So my name is Ashley Taylor. I'm an instructor here at the University of Central Florida with the School of Visual Arts and Design and it's my honor to introduce Karen Atkinson today. She is talking to us from California, all the way from California.
Thank you for getting up bright and early to talk with us today. A little introduction. Karen Atkinson is an artist, curator, non-profit founder, business owner, instigator, and collaborator who has shown internationally and creates large public projects.
as well as gallery-based work. She does not wait to be validated by the art world gatekeepers and has produced large and varied projects on her own terms. She's a founder of Side Street Projects, Getting Your Shit Together, and was a faculty member at CalArts for 31 years, although she has been teaching for much longer.
GYST was founded officially in 2005 as a way to help make life better for artists by providing resources, services, software. publications, a casual radio station, and a podcast called How the Art World Works. She shares her knowledge with other artists as an activist in order to bust the myths of the art world.
She is a little bit irreverent and tries to have some fun when teaching business skills and relevant information to help you thrive as an artist on your own terms. So Karen is here to talk all things Get Your Shit Together as artists And because of the vast nature of this creative career, part of this session will be a question and answer. She is here to answer your burning questions.
So I ask you, please send your questions to me in the chat to the right and stay in mute during the duration of the presentation. And so without further ado, here is Karen Atkinson. Good morning, everybody, at least for me.
Yeah. Okay, so I thought I'd give you a little bit of introduction in terms of why GIST and what that means. I actually run this project as an artist project, not just a business. So there's an interesting history of artists who run businesses as an art practice.
And I actually discovered quite a few other artists doing this actually around the world. And so I also started a nonprofit in 1991 or officially in 1992 and also ran that as an artist project. And so I see those very different than just running an organization that's separate from how artists function or how artists think.
And it's interesting, you should be careful what you start because Side Street Projects, I ran it for 10 years and gave it to the next generation and it's still open, still thriving. So again, sometimes you start stuff and it happens. I had no idea that it would last for over 25 years. So that's really interesting. So what I'm going to do today is I thought long and hard about what we're going through, the fact that we're all kind of sequestered.
And it makes being an artist challenging, but it's also a really interesting time to think outside of what you know already and thinking about the conventions of being an artist. This is a really good time to thwart those conventions. So I put together a kind of PowerPoint and I'm going to go over a couple of things to remind you of things that you could be doing while you're stuck in your pajamas, which actually could be a really great thing.
So I'm going to just start and I'm going to go through kind of 10 steps of how to get your shit together. And then what I did is I put together a whole bunch of different venues and ideas for you to think about while you're having an unconventional art career. This actually might be one of the best things that happens to artists because they're not just thinking there's one way to be an artist. There's actually many, many ways to be an artist.
So. as I go, ask questions to Ashley, and I'll try to answer them. And at the end, I'll open it up, and you can ask me as many questions as you want.
So we'll go from there. Everybody ready? Okay, great.
Okay, so I'm starting out. It's about 730 in the morning here. I've had my two cups of coffee, so I'm raring to go.
So let's get started. So one of the things that I think is really important for artists is to think about planning ahead. One of the things I do is when I'm talking to artists or having individual meetings, I'll ask artists what their fantasy is about being an artist. And that's always usually kind of surprising to them.
But I think it's really important to kind of think about what you want in the future or what you want the end game to be. So one of the things that I've done is had artists write their own obituary, not to be actually morbid. but the idea that you actually really start thinking about what you want to accomplish in your lifetime.
And actually what's interesting about that is a lot of artists change the way that they think about being an artist once they have to think about their lifetime goals. Now, the other thing that's interesting about goals and life planning is that you also have to be ready to make a change in a second. The thing that we're going through now, you might have had all kinds of great plans, you might have been having an opening, you might have been having an end of the year show, all of those things are now kind of up in the air.
But it doesn't mean that you can't keep working. This is a really, really good time to start thinking about what you want to do. It's a good time to think about, well, what are your personal goals?
This is a really good time to archive your work or to get things ready for applying for opportunities, things like that. If you don't have a kick-ass artist statement, now is the perfect time to work on it. You could actually have virtual studio visits with each other and critique each other's work via your computer or whatever. So think about the difference between your fantasy as an artist.
In other words, if you want to be more famous than God and you want to have a house in every country and whatever, you better get started. But that might also be... very different from the reality of what you're thinking about.
So again, think about what you kind of want. You also need to be making work. Even though you're stuck in your pajamas, actually, it's a really good way to make work.
You're comfortable. There's no one around to watch you make work. You can do all kinds of interesting projects.
You can find materials that you never would have made work with. So again, One of the things that's really important is that you make work every single week. So that means that you might have gone for a month now and not made work just because your situation was kind of off or different. But even when we live in, quote, normal times, whatever that means anymore, the idea is that you take at least one day a week or a couple hours a week and make work.
Now making work could be sitting in your studio reading, it could be taking notes, it could be actually fantasizing that really great public art project that you want to do when this kind of current situation subsides. But make sure that everybody knows that you need that studio time. If you have a family, you know, if you live with other people, tell them that, you know, every Saturday this is your is your studio time, you're going to actually make that work.
Once you graduate and get out of school, it's going to be even harder to try to make your work, and so it's good to schedule that time. Because if you're not making work, it means that you can't really move forward. So what I recommend is that if you're having a hard time managing your time, and you know, time goes by in weeks and you haven't done something, I suggest that you have a staff meeting with yourself every Monday, or whatever your kind of, whenever your workday starts. What's really nice about that is that every single entity in the universe has staff meetings, individual organizations, corporations, nonprofits, et cetera, et cetera. And they're all trying to get something done.
You might be a solo working artist, but that doesn't mean that you can't have your own staff meeting with yourself. And it's really great because if you have a staff meeting, let's say on a Monday morning, and you can think about last week and all the things you didn't get done. you can take your list and kind of arrange it and say, okay, what's possible, especially during a pandemic or, you know, when there's other things shaking up everybody's life, it's a good time to kind of reorient and think, okay, I can't go outside or I can't actually go have a meeting, but how else do I do something?
This is a really great time to have more studio time, to get things together, make your CV and your resume perfect, and also learning everything that you can. So... You should be doing something every week that's not only making your work, but also something in which you're completing the business of art.
That could be things like researching opportunities. or, you know, making connections with people, or, you know, updating your website, or building your website in the first place. So, use this time to kick butt.
That's my recommendation. So, the other thing is you should get incredibly organized. I have had artists email me and say it took them three days to find an image on their computer, and they were trying to apply for a show or a grant or something like that, again, make sure that you know where everything is and get as organized as possible.
So this means that you should be keeping track of certain kinds of work. Whoops. Oh, I have no cursor.
Hi, everybody. I'm Shannon Lindsey. I teach at UCF. I'm the gallery director and I also teach the BFA seminar class where we cover a lot of professional development topics. So I think your question about fellowship and I did share those links in the chat for anybody who wants to reference them.
