There was a little art museum a few blocks from my place called the California Museum of Art Thousand Oaks. It operated out of an old Taco Bell, which was enough to draw me in. I started following them online and won a signed print in a giveaway. When I went to pick it up, I met the executive director. By the end of that conversation, I was, more or less, their head of marketing.

It was mostly a volunteer gig. For the next five years, there was a steady stream of “here’s something we want to do, can you figure out how?” And I’d figure out how.

Some of it was normal marketing. I ran paid social for an exhibit launch and pulled in such a crowd of first-time visitors that the staff were asking where they all came from. I rebuilt the website. I built virtual exhibits when COVID closed the doors. But the part I loved was the part nobody had a playbook for.

One exhibit needed video running on screens from open to close, on a perfect loop, for months. So I built the setup myself with a stack of Fire TV sticks and a lot of trial and error. By the end, I had a wall of looping video installations running on their own for the length of the show.

I also built an audio tour from scratch. I interviewed the artists, wrote the stops, hosted the files online, and turned the whole thing into a QR-code experience visitors could access from their phones. It made the exhibit feel more finished and gave visitors another way into the work.

The museum eventually moved into The Oaks mall and, eventually, closed for good. I kept their website alive on my own long after the lights went out.

It was one of the clearest examples of the kind of work I like most. Not just the marketing, but the weird in-between projects too. The ones where someone has an idea, nobody has a plan, and you’re the person who figures out how to make it happen.