This is Turning Points, CULTURED’s column dedicated to big life choices, bucket-list moments, career shifts, and forks in the road. This week, author Patrick Bringley talks about how working as a guard at the Met changed the way he sees the world. 

After college, writer Patrick Bringley landed what a lot of people would consider a pretty plum job: a full-time position at the New Yorker. But his life vision changed suddenly when his brother was diagnosed with cancer. After his sibling passed away, Bringley took a job as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In his recently published memoir, All the Beauty in the World, Bringley describes the role as “the most straightforward job I could think of in the most beautiful place I knew.” He tells CULTURED about making the decision to step back well before the Great Resignation, how he found a book agent, and how he’s kept his commitment to himself even after leaving the Met. 

“In some ways, my gig at the New Yorker was really good. I felt proud to be at a prestigious magazine. I imagined myself climbing up the ranks. There can be something very alluring—but also very deceiving—about feeling like you're somebody just because you have a fancy business card. But the reality is that I was just 22 years old when I got that job. I didn't have all that much to write about because I hadn't thought too many original thoughts. 

Then my brother got sick. And I lost interest in that world and felt the real rubber-meets-the-road aspects of reality. When he died, I didn't relish the idea of going back to an office job. I wanted to do something straightforward, where I was able to think about things that might feel a little more essential. 

Art is not really my background, but I thought, I could get a job where I just keep my hands empty and my head up and exist inside this beautiful world. So why don't I try that?

When I went there [in 2008], I very much was expecting to enjoy the aspect of it that is very quiet and very watchful. You put on this suit, you're camouflaged from the world, and you stand in the corner and watch people flow by. 

I don't think that I had fully imagined the extent to which the museum is a little world and that there are over 500 security guards, and within that there is this fascinating culture—or, really, many different cultures just within the ‘Guard Corps.’

I was just 25 years old when I started at the Met. Many of my colleagues were twice my age. There is no one straight line that leads people to become a guard, so you get a tremendous diversity of people—not only in backgrounds, but also just in terms of the way that people carry themselves, the way they relate to the world around them.

I don't think I anticipated the extent to which I would learn how to be a grown up from all my fellow guards. I really loved the job. Why would I need to do anything else? I get to come here and think my thoughts and nobody's pushing me around.

[Even still,] seven or eight years ago, I got serious about writing this memoir [and left the Met in 2019]. I wrote two-thirds and I shopped that to agents. I knew some people, but actually cold-called a million agents and eventually found one. 

I wrote it for 18 months, and we edited it in six months, and we had to wait a long time for Covid, and then it came out. I want to write another book, but I don't want to be forced to write it quickly. I want to do something to make a little money to just float along. I'm leading a lot of tours. There are people that read my book and want me to tour them around the Met. I'm also doing occasional public tours. I just wrote [and organized a tour of sites related to] Walt Whitman and Herman Melville in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

My life is still the same. After my experience with my brother, I almost had a principled stand against being too ambitious because I didn't want to fall into the trap of trying to scrap my way towards some office position. Because what does it really add up to? What matters is still basically my wife and my kids and my friends."

This is Turning Points, CULTURED’s column dedicated to big life choices, bucket list moments, career shifts, and forks in the road. This week, photographer Ethan James Green explains how he reimagined his career by opening New York Life Gallery last fall. 

Ethan James Green wanted to be a fashion photographer since he was 14. He signed with Ford Models at 17 years old, developing a love for portraiture soon after by apprenticing with late photographer David Armstrong, and reached his goal of becoming the “go-to photographer” to the stars, shooting celebrities for glossies like Vogue and Vanity Fair, all while he was still in his 20s. Then, without any warning, it all nearly came to an end.

He wasn’t getting enough new assignments to stay afloat. Experiencing a drop-off like that “much earlier than ever imagined,” he says, left him feeling blindsided; he had to confront an eye-opening reality that “the party just kind of keeps going, and you can be left behind.” Even though he was able to resurrect his fashion photography business, Green decided that sense of powerlessness was something he “never wanted to feel ever again.” So he made a backup plan—and realized that sometimes dreams are like rules: they’re meant to be broken.  

“The gallery started out as a hobby. I have a space that’s big in Chinatown, and it was split in half as my office and then the space that I've taken pictures in. I have a lot of friends who come in and out of the space. And so the space has always been this spot where people talk about ideas and people create. I wanted to build on that.

I still do a lot of fashion work. That's what first brought me to the city when I was younger—I was modeling. But before fashion photography, I was shooting portraits. That work turned into my first monograph, Young New York, which was published by Aperture in 2019. After that, fashion kept me so busy that I got swallowed up by it, in a way.

Then, in 2021, I almost lost everything because no commercial clients were hiring me. I had a very clear idea of where I was going, but then all of a sudden it felt like a rug was pulled out from underneath me. And you don't know if your career is going to start back up again. Or it's over.