I think context has a big part to do with grants versus fellowships. A lot of times you'll hear about fellowships. in connection with a particular organization. Like you might get a fellowship through a graduate program or maybe a museum or a art center is doing a fellowship, where essentially you are getting kind of a monetary support or even sometimes physical support.
So you might get studio space and things like that to support your research. A lot of times with fellowships, it's a little bit more open-ended in terms of what that research looks like and what a kind of end result would look like. Whereas a grant is usually very, very specific about there's going to be very specific criteria just within the grant itself. So it's going to cover for artists who are working in particular mediums or in particular research areas. And then there's also going to be very specific deliverables from that grant.
So It's a little bit more focused in terms of a grant, in terms of what they're asking for, and what you essentially have to provide as supplemental information for why you're applying for it and how you plan to use that money specifically. And a lot of times with grants, you do have to develop a very detailed budget that outlines your supplies, if you have any kind of labor costs or rental costs, things like that. All of that really has to be fleshed out ahead of time.
And if you are granted the money, they're kind of holding you accountable to how you've said that you're going to spend that money too. So it's just a little bit different, I would say. Not that some fellowships are very specific, because they are, but generally that is kind of a bigger separation.
Usually the grants are much more specific. you know, granting artists who are working in a particular medium or in a particular area with a particular research focus. So I hope that answers the question.
I'm happy to give some, give some insight while we're waiting for Karen if anything that I can help provide. Like Ashley shared, her website is really an incredible resource and she also has a book which actually in the BFA seminar class we've been referencing this book all semester and it really is an incredible kind of handbook for artists and a tool that you can continue to reference it covers everything from taxes to even just organizing your files on the computer that she was getting into organization it's really key and you know I know a lot of us going into creative professions, dealing with like paperwork and the kind of business side is not necessarily always the most exciting or glamorous part of what we do as artists, but it really is very vital. So I think with her suggestions about coming up with a time to schedule, schedule times for like your staff meeting and like your kind of business side of your practice is really important because it's It's vital that you are participating in these professional activities to kind of gain momentum and experience as an artist.
Yeah, and again, you know, the links that I shared for the granting, it looks like a few people have some interests and questions about grants and funding. So I shared some links that were kind of specific to us as Florida artists. So we have local funding through Orange County, Florida.
We have state funding. There's funding that's also specific to artists within the southeast, and there's also funding that you can access that is open to national artists. So I kind of have all four of those, just that's just one resource for each of those.
And then there is a great newsletter through Artwork Archive that sends out a monthly newsletter for opportunities like exhibitions and residencies and also granting opportunities. So I do think it's good to get on these newsletters, especially if it's a kind of, if it's an organization offering funding. A lot of times these granting cycles are once a year, so it's nice to get signed up on those newsletters to where you're informed and you know when those deadlines are coming up.
Guess what? Oh, yay! I'm back!
All right. Sorry, it took over my computer. I had to restart and everything. Sorry about that.
We are back. Okay. All right.
I'm going to let you take over. That was really strange. All right. We're here now.
We're here now. We get to give you some great tips. So, all right. I'll let you have it now.
Okay. Thank you, everybody. Okay. So, I wanted to actually show you.
a couple of things that you should be doing to keep track of your work. So, for instance, this is a software that I created that I started in 2000. And if anybody had told me then that I would be a software developer, I would have told them they were really nuts. It's not really my forte.
But I created software so I could run an organization. I was teaching full time. excuse me, and I was also trying to have an art practice. So I built a database to actually keep track of everything in the organization as well as my own work.
So later I decided that I thought maybe it would be a good idea to share with other artists and that's how the whole thing kind of started. So this is a screenshot of where you would keep track of all your artwork and you can do this on paper or figure out your own system as well. But you should always have things like the title, what the category is.
If you use something like this, it means that you can find anything that you want in one second. You should also have some sort of tracking number to keep track. Now, sometimes museums and galleries have tracking numbers, but nobody uses the exact same thing.
So it's a good idea for you to figure that out. And that information is on our website. Also, the date created. what the medium is, height for both framed and unframed work.
If you keep track of the status of that work, if anybody ever called you up and say, hey, what work do you have available, you could actually just easily sort and say, okay, what's available, and it would come up and you could print it out. Keywords, if you ever needed to search for certain kinds of work that you want for a particular show. I also have a place for you to have the description of the work. keep track of all the expenses of the work so you never undersell yourself. I once met with an artist who was really broke and she couldn't quite figure out what the deal was and she was using gold leaf in her work, but she wasn't keeping track of the expenses.
So she was selling her work for less than the materials that it cost to make it. Now that is not a good strategy. Keeping track of little information is the work insured.
If you build a crate for the work, you only have to weigh it once in its lifetime, instead of digging out your bathroom scale every time you want to ship something. You can keep track of anybody who's collected your work, any notes or things that I haven't thought of. There's a way to keep track of additions, and there's legal ramifications for making additions that you should always know about. You can keep track of as many images per artwork as possible, especially if you do installation or public work or anything like that.
you can track where your work is, where it's stored. I had someone else say that they had forgotten that they had loaned or given their work to their mother, and they were looking all over the place for that. So again, where is it?
Is it stored under your bed? Is it at your mom's house? Is it, you know, in your studio? You can keep track of sales and all your financial information, condition reports.
I figured out a way to create electronic edition reports. so that you could, or condition reports, so that you could actually always keep track of what the condition is. Now the reason you do that, so let's say you have a painting and you send it off to a gallery or a museum and there's a slight dent on the left upper corner.
If you keep track of that, then when they get it and they see, yes, the painting is really good condition except for a small dent on the top left corner. If someone destroys your painting or spills wine on it or does something else, then that way you're not stuck paying for it because they can't say, oh, well, it came damaged. And that's important because a lot of work gets damaged on the way back from somewhere. So if you keep track of that and you show that it's in good condition when they got it, you won't be stuck with the problem.
They'll have to take care of that. So there's a lot of things that you should keep track of. The other thing is to know the business.
I know that a lot of you have been studying this and I think that's a really good thing to know. The more stuff you know, the better. I always tell artists that they have to know more than their dealer or the curator or anybody else that they're working with.
You'll also run into people that don't know as much as you and that's a good time to kind of share information. I get a lot of questions about contracts because a lot of galleries refuse to do contracts with artists and there's reasons behind that. I'm not saying that they're necessarily good reasons, but again it's a good idea to sort of know as much as possible so that you're not kind of stumbling around in the dark. If you know more than other people then actually you look incredibly savvy.
And if you ask really good questions when you're having a meeting with somebody or a curator, that means that they kind of know what you're, they know that you know what you're doing, and that makes them actually feel a lot comfortable, and it's a lot easier to get stuff done. So again, a lot of artists email me and say, you know, what kind of work should I make? And they're interested in what galleries want.
