Rachel Adams at OCCCA/GCAC

The first talk in a new curatorial lecture series brought the Chief Curator of the Bemis Center to Santa Ana and she had a lot to say about art, empathy, and saying yes.

On Thursday evening, March 12th, a small crowd gathered at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art on N. Sycamore Street in Santa Ana for something new. Grand Central Art Center Director John Spiak kicked things off by announcing what he hopes will become an ongoing series: a curatorial lecture program co-presented by GCAC and OCCCA that brings curators from institutions across the country into direct conversation with the local arts community. The inaugural guest was Rachel Adams, Chief Curator and Director of Programs at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska, and she delivered.

Adams is the kind of curator who makes you want to book a flight to the Midwest. Over the course of her talk, she traced a career that took her from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where she’d originally planned to be an artist) to San Francisco, Austin, Buffalo, and Portland before landing in Omaha about eight years ago, where she’s been steadily building one of the more quietly ambitious artist support ecosystems in the country.

A Different Kind of Residency

Central to her talk was the Bemis residency program, which Adams describes as a “non-expectation space.” Artists arrive to thirteen live-work studios ranging from 900 to 2,000 square feet, receive a monthly stipend, travel support, and 24-hour access to tools and materials, and then, essentially, they’re just allowed to exist. “You can literally just come there and sleep, if that’s what you want to do,” Adams said. “We want to give you time, space, and support.”

The Bemis building itself has an origin story worth knowing: founded by artists in 1981 inside the Omaha Brick Yards, asking whether a handful of artists could use the beehive kilns, the organization eventually landed in its current home in the Old Market district, a 120,000 square foot building acquired in 1993 for $242,000. (“It’s like a $20 million building now,” Adams noted, with a mix of pride and awe.) A second fabrication building across the street was gifted to them, housing welding equipment and the services of a full-time residency arts technician. The sheer scale of the physical space, Adams argued, is what allows her to say yes to almost anything an artist wants to make.

Half of the Bemis staff, she mentioned, are working artists themselves, creating a fluid sense of community between residents and the institution that she clearly values deeply.

LOW END: When the Mellon Foundation Funds a Secret Garden

One of the talk’s most vivid passages centered on LOW END, Bemis’s sound art and experimental music venue. In 2018, the organization received a half-million dollar grant from the Mellon Foundation to build out a dedicated rehearsal space, recording studio, and performance venue in the building’s basement, all of it free to the public. The venue was named by Raven Chacón, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who was Bemis’s first sound resident. (“He named a beer Low End,” Adams said, “so we just called the venue that.”)

Adams programs the space roughly twice a month, pulling performers from across the country and internationally. The shows are free, the drinks are free, and they average around 110 attendees, with a regular influx of faces Adams has never seen before. She spoke with particular enthusiasm about Victoria Shen in the Bay Area who performs with a contact mic embedded in a comb she runs through her hair. “If you ever have the chance to see her perform, please take it,” Adams said. “It is one of the most amazing experiences you will have.”

Curating as a Practice of Listening

When Adams turned to her exhibition history, a consistent philosophy emerged: the curator as facilitator of new work, not just organizer of existing objects. She describes herself as a “generalist curator” most interested in commissioning new projects, especially for artists having their first major institutional show in a given region.

Her first major exhibition at Bemis, All Together, Amongst Many: Reflections on Empathy (summer 2021), set the tone. Featuring 18 artists and conceived in the early period of the first Trump administration, the show assembled work that leaned into empathy as a political stance, less as a soft sentiment than as a practice of sustained listening. Among the highlights she described: a Christine Sun Kim wallpaper piece that posed the question of whether hearing and listening are really the same thing; a recorded audio piece by artist Marcus Fischer who gathered responses from fellow residents at the Rauschenberg Foundation on the day of the 2017 inauguration; and Brendan Fernandes’s Free Fall 49, a tribute to the 49 victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting that involved a live performance on the building’s front dock, dancers on platforms, music that stopped exactly 49 times, before ending in a full, joyful celebration of life.

Her description of the Maya Dunietz exhibition, Root of Two, offered another window into her curatorial sensibility. Dunietz, a sound artist Adams encountered on a curatorial research trip to Israel, had been experimenting with attaching transducers, the vibrating mechanisms used in gaming chairs, to piano strings. By the time the Bemis show opened, she had seventeen pianos sourced from donations across Omaha, all vibrating and “speaking to each other” through a composition Dunietz called the pianos “beasts or mammoths of time.” The show was activated throughout its run by live performances, including a final concert featuring Dunietz alongsideCarmina Escobar and Dorian Wood, both of whom have connections to Bemis as residency program alumni.

Why This Series Matters

Spiak framed the evening as an investment in the future of the local arts community, specifically, in expanding what’s possible for Orange County artists who might not yet know what pathways exist. “Sometimes the opportunities here are few and far between,” he said, “and we want you to expand that and have opportunities in other states and hopefully other countries.”

It was the right note to open on. Watching Adams talk, unhurried, practical, genuinely in love with the work, was a reminder that curatorial practice at its best isn’t about taste-making or gatekeeping. It’s about building the conditions under which artists can take risks, and then getting out of the way.

If this is what the GCAC/OCCCA lecture series has in store, the next talk can’t come soon enough.

The GCAC/OCCCA Curatorial Lecture Series is an ongoing collaboration between Grand Central Art Center and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art. Stay tuned for upcoming events.