Larry Ossei-Mensah on the curator's quiet leverage.

Larry Ossei-Mensah doesn't have a museum job. He has had a few of them, briefly — senior curator at MOCAD in Detroit, guest projects at institutions from Atlanta to Madrid. But the way most curators are described — "the Whitney's so-and-so," "MoMA's curator of" — doesn't apply to him. And he has, somehow, become one of the most influential curators of his generation.

We sat down at the end of 2024 for a long conversation on the channel. I want to pull from it here because it has stayed with me — the kind of interview where the working theory of how a career gets built is just sitting on top of the table, in plain English, for anyone willing to take it.

The fundamentals come from somewhere else

Larry is first-generation Ghanaian-American, raised in the South Bronx. The introduction to art was graffiti, hip hop, and the public-art logic of a city in the eighties and nineties — people in his community looking for a place to be seen. From sixteen to twenty-two he interned at record labels. That, more than any art-history degree, is where he says he learned the relationship between art and commerce.

"When you're an artist and you choose to work with a gallery, you have to find the right gallery partner to help get your work out there," he tells me. "What happens when you have the talent and are able to find a collaborator in the form of a record label that can then help you amplify your voice? Very similar."

He read Donald Passman's book on the music industry the way you'd read a bible. Royalties, mechanicals, synch licensing — the unglamorous parts. Because the unglamorous parts are how you read a balance sheet and know whether something is off. The artist parallel is the same. "Even though you might not have your hands in the weeds, when you look at a balance sheet, when you do an audit, when you get a statement, you don't know if something is wrong unless you have that fundamental understanding."

"Nervous don't pay the bills"

One of the threads I keep coming back to in the conversation is what he says to artists about being intimidated. About being scared to ask the question, scared to negotiate, scared to mess up the opportunity.

"Nine times out of ten, whoever you're working with is going to do what's in the interest of them. If you choose this as a career path, you can't be nervous. Nervous don't pay the bills." — Larry Ossei-Mensah

He says it twice in the recording. The second time he repeats it for emphasis. "Nervous don't pay the bills. Nervous don't pay for materials. Nervous don't pay for your studio." His point isn't that artists shouldn't feel nervous — he says that's a natural human feeling. His point is that the nervousness tells you exactly where the gap in your knowledge is, and the answer is to go fill it. Books exist. Conversations exist. Studio visits exist. There are people on Instagram having those conversations on a Saturday. You have to be hungry for the information.

"If you're lucky and blessed to find a mentor who drops jewels on you," he says — and he was, he tells me about a few of them — "you take them. But some of it, I had to go get."

The independent route

For the first seven years of his curatorial career, Larry held a job. He was doing the curating purely for the love. In 2015, under encouragement from his then-boss Angelina Sierra, he went full-time. He was scared. "It was like, how am I going to pay my rent?"

The thing he says happened next is something I think about a lot when artists ask me about making the leap into a full creative practice. He decided, and then things started to open. He met Brooke Anderson, who pointed him to ICI's curatorial intensive in New Orleans. He applied two days before the deadline, with Brooke's support, and got in. The cohort — he names Rashid Bumbray, Franklin Sirmans — turned into a network of curatorial colleagues who are now running museums, directing institutions, doing the work. "Once I made the decision and committed to it, things just opened up. There was less friction."

That is, on one level, a story about the universe rewarding commitment. It is also a story about a young curator being smart enough to recognize that there were no real templates for what he was trying to do — a Black independent curator, not tied to one institution, not wearing five hats at once — and that he was going to have to build the example himself.

The pruning

Larry says early in his career people pulled him aside to tell him he was doing too much. He was curating, writing, producing film, dancing — the multi-hyphenate identity that a younger generation now wears as a badge. The people putting him in rooms were having trouble making the introduction. "Damn, he does so much I can't even quantify it."

So he pruned. He says it the way a gardener would. He kept curating. He points to the other things when they're relevant. He stopped leading with them. And then, when he says "I curate" and someone tries to qualify it — oh, where do you curate, what museum, what gallery — he says "independent," and watches the person decide what to do with that information.

"In the beginning I took that as a slight. Sometimes that's what it was. And then you learn how to navigate it. The thing is, once you realize most of them don't know either, you're like — oh, okay. You're like the next person. Right. I'm getting it from the mud. What're you getting it from?"

The inflection point

The show he points to as the one that shifted his trajectory was Allison Janae Hamilton's first museum exhibition, at MASS MoCA, co-curated with Susan Cross. It went up for a year. It came together because Jack Tilton, rest in peace, made the introduction, and because Susan and Larry built a real working relationship. From that point on, the institutional platform became viable for him in a way it hadn't been before. The senior curator seat at MOCAD followed. So did the current Amoako Boafo exhibition at the Denver Art Museum, where instead of just hanging the paintings he partnered with the Denver Public Library to build a reading room — the literature that informs the practice, sitting alongside the work.