The first thing I do is just say, don't even think about that. You know, again. Your audience and your work have some sort of match.
So if you're making artwork and nobody's paying attention, I think you should change your audience as opposed to changing your artwork. You have to be actually true to yourself. The worst thing you can do is make work to fit a grant or something like that.
You'll kick yourself later and you'll be really miserable. So don't hide in your studio. Get out and network.
Talk to people. I suggest to artists that they do a quarterly newsletter. The reason is, is that you can put a lot of stuff out there on social media and things like that when you're doing things.
But what happens if you're, you have a long time between gigs, you can actually send out a quarterly newsletter and talk about what you're working on. You might talk about other people's work. You might actually include information for other artists like deadlines and, and possibilities of where they can get information.
You can create links to really interesting sites and help each other. If you send out a newsletter and you only send it out quarterly, it doesn't bug people too much. It's not like you're sending stuff out all the time, but you can keep people informed at least every three months as opposed to them not hearing from you at all. So write about other people's work or, you know, if there's something for them, they'll probably always open it.
We send out a newsletter that has opportunities. We post them every week. They're already vetted, so they're not pay to play. We don't believe in paying for an opportunity.
So in other words, if there's an entry fee, run like hell. That's my suggestion. Also think about participating in new ways.
You're not obviously going to go to openings, but there might be other things you can do. was talking before about maybe doing studio visit exchanges with each other via Zoom or Skype or things like that. So think about lots of different options.
So networking doesn't have to die just because you can't see somebody in person. So seek and propose. The idea is that you need to find out everything out there that is possible for you. So different kinds of support. Money is one.
You can apply for grants. You can apply for time. Time might be a residency somewhere or a space to make work.
Or you might have support services. You might actually get time at a nonprofit printing lab or something like that. So look for those kind of opportunities.
Also in-kind. In-kind is anything that is donated to you that might be an object or time or support or things like that. If you need something for your work, let's say you need 10,000 cotton balls for your new installation. The idea is it's supposed to writing a grant and finding the money and then buying them. You could actually go to all the people who make cotton balls.
and you can ask him for a donation. And the idea is when you ask for a donation is to always give them something back, whether it's publicity or something like that. So InKind is a really great way to get things that you need without having to spend money. I've gotten tons of things donated.
I once did a project where I took 20 parking meters and wired them for sound. This was in the 90s. and commissioned artists and writers with HIV and AIDS to write stories because the only thing that was being, the only way you heard anything then was the media.
And that wasn't a really good overview. So I wrote to the only parking meter manufacturer in the country and I got 20 parking meters donated. You can't go to the local art supply store and buy a parking meter. So again, you might be thinking that, you know, there's different ways to get things. The other thing that's really important to know is about fiscal sponsorships.
So what this means is you as an individual artist can apply to be fiscally sponsored by a nonprofit organization. And there are organizations actually that do this as a part of their programming. And what it means is that if you're fiscally sponsored by a nonprofit, then you are under the umbrella of a non-profit organization. And what's important about that is it means that you can kind of operate in that way. So in other words, you might have an uncle, rich uncle, that's willing to support your art practice, and maybe they are willing to give you a couple thousand dollars towards a project.
But if your uncle writes you a check to you directly, it's not tax deductible. And a lot of people who give money want something back. So if you get fiscally sponsored, it means that somebody can donate to you and they can get a tax write-off. So when I got these parking meters donated, I actually had a fiscal sponsor, and actually they gave the parking meters to the organization, and then the organization gave them to me. There was a lot of interesting negotiation at that point because I also needed the keys to the meters because when you fed the meter with a quarter, you got 15 minutes of audio art.
And then I took that money and I started a fund for artists with AIDS to finish a last body of work before they died. So I actually raised almost $10,000 quarter by quarter. The project was supposed to be up for three months and was up for three years because nobody would give up their parking meter. So again, You never know what you're going to need.
So the other thing is, is you should be getting rejected constantly. If you're not getting rejected, you're not applying for enough things. So again, if you get rejected, one of the things that you might be able to do is call them up and ask them why. Some organizations will take kind of copious notes about panel discussions. If you fail and you get rejected, then you know that that didn't really work.
So you could actually look at something else. It could be something as simple as your budget didn't add up, or there were too many people that had similar kinds of work. Those are all really good things to know. But again, apply, apply, apply. The other thing is that if you apply for something and you get rejected, you should apply again because every single organization.
and funder rotates the people that make those decisions. So they use what's called a panel and they invite different people to participate. So it could be that one year, the panel is, you know, much more into installation work. And the next year they're all painters. You just never kind of know.
So again, apply over and over and over again. The reason is that every time you apply, you're going to learn something about yourself and you're going to learn something about your work. And then also have somebody else perhaps review your application and see maybe where you went wrong.
Maybe you did a project description and at the end of it, we still have no idea what your project is. That's a service that I actually started. We'll do resume reviews so that they make sure that they're formatted to art standards.
We'll look at your artist statement for 20 lousy bucks and tell you what's working and what's not. So if you're applying to something important, that might be worth it. We'll also do grant reviews.
So if you get rejected, sometimes I'll look at... people's grants and it's really clear why they got rejected. And other times it could be about the work.
You never know. So getting funded or getting support actually means that there's a kind of mutual agreement between the person giving you the opportunity and yourself and there's a kind of connection. So sometimes you have to keep looking for different places to apply. If you're applying for at a particular space to do an exhibition and they tell you no constantly, then maybe you're applying to the wrong place.
So again, your work has to match what you're asking for. So again, follow through. Really important. One of the reasons that you want to work every week is so that you can actually get things finished and that you have a body of work to propose. Once you finish that body of work, then work on that proposal.
Send images to the person you expressed. who express interest to you. For instance, I've had people call me and say, look, I had somebody that told me to follow up with them, and I never did.
Well, I said, well, how long ago was that? And they'd say, oh, nine months. Well, nine months, nobody's going to probably remember a thing.
But if you meet somebody somewhere, let's say you're at an art party, and you give them your card, and they say, oh, well, this looks kind of interesting, send me something. or call me up I'd love to do a studio visit but you didn't have the work done and you waited six months that might be a problem. Always follow through whether you actually meet them or not at least send them an email so that you're in the loop. Make that connection with them even if you're not ready to do a studio visit right then then you can email them and say look I'm finishing this last body of work I'd like to get it finished before we meet but don't just do nothing.
Because again, networking and follow through is a huge, huge part of your art career. You have to document the heck out of your work and it has to be really, really good. It's really, really important nowadays to have a website. If anybody asks me for names of artists for whatever they're looking for, I can send them out names and I'll send them as many names as I can. But the first thing they're going to do is they're going to go to the web.
Now you might have a website, but it might be on page 10 of a Google search. And again, that might be an issue. But if you have a website, at least you can direct people there to get more information. If you don't know how to use a camera, learn.
