The more boring your job seems, the more important your imagination becomes

On my first day as a member of a large corporately structured organization, I showed up wearing an orange blazer, blue sneakers, black Buddy Holly eyeglasses, and my finest vintage T-shirt; if my new job had been lead singer of a nerdcore band, I would have totally rocked the look. So it was really unfortunate that I had been hired by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and not Nerdapalooza.

I feel it’s important to reveal here that I’m probably the least likely person to ever work for an art museum — though I could easily have been voted most likely to get kicked out of one. The facts: I never studied art or art history, have zero experience of any kind working in the art world, and have historically viewed museums, and their staff, as kinda uptight, rule-bound you-know-whats. Not to mention the fact that contemporary art in particular always tripped me up. Wait, I’m supposed to touch the art? I’m NOT supposed to touch the art? And how am I supposed to even figure out whether what I’m looking at IS the art? If there is one crumpled candy wrapper on the museum floor it’s garbage, but if a whole pile of candy is sitting in the corner of a gallery, it’s art? (Note: Candy piled in a corner is actually a well-known piece of art by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. And, yes, you can touch and even eat the candy.)

I suppose my ignorance at the time was understandable given that the only real exposure I had to contemporary art growing up was the folk art festivals my mom used to take me and my sibs to; and I’m here to tell you that a clay cookie jar with a scrunched- up cowboy face stuck on it and a big ol’ cork shaped like a Stetson pushed through the top of said cowboy’s head is not, despite being made in the eighties, what museums mean by “contemporary art.”

In any case, it turned out that my complete and utter befuddlement about the art world was actually why I had been offered the job in the first place. One day, totally out of the blue, I received a call from the director of the museum at the time, Tim Rodgers, asking if I might be interested in being in charge of turning a traditional gallery space within the museum into a new kind of forum for artistic expression that would disrupt all the usual conventions of museum-going. Tim was looking for a rule-breaking outsider to activate a stunning new museum space with new programs, audiences, and revenue streams, and I was looking for a new challenge. So despite a healthy amount of trepidation, I decided to give it a shot.

That’s how I found myself sitting in Tim’s sleek corner office dressed like a cartoon character and awaiting instructions for my first day as the resident rule breaker. Tim, a bald man in his fifties with a strong chin and impeccable posture, sat perched behind an angular glass desk reading (what else?) an Artforum magazine.

“Welcome,” Tim said, surveying his stark white kingdom. “We’re excited to have you here.”

“I’m excited to be here!” I said with a big smile intended to distract him from my noticeable jitters.

“Fantastic,” Tim said, getting up from behind his desk. “Let me introduce you to the team and show you to your office.”

Before I could muster the courage to tell him this had all been a big mistake, that I couldn’t even properly curate my wardrobe, let alone a big beautiful gallery space (unless they had their sights set on a cowboy folk-art cookie-jar installation), he was marching me off to meet my new colleagues. The thinly veiled shock on the faces of my prim and proper new coworkers as Tim introduced me like a proud father who had just sprung his daughter from juvie said it all.

“This is Tania Katan, we hired her because she’s a (barely suppressing his mischievous grin) . . . disruptor!”

“This is Tania, we brought her in because this museum needs some new energy and she writes and performs (now really getting titillated) . . . edgy stories!”

“This is Tania Katan and she is going to create (on the verge of a full-on emission) INNOVATIVE programs!”

And then the grand finale: “This is Tania and she thinks OUTSIDE the box!”

With the awkward meet-and-greets behind us, Tim showed me to my “office,” which was in fact a cubicle. A very small cubicle, maybe two feet by three-and-a-half feet, tops. When I stood in the middle with my arms extended, like a scarecrow, I could almost touch the two opposite walls at once. I was fairly certain this was the smallest office that employees can legally be placed in. Just as I was pondering the size of my new work space relative to the average prison cell, I heard blood curdling screams! “What’s that?” I asked Tim.

“Oh. Ice cream cake. The staff is celebrating a birthday. They usually get regular cake, so they’re just really excited,” he explained. “Welcome to the museum,” he said cheerfully, as he turned back in the direction of his palatial office.

