art
At some point during each episode of Las Culturistas, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang ask their guests, “What was the culture that made you say culture was for you?” It’s a delightful and revealing question, sometimes excavating in their guests long-forgotten memories or helping them recognize that something was more significant in the shaping of their worldview than they’d previously thought. Frequently, while fantasizing making the rounds as a guest on my favorite podcasts, I try to answer the question for myself. Would I cite my earliest visits to the Art Institute of Chicago with my sister? Would I invoke Murder by Death, Neil Simon’s detective parody whose screenplay I could recite (but couldn’t necessarily interpret) by the time I was 7? Would it be watching my dad sitting at the piano, or watching his mother’s made-for-TV movies? Or playing Scrabble with my mom on her bedroom floor while watching The Golden Girls?
I could go on…through hundreds of intersections like these as a kid, I was lucky to be exposed to a wide range of cultural and artistic influences. Thinking back, it was a more diverse array of artists, media, and experiences than one might expect for a cis white kid in the suburbs. I didn’t become an expert in any particular art form, but I gained a kind of vocabulary, a rudimentary semiotic lens, to be able to encounter and appreciate people and experiences that I didn’t necessarily “understand.” Growing up, I wasn’t in…
