My What If Year: A Memoir by Alisha Fernandez Miranda

Author:Alisha Fernandez Miranda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zibby Books

Chapter 9

Rebel Without a Cause

On the morning that altered the entire course of my professional life, I ran into the cavernous Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, dripping wet from the rain with a fierce hangover, fifteen minutes late for my meeting with Nigel, a junior member of the Tate’s curation team. I was twenty-one years old. The meeting had been orchestrated by one of my art history professors back in the States. I had fallen in love with art history and had added it as a joint major, along with women’s studies.

I had a lot riding on this interview and was kicking myself for being late, a result of a long evening of partying that ended in line for a Big Mac at 4:00 a.m. the night before. It was my last year of college and my visit to London was an attempt to figure out what I wanted to do after graduation. The Tate interview was one of two I had set up that day, with grand hopes that someone would be so delighted by my wit, intelligence, and personality that they’d offer me a job with a UK visa, which I needed to work in the country.

When I had come to London to study abroad during the spring semester of my junior year, I enrolled as a visiting student in University College London’s art and architecture program and experienced for the first time in my life the richness, expansiveness, and sheer volume of art available in Europe. All of my classes that semester were “on-site,” meaning we either walked around different neighborhoods of the city looking at statues and buildings or met in one of London’s many museums to be lectured on paintings as we closely examined them in real life.

I was fascinated by art history in the classroom, but once I went to the UK and experienced the difference of seeing a two-hundred-year-old painting not in a book but on a wall in front of me, noting the brushstrokes, the texture of the paint, the faintest lines where you might see a wisp of a previous draft, it made it feel a lot less like history and a lot more like it could be my future.

London—where I now knew I wanted to live—was both dreamy and impossible. I didn’t have a network or even the faintest idea where to start, especially when I didn’t have British citizenship. The interview with Nigel was my first contact with the art world. Actually, he was my only contact in the art world. I ran inside the Tate, not stopping for even a moment to marvel at the industrial, postmodern beauty of the museum itself, which had opened only a few years earlier. I took the escalator steps two at a time to the café and found a man that had to be Nigel. He was alone, wearing trendy eyeglasses and with a peeved look on his face.

“Oh my gosh, I’m so, so sorry,” I said, peeling off my wet

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