"It's not enough to say, all right, I'm going to do an exhibition," he tells me. "How are we tapping into the community? Right? And so it's not just presenting these paintings — now you're presenting these different strands of intellectual discourse to broaden how you engage with the work."

ARTNOIR

He co-founded ARTNOIR eleven years ago. A collective. A community designed to amplify the voices of Black and brown artists, and to cultivate the next generation of Black and brown patrons, in the same gesture. It has run the Jar of Love microgrant program, awarding over $100,000 to artists and cultural workers across the pandemic and after.

What I think the institutional press has consistently missed about ARTNOIR is that it isn't a service organization. It isn't a pipeline. It is, at root, a room. A room where artists don't have to perform — where they get to just be themselves — and where the patrons in the room are people who chose to learn alongside them rather than be marketed at.

"A lot of times an artist is performing," he tells me. "I think the less performative a person can be, and the more they can be themselves — I think that's radical."

On the market correction

We talked at the end of 2024, after the post-pandemic emerging-art bubble had started to deflate, and a lot of the artists who had been pushed up the price ladder fast were finding the market less generous. Larry was careful, and also direct.

"Being an artist is a marathon, not a sprint. A lot of emerging artists were really overpriced, and didn't take the agency to step in and be like, I know you think you can get X for my work — I think it should be at this right now."

The artists who handled it best, he says, were the ones who put the hours in the gym. Whose work in 2024 looked like a real evolution of their work from 2020. Whose ideas had grown, whose materials had grown, whose forms had grown. "People are investing in your ideas. They want to know that you are making the efforts to experiment, to challenge yourself, to improve, to get better. And this should be for yourself — forget what outsiders are thinking about. For yourself, you want to get to another level."

The other thing he names: a high portion of collectors, he says, are collecting with their ears and not their eyes. They want the thing they can mention at the dinner. He has very little patience for it. Neither do I.

"Get out your city"

I asked him near the end of the conversation what he would tell an emerging artist with three sold-out solo shows and a strong local collector base who still couldn't crack gallery representation. His answer was immediate.

"Get out your city. It's cool if you had a solo in New York or LA or Chicago. What does it look like to have a solo in Mexico City? In São Paulo? In Tokyo? In Bangkok? In Dubai?" — Larry Ossei-Mensah

And he gave the analogy I keep stealing. If you're averaging fifty points a game in the G-League, that's a number. It's not the NBA. It's not Italy. It's not Spain. The work of an emerging career, at a certain point, is putting yourself in a context where the work has to translate without you standing next to it explaining it. If the work can't carry the room when you remove the local context — that's the information. Go back, sit with it, and then keep going.

Brand, or language

I asked him about the word "brand" because I think we've collectively confused ourselves about what we mean by it. He's careful here.

"I would say the artist is more entrepreneur, and brand may come within that. Brand is a slippery slope. There's a danger where it takes away the soul from the creative process."

What he wants instead, for the artists he works with, is what he calls a definitive language. A recognizable approach. So that when he walks into a group show or a museum or a collector's home, he knows without being told. The point isn't to manufacture a signature. The point is to have a consistency of ideas and expression so deep that the work doesn't need a name tag.

He brings up Titus Kaphar, who has a film out and is also a painter, a sculptor, and a co-founder of NXTHVN. All of that, Larry says, is aligned with the fundamental hypothesis of his practice. The hypothesis is what makes it cohesive. The medium is downstream.

The quiet part

There is a quiet part of the conversation that I want to name directly, because it might be the most important thing he says. He had a health scare a few years back. One of his close friends pulled him aside and told him something he repeats to me, and that I think every working person in this industry needs to hear.

"You can't be of service if you ain't healthy. We need you to like, focus, get right. So you can continue to do the things you're doing." — a friend, to Larry

That changed how he works. He's more deliberate about checking in on the artists he's collaborating with — not just project updates, but life updates. He says it has made him a better collaborator. It has also, I think, made him a more durable one. Because the people who burn out in this industry — and there are a lot of them — tend to burn out because they got the relationship between their work and their life backwards.

What I keep coming back to

The most important thing Larry said in the recording — and the line I keep pulling out when artists ask me what curators are actually doing — isn't about the market, or the international solos, or the institutions. It is about competition.

"I'm not in competition with my colleagues. The pie is big enough for all of us to eat and contribute. I might be in competition with the show you do. And I'm gonna tell you that, yo, you killed that. And in my mind I'm like, all right, how am I gonna chop chop that show's head off? Something even sharper. Iron sharpens iron."

That is the curator's quiet leverage. Not the title. Not the institutional seat. Not the access. It's the willingness to be in real competition with the work, while standing in real solidarity with the people making it. To do the show better next time, not because you need to win, but because the field gets better when everyone in it is operating at a higher level.

The institutions follow. They've been following him for a while.