It's really not that hard. Cameras nowadays can generally even be an iPhone. If you do it right, if you're...
just completely not good at that, you can always hire somebody to do that. Find your local friends and other students who are in the photo program who might be able to barter or something with you, but your work and the images of your work are going to make or break your applications, and almost everything is done through application. So a couple other things. There's a lot of arts scams out there, which I find kind of hysterical because I don't know why they picked the lowest income people in the U.S., some of the lowest income people to actually try to get money out of, but be really careful.
There are a lot of vanity galleries out there, which we'll talk about a little bit later, which will charge you a ton of money to have a show there, and they're just in it to make money. Most everybody that has an entry fee They're not doing their job if they're charging you money to participate. If they're an organization and they're not supporting artists, then they have no business being an organization that says they support artists. So again, be really careful. There are those kinds of things.
Invest in people who invest in you. Again, having connections, having like-minded ideas. participating, talking with people, things like that are really, really important.
If somebody treats you really badly, maybe they're not the people that you want to work with. So again, be a little bit discriminating and life will go a little easier. So I have a ton of resources on our website. And I know that you guys know about the book and the fact that I have all my information online for free, which I call a really bad marketing strategy, but a really good activist strategy.
So I'm much more interested in artists than actually money, which is a really kind of goofy. But you are the art world. You are the people who are going to make or break or change things accordingly. So a lot of what you do now has to do with the way the art world will turn out in some way. If you are incredibly, if you don't ever share information with other artists, or you're trying to keep all the information to yourself because you think that will give you an advantage, you're probably dead wrong.
Because actually sharing with other people is really important, because those people will share back with you. um if you have an opportunity to apply for a grant and your best friend is making the right kind of work for that grant but you don't tell them and you apply anyway um that's really not the best strategy so the other kinds of things that we have we're always listing free resources and uh our podcast how the art world works and we have tons of radio interviews with artists that are doing diy and what i mean with by that is they're not waiting to be validated by a gallery or a curator or something like that. They are just moving forward and making stuff happen.
So look at lots and lots of resources and try to get as much information as possible. So what I decided to do is, I know that you guys have probably talked and investigated different venues. But what I did is I put together a kind of, some more details that you won't get in the book or on the website.
And then I also collected a ton of images of artists doing things outside of the gallery museum system, just because this is a really good time to sort of think of a lot of those things. So museums... I chose three really different museums because people think of museums in this kind of monolithic category, and they're very, very different from each other. So for instance, if you can look at the mission statement of museums and organizations to find out what they're really thinking. So again, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami is interested in diverse audiences and underserved populations.
So that gives you some kind of clues into what they're interested in. So the Philadelphia Museum is much more conservative. And they are, like most museums, preserve, enhance, and interpret collections. So they're mostly a collecting institution.
So if you're emerging artists, this doesn't really make sense for you to try to go after them. The New Museum in New York City, it's very simple. Their mission statement is new art, new ideas. Again, that gives you an idea that, hmm, they sound really contemporary.
They're looking for new ways of working. So again, that might be worth investigating. Commercial galleries are also very different. Some of them will do more conservative installations.
Some of them will be only for prints. Some will be only for photography. Some will be ceramic, dedicated, things like that. So again, doing your homework and finding out what makes sense.
The worst thing you can do is just approach people and not know who they are. One of the saddest things is to watch somebody carrying around their work in a portfolio in New York and they're going into every single gallery. They don't know what they're about.
They're interrupting their work day. Imagine if you were at work and someone just came in with a bunch of stuff and decided, oh, I want you to talk to me right now. So, again, be careful about that stuff.
Artists run spaces. There's. probably over 3,000 artist-run organizations in the country, probably more. When I started Side Street Projects, there were only three spaces in Los Angeles.
Now there's over 100. Now an artist-run space means that mostly it's artists who actually call the shots. They're the people in power, the directors, the staff. Usually there's a percentage of artists on the board, and they have a very different mandate.
and they're definitely there to support artists. They used to be called alternative spaces and they started in the 60s and 70s because the art world was showing no women and no people of color at all. Very rarely, very few. When I started my career in the 80s, it was very, very difficult to get a show.
There were very few women involved and hardly any people of color. So again, that has changed a lot, and mostly because of these organizations. So again, Art in General in New York, it's a nonprofit organization that assists artists with production and presentation of new work.
The key to that are they actually assist artists. So again, that might be something that fulfills your needs. Atlatl in Phoenix, Arizona is specifically to support Native American artists. So again, an organization you might not necessarily fit with them, but it also might be a really good organization to know about.
Side Street Projects is the organization that I started. They're now completely off the grid. Everything is mobile.
Their offices are in trailers. And basically there, I started that as a way to support artists specifically in a lot of different ways. we used to have a full on woodworking shop. We used to have a rehearsal space. So there's all kinds of different ways that you can keep track of things.
And since the organization is still going, they're still mobile. Everything's off the grid. And so they do really different kinds of projects.
So if that's the kind of artist you are, that might be the perfect place to apply for something. College and university galleries are something that's overlooked a lot. They have a built-in audience, but also sometimes they're harder to get to. Rice University Gallery in Texas, Art History Made Daily, it's the only university gallery in the nation dedicated to commissioning site-specific installation art.
So again, if that's the kind of work you make and you're having a hard time finding a space that will show your work, this might be an interesting place to apply. Illinois State University Gallery is much more traditional. And They mostly do outside things, but they also support their students, etc.
Chico State, again, completely different mindset. So again, those are really good. Just find their mission statements on their website and see if that actually matches your work. Private art dealers and art consultants.
Besides dealers who have open public spaces, there's also private art dealers. They may work out of their house. Art consultants sometimes work on public art, sometimes they work on finding work for hotels or other businesses, things like that.
So again, you could kind of research and find out if there's any interesting match there. Rental galleries are something that you, you don't actually rent the gallery, but a rental gallery is a place where you can go and they will actually have your work in that space. space and they will rent work out to either movies, to individual offices, things like that.
So instead of just selling your work, they might rent your work for a couple of years and then someone might buy it. So again, it's another option. Corporate art collections, this used to be much bigger, but there are still quite a few corporate art collections.
Sometimes they have somebody who manages that collection, and a lot of times it's an art consultant. So again, those might work kind of hand in hand. There used to be something called slide registries.
Now they're just called registries. There's a number of organizations around the country that will actually allow you to submit your work. And it's listed as an online. So actually a curator can actually go to that registry and find new artists. Some of them...
charge a fee. Some of them don't. Some of them are curated.
Some of them are not. Again, you want to see if it makes sense for you. Open studios.
Maybe you can't get a show somewhere. Maybe you, you know, you're doing something that's too, a little too innovative for your region, and you might actually have an open studio. And whenever you do that, it's a really good idea to partner up with other artists if they live close to you so that you have more of an audience.
