Happy birthday, Daily Serving! This month marks our tenth year of bringing you some of the smartest art writing, and since this is such a momentous anniversary, we’re going to be celebrating for the next few months. To kick off the festivities, today we bring you an excerpt from our interview with Daily Serving’s founder, Seth Curcio. Back in 2006, Seth started this site from Charleston, South Carolina. It rapidly grew into an international platform, and the rest, as they say, is our proud history.
Daily Serving’s founder, Seth Curcio.
What you were thinking when you started Daily Serving:
Daily Serving was designed to be an archive of ideas. My brother Ian, who is a photographer, and I were brainstorming ways to research and catalog this information and share it with others. When we started the publication, I had a few specific things in mind: First, I wanted an easily accessible repository for my interests. Second, I was living in Charleston, South Carolina, and I wanted to build a global community from a place that doesn’t always provide that type of opportunity and access. Third, I wanted to keep my research and writing as active as possible. So, Ian and I named the site Daily Serving, and he and I worked with a designer to build it, and I started writing the content immediately. It was really fun to collaborate with him in the early years.
Around this time, I was also the Executive Director of Redux Contemporary Art Center, and I used the site as a curatorial resource for our program. Often I would write about an artist that I really respected, and then follow up with an interview. If we clicked, I would invite the artist to come to Charleston and do a project, exhibition, or residency at Redux. This worked well, not only to archive the work that I found relevant, but to create wonderful connections and lasting friendships in the process.
How the skills that you cultivated at DS serve you now:
I’ve held several positions in the art world since I founded DS. In 2005–08, while I was still running Daily Serving, I was the Executive Director of Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, and from 2009–15 I was the Associate Director of Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco. I’m now the Senior Director of Shulamit Nazarian, a gallery in Los Angeles. In all of these positions, I’ve used many of the skills that I learned from my time with DS, such as how to problem-solve big issues, how to build a network of collaborators and supporters globally, how to work collaboratively to achieve goals that are bigger than any one person. Most importantly, it taught me how to be ambitious, take risks, and continue to push myself with the things that matter most to me. And most of all, for all of those days fighting to make sure there is content on the site, it taught me to just get up and make sure the work got done. These core skills, if you can call them that, will be with me forever.