That was quite scary because I almost lost my studio—and everything. Getting hired freelance in general, and I think a lot of people could probably relate to this, it can just stop. It’s like you're waiting to be chosen. You're waiting for someone to call you in.

So once things started happening again, I [said to myself] I just couldn't ever be in that position again. It became an opportunity to reimagine what my career could look like. This was one of the big things that caused the shift towards the gallery.

With the gallery, you get to be the person who makes the shots. And [it] happened very organically; but then once that happened, I was like: Oh, this is it. I feel like I’ve found something else that I'm good at.

I dreamed of being a fashion photographer when I was 14 years old. On the journey to get there, I realized my love of portraiture. I learned that I like to take pictures outside of fashion as well. But I got to where I wanted to be. Fashion can be very overpowering, because you’re working with celebrities, that’s what ends up representing you. Sometimes we only have space to think of people in one way.

But with that lull, I discovered something that I love doing that isn’t photography, and it’s allowed me to allow myself to dream and move forward in a broader way.

When I had decided that I wanted to start showing work in the space, my good friend, Marcus Cuffie, asked to use my scanner because they were starting to document their late father's archive. And their father's name is Steven Cuffie. I saw the work, and it just blew me away.

[For my second show,] I became friends with Drake Carr, who's a painter and illustrator. He had asked me if he could borrow the space to trial life drawings. I was like, 'Why don't we just make a show out of it—a live show? People come to see the work, but they can see you create it at the same time.'

A big thing about the [third] show that’s up right now is all the people that we’re showing are names that are recently forgotten—but half of them are in major museums in New York.

So right now, one show just leads us to the next. Our goal is to do three shows a year. Since I'm coming into it not from the gallery world, the approach is very… it’s a different thing."

This is Turning Points, CULTURED’s column dedicated to big life choices, bucket list moments, career shifts, and forks in the road

In her early 20s, Isolde Brielmaier—now the deputy director of the New Museum in New York—wanted to be the next Christiane Amanpour. But she quickly realized that broadcasting wasn’t a good fit. Not because she wasn’t well-suited to the work—quite the opposite. It “wasn’t well-suited to me,” she says. People can be good at “a multitude of things,” she continues, and “it's the thing that has to be flexible and fluid.” At the time, broadcasting was neither flexible nor fluid, especially for a Black woman interested in social justice. But the art world was. While Brielmaier certainly wasn’t “visually represented in the traditional canon of art history,” she found scholars, curators, and artists who were talking about issues she’d always held close to her heart: “not only their craft and their practice, but also about what the work was doing out in the world.”

“I started off as a dancer at age six. The performing arts are very much about presentation, engagement, and audience. If you think about my work as a curator, those elements come into play.

In college, I was interested in issues of social impact and representation, [especially] in terms of supporting criminal justice reform. So I thought I would try my hand at being a broadcaster. Drawing on my travels and multicultural background—part of my family's Ugandan and part is Austrian—I thought, Wouldn't it be incredible to build on all of those loves and travel around the world and meet people and create platforms with them to share their stories?

I quickly found out that, at the time, broadcast journalism was very white and male-dominated and it was kind of conformist. I found that a bit soul-crushing.

[I worked] for about six months at ABC. And then I worked at a local affiliate in Seattle, which is where I'm from originally. Those two experiences gave me enough information to say, 'This is gonna be a tough place for me.' I was not mirrored anywhere around me.

From broadcast journalism, I went into policy work around criminal justice reform. I worked to develop a new model of caring for people who were in the prison system. But on the side, I was leading tours at the Museum for African Art, and one thing led to another and I ended up being referred to a job at the Guggenheim. The rest was history.

The things that drew me to broadcast journalism and the things that drew me to policy work very much exist within the contemporary art space, at least for the artists that I am drawn to.

I did not build my career on solely feeling like I belonged. If that had been my focus, it would have just been really tough going, because there just weren't a lot of Black people; there weren't a lot of women; and there certainly weren't a lot of Black women in any field. But then there were these moments in the visual arts where I would see people and be like, 'Oh my gosh, what a trailblazer.'

There was still a very traditional path. The notion of an independent curator was not really a thing. [Late curator] Okwui Enwezor told me that I really should get a graduate degree. I remember him telling me, 'That is your insurance as a Black woman.' It wasn't just because of him, but I did get that PhD. And normally, you would get a PhD and then go work in-house somewhere. But I was curating shows here and there, and then I got an offer to teach. I opted for a contractual position because I wanted my time to be my own. I remember people being perplexed, saying, 'You're gonna turn down a tenure track position?' Or, 'Why don't you want to work in a museum?'

But I was just following my own drumbeat and making it work.