Open studios can range from anything that's hosted by an organization to just you opening up your studio and serving wine and popcorn for the afternoon or whatever else you want to serve. Online galleries and sales sites have really kind of proliferated over the web and again do your homework. If you go to a very well-known online gallery and there's 10,000 artists on there.
And when you bring up your work that you've submitted and you're next to other work that you can't stand or you would never have a show with, you have to be careful about that because sometimes people go to those spaces and you're next to really awful, awful work. So it doesn't really kind of make sense. Also, most of them have their own name in the URL, so you come after that.
So it's a lot better to pay attention to your own website and get the word out than it is to actually do online galleries, although some people create work specifically just for those sites. Sometimes they don't use their own name. So again, they're just out there. Vanity galleries, which I always tell people to run like hell, are galleries that will charge you an arm and a leg to show there.
There's a gallery in New York who sends out emails every day to people saying, I saw your website and I love your work and I'd like you to show here. You can usually tell when they're a scam. There's actually lists of scammers out there. But the idea is that this gallery in New York will charge you $3,000.
and they will hang your work up in the gallery salon style. So they'll put 100 works in one space for one week. That means that you can actually say that you had a show in New York, and that's what they're banking on that you want.
The problem is, is if anybody sees the name of that gallery on your resume, they will not take you seriously. So again, anybody who charges you money, be careful. find out what they're doing with that money.
There's a lot of spaces around the country that will charge you money to participate, and they really are using you to pay the rent, and that's really not what you should be doing. Jury to exhibitions, again, if they're non-entry fee, participate, or make sure you really know the organization and it's going to a good cause. But mostly juried exhibitions are scams these days. And if you have anything on your CV or resume that says a juried show, you should probably take it off and or take juried out of the title. Probably 90% of juried exhibitions now are out there as scams to pay rent.
So again, be very, very careful with how you participate. Co-op galleries can actually be particularly interesting, especially in rural. situations or people who don't have a lot of galleries in their city or there's a quite a few of them around the country that are actually pretty interesting. And a co-op gallery generally means that a bunch of people get together, they start a gallery, they share all the expenses and all the work. So you might actually gallery set once a month or you know something like that and sometimes those are really interesting.
So public art programs, there's a lot of different ways to do public art and get money. There's a lot of programs now that actually you don't have to have experience in public art to apply. And so there's a lot of artists now that are actually making their living doing public art projects and programs and so that's an interesting shift. So it's possible.
Art fairs and festivals might be interesting. You might do something in your local city. You might have a group of people together.
I'll show you some other kind of oddball possibilities that might stand in for that, but they might be a good way to, once you can get out of your house again, whether those happen. It might be interesting to reinvent the art fair or the festival. Like, what would it mean nowadays? Auctions and benefits. Auctions can sometimes be incredibly useful.
because you get your work seen by buyers. Again, make sure that it's something that you support and that it's going to a good cause. But I've had work collected through an auction that I would never have, those people would probably have never seen my work.
So that's kind of interesting. So now what I'm going to do is going to run through these different kind of sites. I kind of make a joke about this.
image because, you know, if you're looking for space to show, the North Pole's probably pretty open. So that's an example. City Hall or government buildings are probably not the best place for controversial work, but I've seen some really interesting exhibitions in really different places.
I once curated a show at City Hall and it was a little bit controversial, but only in the best way. So you might find a house, a woman house in Los Angeles in the 70s, which is the start of kind of site-specific and installation art. They took an old house that was going to be abandoned and they changed every single aspect of that house. Domestic setting in Los Angeles, a group of artists created an exhibition space in their house. So gallery space was in their living room and they lived in the rest of the house.
This other one is a guy painted his house blue inside and out to see what it was like to live in one color. Again, you know, maybe you could give two words or something. Another example, alternative places like apartments. In the 80s, gallery space was really hard to find in San Diego, and so these two guys created a gallery space in their apartment, and they did that for years.
There's a lot of apartment galleries across the country. It might be an interesting way for you to start something in your own community. artist Barbara Drucker used a living room and a house and she did all kinds of installation projects and she would have openings once a month and you would go in and and see the work site-specific work in the specific living room of that place.
I know a couple of people who have taken over garages or different like a gas station and a abandoned gas station and turned it into a studio space and an outreach for a community. So it might be left the tires and all their shelves and all the stuff in it. This is a five-story building in which I created a work where I made over 300 handmade handkerchiefs and hung it in the window. There was a constant kind of breeze and so it was a kind of like a stained glass window that never was still. And then I had people tie ribbons on the bottom and this is also a back in the 90s of people who had died of AIDS.
So it was predominantly during the the first big whirlwind AIDS crisis. This is artist Mel Chin after the New Orleans Katrina incident. He took over one of the abandoned houses and created a safe house. So the front door was actually a safe door and that's how you open it and when went inside and then he also created a whole bunch of um xeroxed hundred dollar bills where the denomination and and the images were taken off and they were sent all across the country and you got to draw in your own denomination and your own pictures and then they sent them back here and the inside of the house was wallpapered with these things called fundreds um the idea was they were going to collect these from all over the country and put them in an armored car and go to the U.S.
Capitol and demand to get support for the city in exchange for the funders that they would give the government. So again, very site-specific and reacting to a huge crisis. These are some artists who created installation work and they actually lived outside of their building.
Gutsy? but you know. Cafes and restaurants, I know those are kind of tacky in some places, but I've seen people completely redo something and make it really interesting. I actually also, a project I started in the 90s was I was projecting images in storefront windows all over the country and abroad, and it was a rear projection screen and And so from dusk to midnight, every night, and they were always in non-art spaces. So the first place I did it was in a flower market.
So by the day, it was a flower market. And at night, it had a rear projection screen fold down into the window. I also, on the weekends, showed movies by artists. And everybody would bring their beach chairs and their popcorn and hang out in the parking lot.
Did it in an architect's office. Did it at a furniture store. Did all kinds of things. Did it in South Africa. and a lot of different places.
So it was really great because the work traveled in slide form, which would be completely different than nowadays. But it was really easy to ship artwork that way. This is somebody who created in Holland a public art installation.
Obviously this one was sanctioned, but again might give you possibilities and ideas. This is what somebody did in a local neighborhood. Occupy parking lots with Persian rugs. If you're a performance artist, check out local theater spaces.
A lot of times they have dark nights. So if your performance doesn't really kind of take over the whole stage, sometimes you can actually do that. Your local high school might actually be a really great opportunity.
I think now you'd have to have one person per row, but you know that that might be possible. John Ahern and Roberto Torres also a long time ago started creating life-size castings of local community members. So they were actually working with the local community and setting up and actually doing these life casts on the sidewalk in their community so the whole community could participate and then they actually showcased their own community members.
If you're a dancer or performance artist, A lot of people have used the outside of a building, which might be apropos in these times. I also commissioned a lot of artists to work in slide form and projected them in commercial movie theaters in between the popcorn and trivia slides. I think you're all maybe old enough to remember that, but they used to project slides, mostly advertising, like really bad popcorn and trivia slides and faded. architectural or, you know, different stuff.
