Rujeko Hockley featuring the Mara Side Table

My name is Rujeko Hockley and I'm a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

I live in Brooklyn with my family. We’ve lived in our home for three and a half years.

I think art, culture, and design are all connected. I'm a curator–I've been a curator for almost 20 years somehow–but I came from being a dancer. I was always very oriented towards aesthetics. Throughout my life, I’ve had a very particular idea and vision about how things look, whether that was my room when I was a kid or my clothing.

As an adult thinking about design, thinking about a house and a home, the question is how do we have a beautiful home that can host adult conversations but also be comfortable for two children?

We are surrounded by toys but we're also surrounded by beautiful furniture and art and those things can live together. We have a little trampoline in the living room. We also have really beautiful artwork by Barkley Hendricks.

What am I dreaming about? It’s definitely a beach, a tropical situation with beautiful water. I grew up traveling with my parents and going to beaches in Kenya and Tanzania. In my adult life, I have realized there’s amazing beaches in New York, in Amagansett and the tiny bay beaches. I love the replenishment of the beach experience, I’ll go anywhere for it.

I was a dancer for many years and I still like to see a lot of dance. At the Whitney, we just closed the Alvin Ailey exhibition. It was amazing to be at an art museum and be surrounded by dance and dancers.

I recently saw the Ailey II dancers, it’s the Alvin Ailey school and the dancers are students. I was so inspired by the performance of these young people who are semi-professionals. The director of the program led the audience in a chair dance. I was like, oh yeah, there’s just so many ways to do this, it’s so accessible.

Another performance I recently saw was by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, she’s the founder of a dance troupe called Urban Bush Women. It was a solo performance, thinking about the legacy of Alvin Ailey, but also about her own legacy and her own aging as a person and as a dancer. It was badass, I think there’s really no other word.

I found it inspiring to think about how, if we’re lucky, how long life is and how we get to have so many iterations of ourselves as we grow through our creativity, through our life, through our family, through our own self-development. It was profound to see this black woman thinking about her own arc and her own legacy and her own future.

The impulse to create is so deeply intrinsic to humans. As you get older, all this stuff is put upon it, expertise and professionalism, is it good or not? But kids are like, “I made a shrine, here you go. I made this at school, here you go.” They have the urge–I want to color, I want to draw, I want to put stickers all over everything. And they’re not precious about it.

I’m a curator, I work with artists, my husband is an artist, I have had the great privilege to see artists in action. But they’re professionals, so it’s different. It’s a great reminder to be around kids, to see making is so clearly intrinsic to our species.

In my twenties, when I lived in New York and I had a lot of free time, I used to knit. I used to make baby sweaters and baby blankets for friends. I made a neck warmer that I still wear regularly, that kind of thing. It’s something I’ve been thinking about getting back into. My older daughter saw something I had knit and she was like, you know how to do that? And then she like, can you teach me? I think that’s our next project.

I loved the purple color of the stone, it’s a unique color. And I was drawn to the different textures–the stone surface, the suede, the leather exterior, the brass. But it also felt sturdy and durable. I think it was the combination of beautiful, unexpected colors and textures, and the craftsmanship and sense of durability. They have great proportions, and they have a lot of utility, but they're really beautiful.

Distinguished, quietly classy, which is not the same as quiet luxury. A level of serenity and confidence. The materials are high level, the design is high level, and the experience is high level.

I feel like they're perfectly named. I have a colleague named Maura that I really love, you know, I think it's a great name.

A mirror. An entryway mirror, you’re always in use. You’re not forgotten and cast away. You can witness. You’re seeing everyone that’s coming into the house, you’re seeing the inhabitants of the house, they’re checking their face as they leave, they’re making silly faces, all the various ways we use mirrors.