Edit. Pivot. Curate.

The CreativeMornings theme for June was Curate. This global-theme was selected by the Orange County chapter of CreativeMornings, who framed it as a shift from simply knowing or creating toward the harder skill of choosing, shaping, and sequencing. Based on my previous tenure working at a contemporary art museum, and having read the theme’s framing a few days before the event, I thought I had a decent handle on where the morning was headed.

I did not.

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If you’ve followed along with the last handful of the FlexTal Back Burner Blog posts, you know the pattern by now. CreativeMornings Phoenix hosts a free monthly breakfast talk, one local creative, one globally shared theme, no pitch, no agenda. I’ve been showing up most months since we landed in the Valley, and it continues to pay off – in both creative stimulus and building a network of creative individuals here in the sunniest city on earth.

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Fashion Designer. Gallery Owner. Conduit.

This month’s speaker was Sam Gomez, founder and executive director of The Sagrado, the first and only art gallery and community space in South Phoenix. Sam’s path there wasn’t a straight line. Gomez has worked as a fashion designer, run a gallery, and by his own account spent a career doing what he called curating life’s opportunities – first for himself, and increasingly for a lot of other people.

He opened by calling curation his life’s work. His legacy. “It’s an orchestra in my mind,” he said. “Everything is interconnected.”

That kind of statement could easily land as a platitude in a room full of people at different stages of life’s journey – many of whom may not have earned the right to own that statement. Sam has. The Sagrado opened its doors on Central Avenue in 2016, in response to a city that had made almost no investment in South Phoenix as a cultural corridor. A decade later, in a brand new location, The Sagrado has engaged thousands of community members, directed years of annual exhibitions like Mujeres del Desierto, and become enough of a civic fixture that Sam now consults directly with city planners on public design projects. That’s not a metaphor about curation. That’s a decade of choosing what stays.

Learning to Ask for Help

The part of the talk that surprised me most wasn’t about vision. It was about vulnerability.

Sam talked about how, early on, curation felt like a solo pursuit, his taste, his eye, his call. As time went on, he said, he had to learn to collaborate. To be vulnerable. To ask for help. “Curation is not just work,” he told the room. “It’s healing. It’s medicine, for you and for your collaborative circle.”

I’ve sat through plenty of talks about collaboration that treat it as a productivity hack. Sam wasn’t pitching efficiency. He was describing something closer to survival, the recognition that carrying a vision alone eventually breaks whoever’s carrying it, and that bringing other people in isn’t a compromise of the vision. Collaboration is what keeps the vision alive.

“It’s not just my voice,” he said. “It’s not only me. I’m just a conduit, connecting dots, helping bring people to the table.”

Ancestors of Tomorrow

Sam used the phrase “cultural developers” to describe people doing this kind of work, artists, organizers, curators, and argued that cities should treat them with the same seriousness as any other kind of developer shaping a city’s future. “We are the ancestors of tomorrow,” he said. He has said that before, publicly. He’ll likely say it again. It’s close to a personal mantra at this point, tied to The Sagrado’s own guiding framework: Pasado, Presente, Futuro. Past, present, future, held together on purpose.

He traced part of his own arrival at civic work back to a single sentence someone told him years ago: if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. That line pushed him out of the studio and into rooms with city leaders and planners, not because he’d developed a sudden appetite for policy, but because he realized showing up usually means showing up for a group, not just for yourself. It’s how The Sagrado ended up consulting on projects like the 3rd Street Pedestrian and Bicycle Bridge, and why Sam’s current focus, The Sagrado Futuro along the Rio Salado, is aiming at something bigger than a gallery. He’s not asking to be invited to the table anymore. He’s helping build it.

You’re Not Here by Accident

The line that has stuck with me the longest was the simplest one. Sam said you’re not in a space or a place by accident. You’re meant to be where you are, and the real work is figuring out why, then curating that into your future.

It’s a generous way to think about how people end up doing what they do. It’s also, if I’m honest, a slightly uncomfortable one, because it assumes the accident isn’t an excuse. Wherever you’ve landed, the responsibility to make something of it is still yours.

Sam framed this as a constant state, not a milestone. Anyone doing real creative work, he said, is consistently curating, deciding what stays, who’s in the room, what gets built next. Not as an occasional flourish. As the actual mechanism of the job.

The Conduit Concept

I keep coming back to the conduit idea. So much of what people call networking, or matchmaking, or, in my world, staffing and talent matching, is really just curation done well or done badly. Connecting the right person to the right table at the right moment takes a real skill, not a lucky guess. It’s no coincidence. Sam made a compelling case that this skill deserves to be treated with the same respect as any other trade or craft. At FlexTal, that’s more or less the whole job description, minus the gallery openings. Sam would probably call it curation too.

When The Sagrado’s Ancestral Art Exhibition returns again this fall – if June’s talk was any indication – it’s worth putting on the calendar. Ten years of gathering art and community on a corridor most of the city overlooked is not a small thing, and after listening to Sam talk about legacy for an hour, I don’t think he’d want anyone to treat it like one either.

Thanks, as always, to the CreativeMornings Phoenix team for another morning worth the early alarm, and to Sam Gomez for making the word “curate” mean something brand new, again.

If you’ve never made it to a CreativeMornings event, the local chapter is worth a Friday morning. The speakers change, the venues change, the themes change. The quality of the room never does. Find it at creativemornings.com.