And so I wanted to infiltrate that. So I found two commercial theaters that let me do that. The AMC theaters in Pasadena and the Magic Johnson theaters in Los Angeles had just opened.
And people ask me a lot when I do site-specific kind of public projects and said, well, who sees your work? This audience was over 400,000 people and it was up for a few months only. So again, this might be an interesting way to do this. I ran into a small snag in that the people who were in charge of the slides had some attorneys, and they actually censored some of the work just before the show opened, which is really bizarre.
And this is one of the images that they censored. And this is actually the city of Hollywood built out of concession candy from the theater. But this artist used a container of Milk Duds, which were not available at that theater.
And they thought that people would think it was an advertising and sue them because they didn't have Milk Duds in their concession store. But what we found out later is that the lawyers actually thought that we had figured out how to put subliminal messages in the pixels. Now, this is in the 90s as well.
Now, if we had figured that out, we'd probably be richer than anything. But again, so what I did is I went to the local art house theaters and there was a theater downtown and it had four screens and we took over the theater for three years. And every three months, quarterly, we would have a new curator and we would curate these images.
And so we took over all intermission in all four theaters. Every time we had an opening, they would actually close the theater and everybody could come to the opening. My favorite way to see artwork is still sitting in a chair eating popcorn.
Try to beat that. These are two examples of bus posters. Group Material did one in the 70s, and you can see that they were just these cardboard things that were kind of stuck in. The bus on the bottom is by a group of artists in San Diego who are doing lots of site-specific work.
And they created this ad that was during the Super Bowl. And they actually talked about the people who actually do the work for tourism in San Diego, which was mostly kind of undocumented workers. And so it created a huge, huge problem.
Only for the... the powers that be, but it made it on every single national TV news program, and it became a huge conversation within the city. So this group of artists will make work, but the work is actually in the publicity.
So they'll send out press releases to all the major stations, and all of them follow up, and it becomes a huge dialogue. They record all that, and they make a video about it. So it's not just the work that they... put up, but they actually use PR and all of that in a really, really interesting way. These are commissions by Metro.
This is an artist who designed the seat fabric for a bus and another older poster project. Public art projects, there's a lot of subway metro projects that you can actually do and apply for, and again a lot of them are open to emerging artists. I chose this one because the woman on the left used to do billboard sabotage in the 70s and 80s.
She would climb up billboards at three o'clock in the morning with a priest who was also an activist, and they used to sabotage racist or sexist billboards. So when she got an official public art project, she did something much more conservative, just a really interesting strategy. This is an artist who makes signage and puts them in public places. There's quite a few people who do this.
I have some examples of different people. The sign project by Repo History in New York City was really great because what they did is that Each of the artists addressed things that were going on in a particular community. So, for instance, in the financial district in New York, they put up signage about what used to be there. So there used to be a Native American group that lived in that place. So they would look at the history of the place and they'd put a sign up to sort of talk about that, which was really interesting.
I could use your front lawn or a local park if you're ambitious. This is a woman who is a former student of mine back also in the 90s who started crocheting sweaters for trees. Now we know it as yarn bombing, which has become a huge kind of element. So it probably is not a good thing to start, but just the idea of doing that. She actually also crocheted cozies for rocks.
There's a group in Los Angeles for a long time that we're doing performances all over the city. So they would do it in public parks. They did it in a local zoo.
The old Los Angeles Zoo, they took over and had artists do installation projects. This is an artist that did a project for Insight. She took an industrial complex and she got everybody to park their cars by color for the length of the exhibition. Just pretty amazing feat, I would say.
You could actually set up at your local swap meet. This was a group of artists that took over a whole block in a swap meet and they set up their own work. Some did performances, some sold their work, you know, or created an installation. So again, you know, you could invite people. This is for the future, of course.
Inserts in a local paper. Group material actually created an insert for the New York Times as a supplement. and it went throughout all the boroughs of New York City. The local calendar section from the LA Times had an artist actually paint the front of the calendar section.
On the right there's somebody who actually hand drew the cover of a newspaper. So again these might, you know, they were still pretty big cities so again can get things done. A group of my students found a storage space and facility and took over each storage space because they didn't actually want to do their show outside of the city where the school was located. So this was a new storage facility and they actually talked the owners into donating six storage sites for a month and they each just took turns sitting that space and actually in the 80s it was unusual enough that they got in the local paper.
So again, different from a traditional gallery situation. The Metro in Los Angeles also commissioned artists to make posters, and they put them all over the city, particularly in metro stations. Things like that might be an interesting place to think about. This is Eleanor Anton in the 70s. She created the 100 Boots Project.
So she has 100 boots facing the sea, 100 boots in front of the post office, 100 boots at the market. And this was mail art. She would send them to all her friends.
So these would get set up at an installation and then these postcards would go all over the place. Your car or other vehicles. These are a number of vehicles that have been altered by artists. This is Antonio Montares. He projected images from the inside of a car out.
So in other words, as the car drove around, these projections were on the windows. of the car itself. So a mobile kind of gallery.
I also once did a screening of movies in the back of a truck. And I would just send out information and say, the truck will be at 4th and Main at, you know, eight o'clock and here's the movie. And people would just bring their chairs and hang out.
This is somebody actually constructing a theater set out of a truck. A while ago there was a quite a few artists in Los Angeles that would actually find a truck, set up an installation, and park it outside of a well-known gallery during an opening. That may or may not be in your best interest, but you can think about that. I'm not usually a chalk fan, but this, you know, some chalk artists are doing pretty amazing stuff. It's not the supply that's the issue.
I once took over 12 libraries in the city of Los Angeles and commissioned artists to make site-specific installations within those libraries. We created a map and it was up for three months. So you could actually go to all of them or you could just be driving by and stop in one.
So this was a project that I was going to eventually turn into a biennial for Los Angeles. I think before one of the many recessions and each year that had happened, I was going to create a different site. So the next site was going to be in mechanic offices or something like that, or, you know, it would sort of change around. But anyway, this was the first one and a huge audience. Again, lots of people go to public libraries or did.
Making your own calendar. I knew a woman who after. some big tragic event, created a calendar and created the whole history behind that event.
So again, it might be something you can kind of send out to people. Suzanne Lacey used a number of different sites. So she would stage people in different places.
So, you know, there was a furniture showroom in San Francisco in the Warehouse District. And so she set up her whole performance inside this. furniture store and she called it the living room and you could walk around and hear different conversations by different artists. Using your local laundromat, for a while there, there was a number of artists that were taking over laundromats and showing films or doing performances or doing installations in various different places. Suzanne Lacey did a series of whisper projects which took place on the beach.
I know another artist that once a year she gathers all her friends together and she projects. images onto a screen at the beach. And she reviews her body of work for the last year. It's kind of an interesting way to get together. Birdhouse cities.
