The Story Behind Modern Art’s Storyteller — Alumni Profile, Erica Gangsei

Erica Gangsei, director of Interpretive Media at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), digital content producer, and mixed media sculptor, isn’t your typical Amherst alum. In fact, she isn’t an alum at all.

Gangsei attended Amherst for five and a half semesters over four years as part of the class of 2000, but ultimately withdrew before graduating. She finished her undergraduate education at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and graduated with a B.F.A. Nonetheless, she considers Amherst a “formative” part of her education and her remarkable life and career.

Gangsei, who was raised in Brooklyn but now calls San Francisco home, has led a career steeped in the arts and in public service. She made her start in political organizing and ultimately found museum work at the intersection of her passions. She has now worked at SFMOMA for nearly two decades, while also continuing to produce her own art.

Although she may not have walked the stage here in the Pioneer Valley, she exemplifies the endless possibilities of an Amherst education.

A Classical Education … Or Not

Gangsei grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and attended Saint Ann’s School, an “alternative school” in Brooklyn Heights, from fifth grade. She greatly benefited from Saint Ann’s unconventional approach to education, noting there were “no grades and students were really treated as scholars from a young age.”

Although Gangsei has now led a long career in contemporary art, as a high schooler, she was drawn to the past. She discovered a passion for ancient Greek while attending Saint Ann’s, which had a  “robust” classics department headed by the resident Egyptologist at the Brooklyn Museum. When she began researching colleges, Amherst appealed to her “largely because of the classics program.”

During her senior year of high school, Gangsei was diagnosed with a learning disability, which she said came as a surprise because she had been supported by the nontraditional learning environment at Saint Ann’s for so long. Her diagnosis only began to impact her life after she began college at Amherst, a more conventional academic institution. “It wasn’t until I was actually looking at traditional academic structures that I realized that I have ADD,” she said.

Gangsei’s years at Amherst were more difficult than she expected due to her learning disability, and she found the college to be significantly less supportive of her than her K-12 experience. “Now, I think there’s a lot more available for people who learn differently,” she said, “but back then, the resources were sort of scarce.”

Nonetheless, Gangsei tackled the issue with creative ingenuity, developing adaptations to keep up with her coursework. Lengthy reading assignments posed the biggest problem for her, so she would become friends with people in her classes so she could talk to them about the readings.

Gangsei ended up taking a gap year after two years at Amherst and worked for Mark Green’s 2001 New York mayoral campaign. She returned to Amherst for two more semesters but ultimately withdrew in the middle of her sixth semester when she realized she was “not going to be able to complete the work for the semester.”

“I would have liked to finish my degree,” she said, “but it was just not the right fit for me anymore.”

From Liberal Arts to Art School

Before returning to finish her undergraduate degree, Gangsei spent a few years in public service, at first continuing to work for Mark Green and later joining the New York affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union as a fundraiser (A.C.L.U). Although her early interest in politics might seem a world apart from her career in art, she says the two are “not so radically disconnected.”

“Politics and art are both the process of collective imagination,” Gangsei told me. “You’re in the process of imagining a different way for the world to be and articulating a different way for the world to be.”

The two fields have always played an important role in her life, but politics, in particular, runs in her blood. Both of Gangsei’s parents are lawyers, and they instilled their love for activism in her — Gangsei grew up going to marches and recognizing the importance of civic engagement. Her mother, Susan Herman, served as president of the A.C.L.U from 2008 to 2021.

“In high school, I would cut school occasionally, and when I cut school, it would either be to go to MOMA or to go to Earth Day,” she said with a smile. “My life was always engaged in activism and in art.”

Nonetheless, as much Gangsei enjoyed her time in politics, she realized a few years post-Amherst that she wanted to devote herself more seriously to the art world, and she couldn’t do that without returning to school. She decided to move to San Francisco and finish her bachelor’s degree at SFAI, where she graduated with a B.F.A. in sculpture in 2006.

Art school turned out to be just the right place for Gangsei. She said that finishing her bachelor’s when she was 25 was “amazing” because she returned to school with all the real-life skills she acquired from working professionally for five years — like how to “show up to places on time.”

Amherst and SFAI “were like night and day” to Gangsei. Not only did SFAI naturally have more studio art resources, but it also had more accommodations for neurodivergence and a more manageable reading load, which she found to be “such a relief.” As much as she had tried to pursue her artistic passions at Amherst, that wasn’t something she could truly do until SFAI.

“I loved how I spent a lot of time in Fayerweather [the arts building here at Amherst] and had deep relationships with the other artists on campus, but there just weren’t that many of us,” she said.

Nonetheless, Gangsei doesn’t regret her roundabout path from Amherst to SFAI. “I love the relationship that Amherst gave me to the academy,” she said. Attending only art school would have given her an utterly different outlook on life, one without the critical thinking and theory she learned at Amherst. SFAI provided Gangsei with the perfect environment to dive into studio art, but she owes her academic foundation to Amherst.

