Taylor Roberts on her vision for museums, navigating intimacy in a changing body, and being a super planner
By helping [them], I'm constantly growing and learning myself every day, and getting more comfortable in my own skin. So how could you not appreciate that?
This month's profile is included below but we have also attached the full recording of this interview in audio form above. We highly recommend you listen!
Warning: This interview briefly mentions weight loss. This section is noted below and occurs from 30:35-31:00 minutes in the audio version.
G: Thank you so much for being here, Taylor. We are so excited to interview you. Do you mind introducing yourself a bit?
Well, first, thanks for having me. I feel privileged to be here in this space with y'all. I'm Taylor Roberts. I'm from Chicago. I use she/they pronouns and I am 23. I'm originally from the North Lawndale area right across the street from Douglas Park. I live in Hyde Park right now, but in between, I lived in Atlanta, so I consider myself a transient human being at the moment and hoping to sort of continue that.
I work as the Manager of Special Projects and Research and a Lead for America Fellow at 3Arts. Lead for America is an organization that puts young people in a capacity to create change in the US and 3Arts is an organization that funds women artists, Deaf and disabled artists, and artists of color in Chicago. I studied Art History and Nonprofit Management at Oglethorpe.
G: Cool, thanks for introducing yourself!
H: Yeah, seriously. It's amazing to hear how tied are to your community work and how it seems, as an outsider, that it really fulfills you in ways that I think a lot of people aren't fortunate enough to have. It's really inspiring to hear that you've been able to carve that out and find that community.
G: Maybe that's somewhere we can start. Can you talk a bit about your community work and what led you to it?
I started working at museums at the age of 14. My first museum was the Adler Planetarium, which is the longest job that I've had to this day. I worked there for five years and I found myself in a thousand different positions over the course of those five years. But the Youth Leadership Council made me realize that there was a real need for young people in the museum field. It was a field that was slowly carving itself within history.
I think that museums are always behind on the trends of what people would like to see from collecting institutions and they are constantly behind on a social level. We saw that, especially during the pandemic. Museums, instead of just being giant spaces that were closed off to the public for an entire year, paying for air conditioning and heating for these beautiful works, some of them became spaces where people could get food, where people could sleep, or count on for resources. So we know that museums need to enter this next phase very strategically.
I entered college as a Business major and I kept a lot of that through my Nonprofit Management minor, but I fell in love with art history through the Oglethorpe Museum of Art. The people that I grew to love, professionally and personally- they encouraged me to become a Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the High Museum which was an interesting experience in both what it's like to work at a larger institution and make a community out of the people there.
At the High Museum, we created a really great cohort of trust between each other, and during the pandemic we really worked very thoughtfully to figure out what the museum needed in order to move forward. But it also was, of course, a great lesson in white supremacy, right? The institution, while it is wonderful, has a lot more ways that it could strategically support the people who are visiting the museum. In Atlanta, it is majority Black people and so their visitorship should be more geared toward those people.
So those were all things that I took to this Lead for America fellowship. The people that I'm helping, we share a lot of the same perspectives. We understand what it feels like to be marginalized. And so I think by helping them, I'm constantly growing and learning myself every day, and getting more comfortable in my own skin. So how could you not appreciate that? How could I not find some sort of enjoyment in that?
G: That's beautiful.
H: I love that for you. I also just wanted to say that I realized while stalking you on Instagram yesterday that you know Destinee. I was like, oh my goodness, this is the iconic arts internship photo!
Yes, I do! And that's also sort of what I meant about my work at the High Museum. People like Destinee, and the other Mellon fellows, we were four women of color, walking on a floor that barely had any people of color. I could not have done all of the work that I did at the High Museum, without Destinee, Kayla, and Adeja. They're all Black women that even before we were colleagues, I had so much respect for. Now I'm excited to be in this career so I can watch them do hot shit.
H: Yes, they will. It can be a lot mentally and emotionally to have a job that you do care a lot about. Especially one that is very tied to your values and the things you want to see in the world. How do you emotionally sustain that experience?
I work remotely, so I have to set a lot of boundaries at home. I'm really trying to figure out how much of my personality and workspace can be shared at the same time. And it is a little hard because my job relies on me being who I am. It doesn't work if I wasn't passionate about people of color and disabled folks. It doesn't work if I don't feel open and feel good enough to have open conversations. So it's hard.
G: What's something that you've learned about yourself recently?
I've recently decided that as a human being, I'm looking for a relationship- so being clear about my romantic goals. I'm a planner. Like I'm a super planner. And so I have a vision for how my life looks. And I think as a woman, it’s a little hard because there are eight different visions of whatever can happen in my life, but there's still a plan for pretty much all of them.