These are in London, but they've kind of popped around different places using your kind of local flora and fauna. Parades. There's a couple of artists who have done really interesting parades.
The Duda parade that happens in Pasadena is a spoof on the Rose Parade. I've been in that parade a number of times, and actually it's really surprising what you can get away with. Dentists or doctor's offices. For some reason, dentists are really good at bartering with artists.
So if you have an issue, you might think about that. I know an artist that completely redesigned the lobby of a dentist's office because he needed a mouthful of work. So again, And bartering can be a pretty interesting place. This was a coloring book that was made by Foundation for Art Resources of a whole bunch of artists, over 30 artists. And it was printed.
And then actually we all sat at a long table and people could come and have you sign it and do whatever. But basically it was an adult coloring book created by artists, which actually might be the perfect thing to do right now. This is a group of students in Russia who use the windows of their dorm rooms to create a performance with light that mimicked the computer game of Tetris.
So again, timing and a light switch. That's it. So again, if you can't afford art supplies, think about doing something on a real minimal basis. Your front door of your house might be an interesting place to do something. I know people who have put installations in their front yard.
Again, more bookstore situations. You might want to throw your own block party. It might be a virtual block party at this point, but having performances and things like that where you get all the local people on your street together might be interesting.
This is Running Fence, a very old project, but was also a really amazing collaboration. And also there's a woman who... who planted wheat.
There's another woman here who planted a cornfield. So again, these were kind of projects that set off other projects. Parking structures.
I know a number of people, if parking structures are not available at night, sometimes you can make arrangements to actually use it as the theater space or performance space or set up artwork, things like that. These are actually utility covers. These were made in Japan, but again, a number of artists have made utility covers that last a really, really long time. I don't know if you want your art to be driven over, but This is my parking meter project. I put them in public sites all over the city.
The other thing is to think about doing parties. This was a party that was catered. It was a fundraiser at somebody's house.
And we had performance artists that just arbitrarily started performing at a certain time. There was no kind of stage or things like that. All the food was made by artists and had messages and all kinds of things in it.
So again, you know, there might be something interesting about that. Maybe you have a special dinner and you only serve white food or everybody has to wear red or, you know, literary artists will read something or, you know, use your imagination. Here's somebody who took the sign spinning project and created an art project and she would have, she made her own signs to spin. Some were in storefronts, some were kind of exhibitions, but a lot of them were out on the street.
If you have a lot of money to burn, you can always try skywriting. Actually, that was done over the city of Pasadena not too long ago. This is a project done by the Barbie Liberation Organization, and if you have not seen this project, you should check it out because it's really hysterical. A whole bunch of artists all over the country went out and bought G.I. Joe's and Barbie's.
They took them back to their studios and they reversed the voice boxes. So they put Barbie's voice in G.I. Joe and vice versa.
Then they took them back and they put them on the shelves. So what happened is parents bought these for their kids and on Christmas they opened it and they pulled G.I. Joe's cord and it said, I like to go shopping.
So again, they created a really hysterical video that sort of documents how this took place. And what was amazing is that again, it made it in the international news. So, you know, this project was talked about ad nauseum for night after night.
So you should check that out. It's really funny. This is a project where I use some theater doors on 42nd Street in New York City in the 80s.
This is quite different now. 42nd Street is very lively. Back then it was quite dangerous. So again, just projecting through theater doors from dusk to midnight. This is an artist who created an online game very, very early.
It was called MetaPet, and actually it depended on how you treated your secretary, whether she did a good job for you or she died. Again, there's been a lot of stuff since, and this is one of the really early, early ones. This is an artist that built a Trojan horse that actually sat across the border between San Diego and Tijuana, between the US and Mexico, and it straddled the borderline. And you can see that the Trojan horse on this particular thing has two heads.
This is an artist who creates faux animals out of, they're not real animals, but they all relate to the idea of collecting exotic species and she'll use signage that says lost pet and she'll describe it and then somewhere on that hiking trail you might actually see that pet or think you see it. So she's trying to bring awareness to that. Using hiking trails, there's lots of different ways to do things with the natural things that you find.
This actually was a catalog that I created for the projections in the theaters project. I didn't want to create those images on a flat piece of paper because they were meant to be light generated. So I put all the works on a Viewmaster and created a catalog.
So at the time that I created this project, it was the first time that you could create a slide from an image off the computer. So you could create an image on the computer and then create a slide. This was brand new technology at the time. So I wanted things to be seen that way as opposed to just a regular catalog.
And then... some pencils that were actually made during the NEA reauthorization scandal. This is some other artists doing audio work.
This is someone who created audio work. It's a dispenser with audio. Janet Cardiff creates these amazing audio tours through museums and different places. And you go places that you never would go if you were just attending in a regular museum. So she'll take you into the back.
She'll take you outside. might be also a really interesting solution right now. I did something at the National Political Convention in San Diego, and it was the Republican Convention. They had a free speech stage located outside the convention center.
We did a whole series of performances with the taco shop poets and a bunch of other things instead of getting up and ranting about a particular thing that was going on, we actually approached it culturally and artily. I guess that's a word, artily. And what was so interesting is we were so different, we actually found ourselves featured on the McNeil-Laird News Hour. That doesn't exist anymore, you can probably look it up. But again, different enough that we actually got attention.
And actually we addressed everything that the Republicans were against at that time. There's a lot of art hotels these days which are actually hiring artists to design rooms. Might be a strategy to kind of think about for some extra earned income. It might fit your work, might not.
This is a guy who creates all his work on the dusty windows of cars. He takes his own car, he lives on a dirt road, he drives it back and forth, and periodically he'll put a layer of dirt on and then he'll draw, and then he'll drive again, and then he'll draw some more. So if you look this person up, it's actually pretty amazing.
And talk about cheap art supplies. It doesn't cost this guy one cent to actually make his work. And he has quite an amazing collection.
You wouldn't have to do it with dirt on your car. You could actually utilize their car windows and draw on them or do any number of things. This was also during the Republican Convention. And these artists set up a faux sweatshop. in the middle of downtown San Diego and made these vests for people to buy and wear.
These were all the things that the Republicans were against. So people would buy these and they actually had a place in the front for a bullet. And so these were kind of targets.
And the idea was that, you know, all of these things were being targeted at that particular convention. So it's really interesting to see downtown people walking around with these vests. Again, performances can be done in most public sites.
It could be subtle. It doesn't have to be a really big deal. You could just kind of show up and do something.
This is the, a friend of mine created the smallest public art gallery in the world. It's called the Louvre. This is actually the Chicago Transit Authority allowed artists to completely transform their their buses and their trains.
So here's someone who created a swing and people are actually actively using it, of course. I don't know what the liability would be on that, but this is called the Sketchbook Project. Anybody from anywhere in the world can participate.
