What Rujeko Hockley Can’t Live Without

I have outsourced my brain at this point and I need to write everything down. I have a fancy silverjournalthat was handmade in Italy, and it goes back to 2019, and I also have a Moleskine that I use for all things personal. This is my system. I’m notoriously changing handbags every day and losing things, literally. I’m always looking for my keys and my headphones, but I have to transfer the notebooks from eachbag. It’s a personal archive, a to-do list and ideas for big-picture thinking. If I’m with my daughter on the train and she’s bored, I say, sure, you can draw in my notebook. It’s a catchall. I have so many of these going back years and years and years, and they chronicle my personal and professional lives.

Though I’m a museum professional and I’ve been doing this for years, I buy stuff from exhibitions. In my house, I have a shoe box of exhibition postcards from high school. I love to have a material record of something that was very impactful, and I think a lot of people feel that way. You can see it on your phone, but it’s not the same. I love the journals we created for the Amy Sherald show that I curated at the Whitney. Some artists and some curators are super into merch, and some are not into it. For Amy, we did the journals in collaboration with her and my colleagues who work in the shop and brand marketing and merchandising. That’s a part of the museum, too. We had a meeting with her and we asked if she liked merch, what she was into, and what kind of merch she liked. Her show traveled here from SFMOMA, and they had done merch there, so we looked at what they did and asked ourselves if we wanted to do the same thing or if we wanted to make our own, and we did both. We took some of their magnets, but the journals were our creation.

They called this a baby progressive lens, but I usually wear contacts most of the time. I think of my glasses as functional accessories for nights and weekends, cozy moments, or on rainy days. I’m obsessed with these, and I’ve had them for a few months now. They’re from a British brand that a friend recommended to me. She lives in my neighborhood and our kids go to school together. I was telling her I need glasses and I’ve had the same ones for a long time. I’m super-nearsighted, so I cannot function without a corrective lens of some sort. The store is right by the Whitney. I went there and had a very lovely experience that was also fast. It felt like the experiences I had in early adulthood when I’d try on 16 pairs and the optician was there giving me advice about my face shape.

I’ve loved this hair-care brand for years, since my height as a natural-hair girl in grad school when I had so much time on my hands. I did my hair and that was my life then. I took such good care of it and I watched all the YouTube videos. That was when I learned about this brand. A Black husband and wife from Baltimore founded the company for their own needs, and I use their products on my two daughters as well. For myself, though, when I’m wearing a twist out or my natural hair, I’m obsessed with this hydrating spray. When I wake up in the morning and I’m wondering what my hair is doing, I use this because it’s really lightweight and smells good. It’s like a humectant, but it’s not heavy.

I really love handheld blow-dryers because I’ve had natural hair my whole life. My mom would never let me relax my hair, so I didn’t really learn how to straighten it. I still don’t know how to fully do it. I cobbled together tips from the internet, and I love this brush. I don’t know how to perfectly blow-dry my hair, especially not to look really good. But now, with this brush, I can do it enough to have it be fuller, or I use it before I get my hair braided because I have a lot of hair that’s very thick and dense.

I’m a person who operates in cycles. I’ll buy something I really like, and then I want to wear it all the time. I’m wearing these barrel jeans today, and I have them in two colors now. I got them in the black because my friend had them and I had to ask her where her jeans were from — they were so cute. I immediately bought them and then purchased them again in a blue wash that is more casual for wearing at home and on the weekends. I can wear the black pair to work because they can be dressed up or dressed down.

I go to a lot of galas for work because we do a lot of special events. I love to dress up and I love a special look. But I’ve realized after many years of doing this that I can’t buy a new dress every time. Some dresses I know I’ll wear again, and some I just want to wear one time, even if I felt and looked great. So Rent the Runway is my friend.

This is more a product of life stage and how much time I have to devote to shopping, but I was a huge vintage girl. I have a million vintage dresses that I can no longer zip up because of life. And some of them are not my style anymore, but I refuse to let them go. Shopping for vintage is time-consuming in a way that doesn’t work for my life, which is why I really likeThe RealReal. I’ll literally be on the app and I’ll sort by what’s in the store closest to me in the city. I literally did this yesterday for our Whitney gala last night. There was a very cute Ganni dress on the app, so I decided to go and try it on. I bought it, and it was on sale.

They’re super-comfortable and machine washable, and when they come out of the machine, they look brand new. That very bright red color looks really good with pants, skirts, and so much more. I just went to Paris for three days for a quick trip, and I’m a notorious overpacker. I literally brought four pairs of shoes for a three-day trip, but I only wore these shoes. I was walking all around the city and biking. I was out all day and went from day to night with the same shoes, though I changed my outfits. They’re also good for being on your feet all the time, like I am for many hours each day. When we install a show, we’re on our feet all day for one to three weeks. Every curator learns the hard way when we first start out that our footwear choices during install are very important.

Packing cubes are my biggest travel hack, because I grew up traveling a lot with my parents. My mom worked for the U.N. for most of my childhood. I thought I was a good traveler, and I am, but my husband, who really travels, couldn’t believe I didn’t know about packing cubes when we started dating. They really saved my life and I have so many. They’re good for every kind of traveling — whether that’s work travel, individual and personal travel, or family travel. I took one big cube to Paris with my four outfits and my shoes on the other side of my suitcase. But if I’m traveling with my kids, I can do one for my clothes and another for my swimsuits and underwear, then one for each kid with all their pajamas and outfits. It’s a much better way to be organized. Even if I have to get ready for an event at work, I’ll put my things in the smaller size because I’ll be changing in the bathroom here. If not, I’ll be scattered because I’m an Aquarian, so I’m not one of those neat people.

I literally have one in my pocket; I just did a tour of Amy’s show, so I knew I needed something. I don’t wear makeup every day. I’m not a full-face person, and I don’t know how to do that. I also don’t have time to do that, even if I wanted to. But this makes me feel like at least I’m pulled together. I’ll use it as blush, on my lips, and on my eyelids with mascara. It’s also very easy and affordable.

This was a very important exhibition that happened in 1976 atLACMA, curated by David Driskell, who is a legendary Black curator and artist. He is one of the people who made this field, honestly, that I situate myself within because he was always thinking of Black artists and people and their contributions to art and history. Obviously, I didn’t see the show in 1976 because I wasn’t alive, but the catalogue exists in the world and I have a copy of it that I found at a secondhand bookstore. I’ve referenced it, read it, and looked at it, and it’s an important touchstone for me in terms of my own professional forebears. We were told the story that there were no Black artists, and we know that isn’t true because look at what this show told us. We sometimes live in these cycles of amnesia where we’re reinventing the wheel all the time because we’re being told our history didn’t exist. There’s that Toni Morrison quote about racism being a distraction and catalogues are shorthand because there’s literally a book about it. I can go and do my work without the need to explain it. They hold the proof that the work has been done and they’re someplace to build from. We don’t have to start from the beginning every time because the historical memory is short. Someone like Alvin Ailey or Jack Whitten, whose show is up at MoMA right now — these are figures who are no longer alive, and they were incredible artists in their lifetimes and beyond. They haven’t really received the full, monographic, heavily researched and institutional resources that the Whitney or MoMA can put behind them until now. Books circulate in a different way.