I've always been very open and I continue to be very open to sort of whatever happens in that area of my life. But I think now I know that I don't want anything casual. I don't wanna pretend like I'm interested in dating the way that the majority of people our age are. I want someone to be there. I want something real. And so that's been something I've been trying to be very bold about.
H: Going off that a bit, can you talk to us a little bit about what love or intimacy has looked like for you recently?
Intimacy has always been very hard for me. And so, being as transparent as possible, I lost my virginity at the age of 22. Going through high school and college, I just didn't appreciate the focus on physical appearance. My family has told me that I'm a curvy woman from the very beginning of my life, so I've sort of known the effect my presence has on men for a long time and I did not really like that. That definitely changed as I grew into my queerness and sort of started to understand who I wanted to be with. I don't think that all experiences with women or non-men are exactly the same, but I still felt very sexualized and was not into it.
It took a certain individual for me to open up that way and I really appreciate them. Intimacy is a very, very new thing for and I'm excited and I'm more open to being vulnerable than I ever have been before. I've been on some really great dates recently, and some really bad ones too. I don't hold anyone at fault for that because we're all just really growing and learning about ourselves and how we see ourselves with other people. But I'm hopeful because out of my life plan that’s where I give myself the most room to deviate.
H: I feel that. I'm curious, what’s something that you wish more people knew about you?
My favorite thing about me, which is cheesy, has been my experiences in debate in high school. The reason why I love debate more than theater was because debate was truly a team. We've modeled love for each other in so many different ways and those are people, to this day, we can just read each other's minds. That's how we win a debate, you know? Sort of just understanding each other, very intuitively.
H: Not debate as a revolutionary framework! *laughs*
I learned when and where having an argument is necessary and I also learned about love and compassion. Mr. Fine, our debate coach, was the most open crier I've ever met to this day. He's the person I've seen in my life cry the most, and for a very stubborn city Black woman who’s going through high school, it made me realize that everyone should be able to show up how they want to. I think that lesson is about making spaces where people can be who they are, where there's sort of a constructive structure. Really the focus was each other, and becoming better people together, even if we didn't win.
G: Can you talk to us a bit about that dance between vulnerability and your own journey with your body? (Weight loss mentioned below)
From an early age, I had this awareness of my body. So many of my nicknames were physical and so I've been very physically mindful of myself for a long time.
The process of growing was growing in love and watching it change. So during college, I lost like 40 pounds, and my parents were super happy, but what they did not know was it was wildly unhealthy. I was smoking cigarettes more than I had ever been and looking for any source of nicotine to quite literally not be hungry. But, because I lost so much weight, I lost my best feature, which is I lost part of my ass. So that was an endless conversation. To this day my parents are still the people that I think make me most aware of my body in a way that I do not love. Constantly talking about the length of clothes I wear or how sexually present I am in certain spaces but the older I get the more I just am myself in all spaces all the time.
That’s a big reason why I was a virgin for so long. I just didn't feel like sharing myself with anyone that way, but also because of my Hidradenitis. I have Hidradenitis Suppurativa, which is an autoimmune disease. It's a skin disease that manifests in areas where you sweat. For some people, you can get it under your arms, in between your thighs, under your breasts, and the buttocks area but it's really just that your sweat glands don't react well to rubbing or moisture. And something that is really exciting is that I'm on the first medication prescribed for HS.
Humira is an injection I take, and so I stick myself with an injection every couple of weeks. After my second dose is when I lost my virginity. HS does make it hard for people to be intimate. You know, there's scarring that's involved, there are certain bumps that get so large that I called them volcanoes. Depending on where your HS manifests, it can be super hard for you to be open to people. So that was a long part of my process.
I know that there are so many other women who have HS as well. It's so important for me to be able to be vulnerable with partners because I felt like there was something physically wrong with me and there was something overtly unattractive. But as someone who's always been curvier, with a presence that is deemed very sexually, it was interesting to have that going on behind the scenes.
Rapid Fire
G: What's one thing that you wish more people knew about HS? Or for people that have it, how they can come to accept it?
I wish people knew that there are a lot of people who have HS. Especially as we're entering the monkeypox pandemic, which manifests on your skin as well, we should all just be a lot more informed about skin diseases.
H: If you could describe it in three words, what would they be?
Openness. I'm really just open to everything.
G: What's one thing that always, without a doubt, brings you joy?
Love me a good plant. My cat's super cool too.