I stepped out of my cell. Paced the corridor. Wished I was a smoker. I stepped back inside and realized the chances were pretty high that I was going to lose my mind in this job. Taking a deep breath, I told myself that I had no choice but to get “lost” on my way back from lunch. Still, that was three whole hours away. In that moment of occupational despair, I did the only thing I knew how to do, the thing that any good practitioner of classical theater would do when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune were hitting her directly in the pie hole . . . I launched into a soliloquy. A soliloquy, as you may know from Hamlet, is when one talks to oneself, aloud, because one is losing one’s shit.

Okay, Tania, it looks like you have a BIG problem! How the hell are you supposed to create innovative programs in a big, beautiful empty space when you are trapped inside a teeny, tiny, squalid space? And isn’t it ironic that you were hired to “think outside the box” and now he expects you to think from inside a tiny little box? Which resides inside a larger box: the museum itself. Whoa. This is so meta. Question: Did you already sign the contract? Answer: You are me, so you know we did! Another question: Doesn’t Tim look like The Master from Doctor Who, only with less hair? OMG, he hired you to control your mind, that’s why he stuck you in a box!

At some point during my one-woman performance, I had the most startling epiphany. Maybe the key to thinking outside the box WAS to think inside the box. I looked around for clues. Cubicles, I noted, have no ceilings. And when there are no ceilings . . . there are no limits!

In that moment, I had two powerful insights that inspired me to stay through lunch (and a few years after that too).

Contrary to what my new boss seemed to believe, my theater training had actually prepared me for thinking INSIDE the box, not outside it. Theater LOVES boxes. We have box offices, black box theaters . . . hell, we even have box seats. I know my way inside and outside of a box! That sounded dirty. But get your mind out of the gutter. You know what I mean.

The less imaginative our physical office — or our job or title or role — the more essential our imagination becomes.

This is our work as Creative Trespassers: sneaking imagination into tiny confined places with four walls — and breaking those walls down, making room for our creative ideas that have no bounds.

In the spirit of these realizations, the first program I created in my role as resident “disruptor” was an online series called “Out of the Cubicle.” I hired a videographer, and once a week, the two of us would break out of my cubicle and sneak around the other offices making short, punchy videos that poked fun at, while also celebrated, the very art institution I worked for. My goal was to engage colleagues in playful interactions during the workday, while at the same time show viewers who thought (like I once had) that museums were stodgy and unapproachable can also be inviting, playful, and inclusive places, accessible to everyone. Sure, there were some colleagues who saw me running around the compound with joy and purpose and immediately reported me to my boss as well as to the board of directors, on the grounds that “She’s not working, she’s just having fun.” As if the two were mutually exclusive. In any case, I respectfully noted their disapproval and carried on.

In the first episode, I decided to run for Employee of the Month, launching a full-on Tracy Flick–style campaign (only very slightly less psycho). In another episode, I invited the distinguished architect Will Bruder (who had designed the entire museum) to redesign my crappy two-by-three-and-a-half-foot cubicle and filmed the “extreme office makeover” process.

We launched the videos with zero marketing dollars — no splashy ads, no blast to a giant email list (we didn’t even have a small email list), and no PR team. We did it the old-fashioned way: we posted the videos on Facebook. Then we picked up our phones, texted friends and colleagues a link to watch the videos, and hoped a handful would. Then something unexpected happened: Our friends didn’t just watch the videos, they shared them. And then the people they shared them with shared them, and then those people shared them, and pretty soon visitors from all over the world — California, Missouri, New York, Iceland, Mexico, England, Italy — were streaming into the museum because they had seen these wacky videos and wanted to find out for themselves what this Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art place was all about.

The appeal of the videos was simple: They showed people that the art world, and those who work in it, are just as silly, awkward, ordinary, and extraordinary as anyone in any other profession can be. My original goal had been to break down the walls of my little cubicle to let creativity in, but in the end we actually ended up breaking down the walls of the entire museum and inviting the world in!

The lesson for you is this: No matter how unsexy your industry, how uninspiring your job title, or how small your cubicle, you too can find ways to break down the walls and let your imagination in.

Tania Katan is the author of Creative Trespassing: How to Put the Spark and Joy Back into Your Work and Life, from which this article is excerpted.