Prior to joining the New Museum, I wrote catalogues there, I did programs, I collaborated on a big show they did 20 years ago, I was a trustee. I engaged from so many different perspectives, and I'm able to bring that to bear—in culture and, specifically, with museums.

I didn't feel at the margins [in the art world] because I was hanging out with these brilliant minds that were having these incredible conversations. Some of it is really about just finding your people.”

This is Turning Points, CULTURED’s column dedicated to big life choices, bucket list moments, career shifts, and forks in the road. This week, a museum director explains how she began her path to art as an unsatisfied prosecutor.  

When Asma Naeem was in college, she never thought seriously about pursuing a museum career. It felt wild enough to major in art history, even if she did plan to go to law school after graduation. But in a series of “wildly impractical” decisions, she ultimately left her job as a prosecutor and took a chance on becoming a curator. Earlier this year, she was appointed the director of the Baltimore Museum of Art and is the first South Asian and first person of color to hold that position in the museum’s 109-year history. She hasn’t stopped curating, either. She recently co-organized “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century,” with the Saint Louis Art Museum. 

“I majored in art history along with political science as an undergrad and was planning on going to law school—thinking that I couldn’t go anywhere with art history. Also, culturally, there was this unspoken code of what people from my background were supposed to be doing, which was medicine, engineering, or law. 

So I went into law. I was an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. I was in the courtroom every day, prosecuting crime. And I was just incredibly overwhelmed by the adversarial nature of what I was doing. I thought, this is not aligning with who I am as a person, both in terms of my collaborative nature and just being a highly empathetic person. 

So in my free time, I was going to museums, reading about art. I got married, and shortly thereafter, decided: I can't see myself doing this for the rest of my life. So [my husband and I] moved back to Maryland, where I'm from. I found a job working as a lawyer in Washington, DC, and took night classes in art history at American University.

And there was absolutely very little pragmatism involved in this decision. It was kind of nuts. My concerns were super focused on the financial. I thought, how am I going to go back to school full-time while my husband goes back to medical school? How are we going to support ourselves? And my biological clock was also ticking at this point. So we did a lot of absurdly impractical things.

I had our first child while I was working full-time as a lawyer and pursuing my masters. Two years into it, we realized we couldn't afford to pay the rent and take care of our son—and I wanted to have more kids. So we moved back in with my parents. I was raising a family, and I needed to continue to work because neither of us would be making an income, unless I did. The job market for art historians and curators is ridiculous. It's incredibly competitive.

I went to school for 10 years to get my masters and then my PhD in art history, and it took me almost four years to land a full-time job. I was literally scraping by. I was teaching as an adjunct. I was working as a volunteer. I was just trying to get my foot in the door. There were a lot of insecurities about this career path. Generally, there's two tracks once you get a PhD in art history, which is either going to museums as a curator or becoming a professor. It became clear that because of my legal background, I might flourish in a museum environment.

As a public servant, I was working with individuals from all kinds of backgrounds, so I started to be able to recalibrate my language and my focus depending on the person I was working with. That fluidity is something curators have to have in a museum environment. But I was also just thinking about what kinds of visitor experiences I would want to create, knowing the kinds of people I had interacted with as a public servant. 

How can we serve the public better? How can we center equity and inclusion as part of our daily practice? These are questions that I've always thought about since entering the field. People used to tiptoe around these ideas. And there were fewer women and people of color in leadership positions back then. 

Looking back, what would I have told my younger self about the museum world? That I didn't need to make myself similar to my colleagues, who are coming from Anglo-European backgrounds. I didn’t have to look like them. Or have names like them. Or have their histories.” 

This is Turning Points, CULTURED’s column dedicated to big life choices, bucket list moments, career shifts, and forks in the road. This week, a curator with a decorated career in the contemporary art world reveals why he gave it all up to co-found a start-up. 

Michael Darling was in his tenth year as chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, when he heard about Museum Exchange, a new digital platform looking to connect art donors with institutions. Think of it as Tinder for art: donors’ works are uploaded onto a digital platform, and museums peruse the offerings to see if there’s a match. He found the idea so compelling, he decided to join the start-up as its co-founder and chief growth officer. In the two-plus years since, Darling has seen how the simplest ideas can meet the most complex needs—and upset the status quo just enough while doing it.

“When I left the MCA to join Museum Exchange, it coincided with Covid and everything was being reevaluated in my mind. I recognized that I had 10 really good years at the MCA and had done some amazing shows and big projects and none of that was going to happen again while the museum went through a transition to find its footing. 

This was also the time period of reckoning with the racial inequalities in our society, and in our museum system, so stepping aside to let somebody else take that role just felt right to me.

The primary idea of [Museum Exchange] was that this was a way for museums to access gifts of art from donors that they might never have had a relationship with before. 