Interpreting Art

After graduating from SFAI, Gangsei found herself doing a “variety of … odd jobs,” like many recent college grads. But she soon discovered her calling. In 2007, while pursuing a career as a sculptor and gallery artist, she began temping at SFMOMA in their development department. It started as a “three-days-a-week temp gig for one month, then they extended me for another month, and then another.” Finally, after six months of temporary work, the museum offered Gangsei a full-time job.

While Gangsei enjoyed her position at SFMOMA, she realized after a year that development was “not going to be a good fit for me long term.” Luckily, a job opened up in the museum’s interpretation team — a supporting role on the team she now heads. “Long story short,” she said, “I worked my way up.” After climbing the ranks for several years, she became director of interpretive media at SFMOMA, a position she has now held for 10 years.

I had to ask her (with slight embarrassment, since I’m an art history major and museum lover), what exactly interpretive media is. Gangsei responded by likening her job to my role in our interview, saying it’s “like being an embedded journalist inside the museum.”

“When an exhibition or collection rotation is put on the calendar, we work with the curatorial team and with the artist to figure out how to communicate the story of the art to museum visitors,” she said. “We do the object labels (the little bit of writing that goes on the wall next to the art), introductory texts, audio guides, video interviews with artists, the museum’s podcast, interactive displays, graphic and text displays … whatever will help visitors have a more meaningful experience with the art that’s on view.”

Gangsei said her role is “not creating a narrative so much as uncovering the existing narrative” for the art. Gangsei works together with the artist and curator to convey their message. Whenever she creates a display, she asks herself, “How can this be a window into the artist’s world?”

“One thing my program focuses on that I’m very proud of is looking for expertise outside the field of art history,” Gangsei added. “For example, when we did an audio guide on Diego Rivera’s ‘Pan American Unity’ mural, we interviewed an Indigenous rights activist to talk about the ways in which San Francisco’s Indigenous population was represented in the artwork.”

Gangsei told me she has too many favorite exhibitions and projects to keep count, but some of the most memorable are actually the ones where she initially “didn’t connect personally” with the art. She enjoys the challenge of making art interesting and understandable to everyone — herself included.

Education and outreach are crucial to Gangsei as a museum administrator. “One of my favorite moments,” she said, “is when I’m able to find something surprising that enables a visitor to engage with a work of art in a way they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.”

There are some glamorous aspects of the job, like meeting famous artists and receiving a grant to travel to Japan. But Gangsei said she feels most fulfilled when she can engage with visitors and share art with the broader public.

“The glamor and glitz has been very special and a privilege, but really the cool part [of my job] is seeing a comment on YouTube saying, ‘I didn’t understand this until I saw this video,’” she said. “Going to an artist’s studio is neither here nor there unless you’re figuring out how to translate that experience to a museum visitor who’s not in that studio.”

Putting It Into Practice

Despite working an exciting and demanding full-time position at an art museum, Gangsei continues to make art herself, putting her sculpture degree to good use while also exploring different mediums. She told me she aims to build a participatory art practice, attending a communal ceramic studio that “functions as a sort of loosely-held hippy artist collective.” And following her early career interests, she continues to prioritize activism and social justice, working on protest art projects including “spectacle-driven puppet art.”

Gangsei has made sure that her museum work and her art are not separate parts of her life. In 2011, she merged some of her artistic interests in game design and emerging technologies with her interpretive work, founding a games initiative called PlaySFMOMA. The project functions as a “series of pop-ups and residencies” and invites game designers to create interactive experiences for museum visitors, ranging from augmented and virtual reality to LARPing.

In many ways, SFMOMA has acted as the perfect synthesis of Gangsei’s creative talent and her dedication to the public. The museum has allowed her to explore a side of her artistic practice she might not have been able to independently, and offers a platform for her work.

“Unconventional Pathways”

Gangsei’s journey from Amherst to where she is now has been anything but straightforward. Yet, she is grateful that she wasn’t able to anticipate every stage of her life. She appreciates life’s surprises.

“I never could have predicted the life I’ve led, or the career that I’ve had,” Gangsei said. “I certainly couldn’t have predicted it back in the spring of 2000 and I think it’s really, really extraordinary to be able to just follow your heart.”

Beyond her fascinating career, Gangsei leads a very happy family life in San Francisco with her husband, a fellow artist who works at the San Francisco Public Library, her daughter, who is in kindergarten, and their cat.

As I wrapped up my conversation with Gangsei, she offered a few words of advice to Amherst students, in particular those who might also find themselves at odds with the standard, linear trajectory through college. While Gangsei herself is possibly the best evidence that interesting lives are not always planned, she cautioned students against attempting to plan every step along the way, saying that it’s crucial to be “adaptable when the world hands you something different.

It’s normal to feel as though you’re “stepping into uncharted territory” when you graduate, she added, but you don’t need to determine the rest of your life when you’re fresh out of college.

“Just find something that you can stand to do, and do that until you find something else that seems like it might be better,” she said. “I’m a big champion of unconventional pathways.”