Image item
 
2025 is a beast.
 
Let's not do it alone.
 

We want to be in community as we walk together through this time.
 
We (Andrew Simonet, Mama Nef Partlow-Myrick, and Victor Rodgers) are hosting a free weekend workshop for Baltimore area artists. We will use Artists U prompts and tools to build conversations around resources, wellbeing, artistic practice, and the audiences and communities around our work, all of it in the context of this chaotic and dispiriting moment.
 
This workshop is an opportunity to build clarity around your artistic practice and the resources that sustain it. It is community organizing, creating positive and rigorous conversations across artistic disciplines, ages, and cultures.
 
It is specific and practical: the principles, tools, and prompts artists use to make sustainable lives and to make the art and impact that matters most to them.
 
This work is grounded in your practice and intentions. We don't know what you should do (obviously). Nothing here is prescriptive. We are not here to “fix” artists. That's our whole point: Artists aren't broken, artists are geniuses. Let's be geniuses, together. Let's be as creative and resourceful in making our lives as we are in making our art.
 
There's nothing wrong with you. The structures of the art world teach us to blame ourselves for struggles which are, in fact, systemic. Building dialogue and solidarity is a powerful remedy. You are not alone.
 
Artists are incredible. As you know. Many of us face similar struggles. And artists have figured out brilliant ways of making it work. This is where our conversation begins.
 
There are a few artist testimonials below.
If you want to read more testimonials, we put some on this page.
 
 
Sustaining in a Time of Change
Friday, June 20, 7:00 pm -8:30 pm
Saturday, June 21, 10:00 am-5:00 pm
The Stu Baltimore  |  218 W Saratoga St. 2nd floor #1
 
 

 
Artists U was so instrumental and foundational to my practice, I can't overstate the impact it has had on my life. The 2012 workshop I attended helped me build skills—thinking about, talking about, and planning for the future of my art practice—that I still use regularly, a decade later.
 
          —choreographer
 
“Our local art sphere is changing with these workshops. People are talking about things differently and feeling more empowered. The impact is deep.”
 
          —visual artist
 
I cannot begin to tell you all how fortunate I feel to have participated in the intensive today. I have been working full-time as a self-supporting artist for ten years, yet there was not a single idea or observation that arose today that did not make an impact on me.
 
—filmmaker
 

 
 
 
I am writing to you because you took an Artists U workshop or downloaded Making Your Life as an Artist. Focus and attention are essential to artists so if these emails take up your time without giving you something in return please do hit the unsubscribe button and go make art.
4624 Osage Ave
Philadelphia, PA 19143, USA