At museums, you get used to the tastes and interests of the collectors that support you. And you start to see a pattern of things that come your way. All of a sudden, this felt like, Oh, new things and different things could really come about through this new channel. And if I was feeling that from my MCA perspective, I could only imagine how it would be for someone at a museum in a much less metropolitan location, without as many collectors in its ecosystem.

At first, I really thought this was just primarily going to be a service for your typical private art collector who had too much stuff, was clearing out their storage, or needed to make space on their wall for a new acquisition to come in. But pretty quickly it expanded to include artist estates, corporations, and foundations.

On the museum side, I realized that for so long I’d just been going through the art world looking through the lens of the museum that I was working for at any given time. Now, I’m looking at the art world through the lens of 200 museums and feeling like I'm serving all of them. 

As soon as we started reaching out to museums and talking to them about what they wanted to do, the idea of diversifying the collection came out loud and clear. So we had to then go out and find collectors and donors and sources of artwork to match that mission.

And that's not necessarily so easy. 

One way that we've done that is by going out and talking to commercial galleries that have had a good track record of promoting women artists and artists of color in their programs. And getting donations directly from them.

I like re-energizing interest in artists who maybe had been passed over by history, or who don’t have any kind of market traction, and getting that work in front of curators. 

And then, on the other side, it was great seeing small museums in out-of-the-way places bring all kinds of works into their collection that they would never have access to otherwise because of contacts—but also because of budget. Most of these museums have little to zero acquisition budgets. 

And this model, or this little niche we've created for ourselves, is not really stepping on the toes of anybody else. I’d say the disruption that we are creating is in some of the elitist and gatekeeper aspects of the art world, making connections when there are oftentimes lots of barriers that prevent that from happening. 

I'm definitely having a great time not being kind of stuck in the day-to-day bureaucracy of a museum. There’s just something really freeing about this."

This is Turning Points, CULTURED’s column dedicated to big life choices, bucket list moments, career shifts, and forks in the road. This week, attorney-turned-painter Wangari Mathenge reflects on her decision to leave the law and set her sights on the canvas.

It wasn’t that long ago that Wangari Mathenge was a practicing attorney. When she quit her job and started considering what to do next, two choices presented themselves: she could either join the family business in Kenya, or finally take her painting “seriously.” The latter, to Mathenge, meant pursuing art as a full-blown career. In 2019, Mathenge enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, completing her MFA in 2021.

On Apr. 22, she will make her U.S. solo debut with “Tidal Wave of Colour,” an exhibition of nine lush and captivating paintings, at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles. The show's title takes inspiration from Malcolm X and the decolonization movements that swept Africa, Latin America, and Asia in the wake of World War ll. Here is Mathenge's account of her upcoming exhibition, the moment she realized she was no longer a lawyer, and her resistance to being packaged by the art world. 

"This is something that always comes up: Why did you decide to take art seriously? Much of it is cultural, and how my parents think about art. Even though I was exposed to art as a child, [its purpose] was to shape you into a well-rounded individual. Painting was a love that I had, but I just did it as a hobby. 

The catalyst was in 2018. I said to my husband, 'You need to help me with this Instagram thing.' And within a week or two, somebody contacted me—a collector. There were a bunch of people reaching out in the early days, and they were all collectors.

At that point, I had already decided to go to art school. For maybe five months, anyone who got to know about me did so through Instagram. Even before art school, I was offered my first show. So numerous people asked me, ‘What are you doing in school?’ What do you need it for? You're signed to a gallery and you're working.’ I wasn't really going to art school to be signed to a gallery. I didn't know about the art world at all, other than the Lucien Freuds that are selling for record prices. I didn’t know any successful artists I could relate to. Any artworks that I thought had any sort of [financial] value were by dead artists. 

And I still wanted to have that critical discourse around work. 

I had taken classes here and there—that's how I was introduced to art history. [But] I just did not feel legitimate enough to say, ‘I'm an artist.’ I would listen to artists and think, What are these people talking about? The terms of art are so different from the world that I was involved in. I wanted to see what these guys are taught in art school.

So I moved to Chicago, and it was terrifying. But I remember thinking to myself, I don't want to have regret. And now it's easy for me to critique the art world and to be confident about the choices I make. I left art school with a question on my mind: To what extent can a person be objective when you are so steeped in your own ideas on aesthetics? One of the things I was always asked [in school] is, ‘Where's Africa in your painting?’ Africa is in my paintings because I'm an African. 

My objective right now is to express myself in the most comfortable way that I know how. I'm not here painting Black people to promote Black people in painting. They just happen to be Black. And I'm not preventing myself from painting any other skin color. 

[In “Tidal Wave of Colour,”] I am paying homage to master artists. There are things in their paintings that help me look at my own work, and help me create my own world. It's entirely mine. There are no rules."

“Tidal Wave of Colour” will be on view from April 22 to June 3, 2023 at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles.