonia Romero: Taken Root is on view at Thacher Gallery at the University of San Francisco from March 3 to April 15, 2025.
–Karen Rapp, Director & Curator, Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University and Glori Simmons, Director, Thacher Gallery, University of San Francisco
Picture #1: Rapp presents Romero’s public works; #2: Romero presents to a design class; and #3-4: Carousel, provided by Glori Simmons. Pictures #5-15: Installation view of Sonia Romero: Taken Root at Thacher Gallery, provided by Glori Simmons. Pictures #16-27: Installation view of Sonia Romero: Taken Root at Laband Gallery, fall 2023, provided by Karen Rapp.
