The Sustaining Power of Conversation

In all honesty, I fully expected to be confronted with a collection of overly optimistic self-help mantras and sickly saccharine positive affirmations. Instead, I was met with what felt like genuine gratitude, followed by some very real, very difficult questions I had also been asking: 

“Thank you. Thank you for being an artist. Thank you for making your work. Thank you for choosing a life which can be hard, and hard to explain. Why is it so hard? Why are so many talented artists exhausted and broke? Making Your Life as an Artist looks at the challenges artists face.”

I was relieved to find that nothing on the page dismissed my struggles and uncertainties with low-vibrating aphorisms. Instead, it validated how I actually felt: that it is hard to be an artist. But it didn’t present the situation as hopeless, either. Rather, it described how we would dive into artists’ realities and address their issues with practical field experience and strategies from peers.

I decided to look more deeply into Artists U, the organization that would be leading the workshop. Its co-founding director, Andrew Simonet, had spent years working with artists to inform a program that would address the core issues impacting artists’ sustainability: time, money, planning, and mission. After digging through the rest of Artists U’s website and getting comfortable with their realistic, artist-centered approach, I thought, “Well, what the heck! I’ll give it a shot.”

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It’s hard to recall exactly what my first Artists U workshop was like, perhaps because now I can’t imagine not having the tools and community I got from the experience. I do remember being a little intimidated by the others in my first group, which was fairly large with something like 60 artists. I am generally shy in big Zoom rooms and find it tricky to find the right moment to assert myself through unreadable, digitized social cues. The group had a lot of well-established artists whose names I recognized, too, and I thought for a moment that I might be in over my head. 

Once we got into the swing of things, though, I quickly became glad that I had joined. This was real talk with real tools and real people. In addition to the abundant practical information that Andrew and his co-facilitator, Michaela Pilar Brown, offered, I felt nourished and validated by the other participants’ perspectives and the art that they shared.

I emailed Stanlyn after that first workshop gushing about how meaningful it was for me, how I’d learned so much, and how it had so quickly shifted my ways of thinking and working for the better.

Shortly thereafter, I started an Artists U Working Group of my own with a few colleagues. And when NPN offered the workshop again a year later, I immediately jumped on the opportunity to go for a third round. Once I was in, I wanted to be certain that I would always have an artist community like this to be a part of.

Not long after that, Stanlyn, Andrew, and Michaela invited me and another participant, NPN Southern Programs Take Notice Fund awardee Courtney Young, to host a series of follow up sessions for attendees who wanted more time to gather and share. Our group was a lot smaller, which gave us the opportunity to get to know each other better, and the space to have even more dynamic and intimate dialogue. 

A few months later, Courtney and I joined Andrew and Michaela in co-facilitating Artists U’s Projects Club. Projects Club, defined widely, was a nine month long, once-a-month series of conversations around what participants were specifically working toward, and was “a chance to not do it alone.” Artists’ projects varied wildly, from people looking for balance when returning to their practice after a long time away, to getting out of debt. After the gestational nine months of conversation and introspection, my own project of wanting to create with less stress and more ease, had, in fact, seen a significant breakthrough.