The term “emerging artist” used to make me cringe. I thought they might as well call early-career artists “baby artists”. The whole concept that a title is needed for people who have decided they want to continue to make art into adulthood seemed a little ridiculous to me. I thought I knew a lot about the world when I graduated from art school over ten years ago. I thought I had sized up the art world and decided: no thank you. I thought I wanted to challenge the status quo and change the world (including the art world) through my art! Ha. The rest of my twenties did not go according to any plan - grand nor not-so-grand. I almost immediately stopped making art upon graduation. And despite an acute awareness of the statistics about art school grads not making art post college, I STILL failed to keep up my studio practice. There were multiple factors as to why I quit. And I now believe one of the major reasons I stopped painting was that I became disillusioned with changing the world through art via the fine art world.
Not long after art school graduation, I entered the full time work force with a job at an elementary charter school. I pivoted to changing the world through sharing art-making and connecting with young people through the Arts. Fast-forward twelve years later and here I am back at wanting to change the world through art. This time it’s different. This time I have access to countless crowd-sourced resources thanks to technology and social media. Not to mention the backbone that I finally realized I had once I entered my thirties. Not just because of lumbar pain, but because I had a little bit more experience with systems and status quo-s. I learned that changing the world starts with small actions inside of oneself and inside your community.
I now receive phrases like “emerging artists” with new lenses. I have a different definition of emerging. I deny the art world’s definition and embrace
adrienne maree brown’s reclaiming of the term emergence in her strategy for community organizing. She defines her emergent strategy as a strategy for “building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions” and as “an adaptive, relational way of being”. If you are not familiar with her work, please follow
adrienne maree brown and read her all her books. “
Emergent Strategy” is a great place to start.
There are countless art schools failing their students when they are sent out into the world without any business skills. I am not asking for there to be yet another graduation requirement or a separate major/program/degree (no thank you PhD in Fine Art). I just see a need for one or two undergraduate level classes or free on-demand classes on developing your plan for how you want to proceed in a system that does not always value its creatives. Thanks to podcasts and sites like Youtube and Skillshare, there is an overwhelming amount of advice and information on how to lay the foundation for your art business. My foundation is not just built on the values and vision statements I wrote with my art in mind. The ground I have laid for my business has been collected, sorted, sifted, tilled, watered, packed, turned, unearthed, packed again, and fertilized with ALL the life I have experienced and the connections I have made in the last 12+ years.
I do not want to just make art, make money, and take care of myself. I want to make art in order to connect with my true self in order to connect with others. Connection is a personal value and a business value. I gave up on my art earlier in my life because I gave up on myself. I gave myself to my community first instead of tending to myself IN ORDER to serve my community. I have set it straight now. I now know where Connection really needs to start. I know myself, therefore I am able to know others as well as know other living things. By “know”, I mean to really know and to connect with deeply. I connect to myself in order to connect in community and in order to connect with the Earth. I take care of myself and my community and my planet. My planet and community take care of me in return. I am the Earth. My art is me having an Earth experience.
My immediate community knows how very intentional I am about all aspects of my daily life. It is no different when running my business. It is important to me to build my art business and painting practice in an ethical way that causes as little harm as possible to people and the planet. Yes - I am a voting, tax-paying, consumer-citizen in a capitalist society and therefore complicit in destructive consumerist practices AND I am emerging and striving to be better with each little moment and movement in my own personal life. With each step, I learn and I adjust. I am emergent. I am growing. I can adapt and I will adapt. I hope to continue to be called in and call others into sharing new information. We can emerge together, we can adapt in collaboration with one another and with this living planet.
All my art-making materials, studio tools, product packaging, shipping supplies - I have a long list of necessary products required for sharing my art with the world. I aim to use as little non-renewable, damaging processes and products as possible. Recycled paint, compostable stickers, non-plastic packing tape, cork moving “foam” are just some of the supplies I have discovered along this path of striving. One could spend a LIFETIME overthinking running a sustainable, ethical business. I am not interested in shaming others for what they do in their small businesses and art-making practices. I hope one day there are more ways for us to share and collaborate on ways we can do better without policing each other. We need to hold each other and cheer one another on, while holding the real bad guys accountable. While we spend extra time and money to be “green”, huge corporations merrily continue to harm us, harm our siblings, harm our animal and insect friends, and harm the climate and planet. All of this for profit’s sake. The word “profit” is not that old. It is definitely a modern, colonizer term that we as a species have not always used to think about when it comes to time, energy, and value.
Value. What do I value? I value my time, specifically my creative time and my time outside of being productive. I value Earth and its natural world. I value my relationships with people and other animals. I value the plants in my garden, the weeds I work at in my yard, the squirrel in the tree outside my studio window, the birds at the birdfeeders, the pollinators loving on our sage plants. I value education. I value learning with and from others and the planet. I value freedom. I value my freedom to be me and love on me and the beloveds in my life. I value freedom to make art and experience pleasure. I value our honesty - in relationships and community. I value you. Exactly as you are. And I value your courage and dedication and passion and rest.
I know there is more, but this is what I am about and what I value today, Summer Solstice 2023. Thank you for being here, emerging with me. I value you for exactly who you are.
Cheers from my paint cup.
