Postscript

Intense colors and verdant tropical landscapes, projections of a domestic setting and bodies in motion, mementos and family photographs echoing the past…these are just a few of the striking images I recall from one never remembers alone, curated by the 2020 graduates of the USC Roski MA Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere Program. While memory is often fleeting, fragmented, or fuzzy, this exhibition examines artists who transmit intergenerational memories through extremely vivid visual images, archival materials, kinship, and embodied experiences. one never remembers alone evoked the powerful visuality I’ve described above, as it also explored the performativity, temporality, spatiality and sociality of memory.  

The five curators––Loujain Bager, Eve Moeykens-Arballo, Bianca M. Morán, Carlo Tuason and Joseph Daniel Valencia––mined their own diverse backgrounds and intellectual interests to curate a group exhibition of artists who reveal personal memories and histories through different cultural lenses and diasporic contexts. Ultimately, the collective work in one never remembers alone coalesced both conceptually and visually, while successfully retaining the individuality and heterogeneity of the artists and the curators themselves.

The exhibition, its accompanying public programs, and this website is the culmination of the USC Roski Curatorial Practicum, a three-semester course that balances history and theory with practical skills necessary to curate the final MA Project. Each MA cohort engages in all phases of the curatorial process: developing the initial concept; installing, producing and presenting the project; organizing a public interface; and documenting it in a print publication and/or online presentation.

This process can be both highly collaborative and unexpectedly contentious (sometimes both) but returning again to the idea of memory, I cannot recall a cohort group that has been as dedicated, engaged, and generous as the curators of one never remembers alone.  

As I write this in the midst of my pandemic self-isolation, I am reminded of the critical importance of collaboration, collegiality, and generosity not just in our own curatorial practices, but also in our everyday lives.

Karen Moss

Director, MA Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere Program

University of Southern California