You can sign up and get a blank sketchbook, fill it up and send it back, and then it gets cataloged in the Brooklyn Art Library. I think this is still going on, but you could try to check that out. I know another artist who used to curate shows where you'd ask the artist to choose the books, and then the books became the show.
This is actually a seed, a global seed vault, but again, it's just an example of out-of-the-way spaces that you can actually use, and artists actually followed up and actually made a proposal, and I don't actually know if it went through, but to do a project. This is a project I did where I, it was in Lake Tahoe, And what I did is I, their local museum was full of men. And I thought, well, there's got to be a, you know, more to this story.
So I researched all the women that had an influence in the area. And I created placemats that had information. So it had an image of them.
And then it also had a contemporary image in the background. And then on the right, I actually wrote the history and I connected it to a website that had a lot more information on these people. And then I talked six restaurants into using these placemats, anywhere from low-end restaurants or takeout kind of things up to really high-end restaurants. And so for three months, these placemats were put in the restaurants. And there were four different ones.
So you could actually go to different restaurants and collect them. That was another way to get information out. This is somebody doing something in Siberia as a project.
More, you know, kind of public art projects. Someone actually, this is funny because the city of New York decided it was going to prevent graffiti by creating its own graffiti in the public restrooms. Seems to me that would get added on to a lot, but you never know. Putting things in unexpected places, chandelier in the middle of the road. There's an artist here in LA who's done a lot of work with really old lamps and put them up in installations.
There's different projects going on in different places. High Desert Test Sites out here in California sets up site-specific installations all the time. So you get a really wide range of space. There's somebody else doing ceramics.
You don't have your wheel with you. Yeah, do something else. More public kind of gathering spaces.
This is someone who put a bunch, it was creating an ecological statement and put a bunch of plastic balls in a river. And I put this in because I think it's kind of ridiculous to implement plastic in a river when you're making an ecological statement. You can kind of decide, but it seemed a little bit not thought out. Someone who took a... train and actually create a moving roving installation.
Someone who actually uses snowscapes to actually create their work. A lot of stomping going on. Again, public murals, public art.
This is someone who creates installations underwater in your neighborhood. And you can actually go snorkel or go underwater diving and actually see all these installations. What's happened is the coral and stuff has started to alter all of these.
So there's really interesting headdresses and different kind of elements. This is an actual architect who designed a building to look like this. This is somebody who made a god graveyard. This is actually graves of thousands of gods that are now only myths.
So again, something else in a public site. Environmental arts is somebody who took something that's quite ugly and actually created something else with it. So again, there's so many different opportunities and different ways you can work. So I'm hoping that this might have given you a couple of ideas. So.
That's the end of my presentation, so I'm going to open it up if anybody has any questions, comments, etc. All right, thank you, Karen. Wonderful.
Oh, thank you so much. That was so inspirational in terms of just being a disruptor in the art field, you know, and coming up with new spaces and new ways of looking, you know, and just really changing. the art world, which I value what you do and what you do in your talks and everything and your resources is how to like look at a system and kind of break it. And I love that. Infiltrate it, break it, mash it, you know, do whatever.
Exactly. We have a few questions. And you guys, again, you can add those questions.
I'm going to go ahead and start with, based off of... All the examples you were shown. I'm going to go with Nicole's question right now, which is something you mentioned before was if something's not working, change your audience. And so Nicole asked, how do you, how does one change their audience. And I think you gave some great examples.
Well, I think the first thing is to is to not hiding your studio and hope really bad art strategy. I think that I'm The thing is, is you can look up all kinds of things. So let's say you're interested in doing something about the homeless. Connect with other organizations outside the art world. This is one of the things that I've spent a lot of time doing is that the art world, I think, is mostly pretty conservative and stuffy on, you know, in my opinion.
And, you know, I think that what's going to change that is you right now. Every single one of you as students can have a huge, huge impact by just changing the way that you think and the way that you do things. So you might find like-minded people.
There's so many ways to find people online. There's an organization in L.A. called LAPD, which stands for Los Angeles Poverty Department. And this guy has been working with the homeless for over 35 years, and they've been doing performances about their situation. So again, it's like there might be something like that where you would, you know, you would connect with this guy and say, look, I love what you're doing.
I'd love to help or I'd like to present a project. They actually now have a Skid Row Museum in downtown Los Angeles. So again, it's like taking things and just rethinking that. You're going to find there's nobody who's making work in a vacuum.
I mean, we live in a global culture and we hear what people are doing all the time. So. Finding other people that are interested is not going to be too hard, but also the way that you reach out. If you have a website, people can find it. If you have keywords, if you're using Instagram, someone might find you.
So use all those resources and facilities to kind of expand your network and find people that you've never met before. That's one of the best ways is to get out of your own little silo and really start looking at what people are doing. Do a search and find out what artists are actually making.
similar kinds of work or dealing with similar kinds of issues. I mean, now it would be interesting to find, you know, every artist who's making masks, right? I mean, you might be doing that and you might be doing it in your own silo, but there are so many people doing that and it's become a huge thing. So that there might be a way that you could just kind of like say, look, who's doing this? Maybe you could start a gallery of masks online.
you know, I mean, they're just, some of them are outrageous and really amazing. So that might be a way to kind of do that. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. Sort of getting out of your own space and finding out who's doing stuff and maybe connecting with people.
It's so much easier now to be an artist than it has been in the past. And I don't mean that as flippantly or saying it was hard for me and it's easy for you, but there's all these really great tools. The last pandemic that we had in the United States, there was nothing. There was no TV, there was no sharing of information, you know, a bunch of my relatives died.
You know, it's a completely different time. So the idea is to not be set in your ways, but think of really kooky, creative ways to do something. You know, whatever your vice is, you know, everybody has one, you know, if you absolutely like. lighten up when you drink a bottle of wine or you you know go sit under a tree or you go to the mountains or do whatever it's like get your mind to kind of unload and don't think conservatively um you know if you think that you have to get a gallery to do something you're way behind the times because galleries are kind of dead they've only been around 200 years and when i say that people are shocked but everything changes right so again come up with the different or better way and look at your work to be the impetus for what those choices are. So if you're making a certain kind of work and you want to do something site specific, you could actually show in a particular site that's actually already addressing that issue or that that issue addresses.
You know, a gallery is just a white box, right? But other things can really get your work to pop and to do something. You know, trying to decide, I mean, the projections in the theater project took me 13 years to get off the ground because nobody would accept it. And I think it's because they thought there's no way someone's going to pull this off. So I collaborated with another artist and we did it ourselves.
We raised some money and we made it happen. And we proved to all those institutions that turned us down that we could pull it off. There's two times that I've also gotten a full write-up in the LA Times.
One was the... parking meter project and the other one was the projections in the theaters project. So again, you know, I mean, they're different. They're more interesting.
More people are going to see it. If I had put those images in a gallery, it wouldn't have had 400,000 people see that work. So again, it's just like open up your brain and get kooky, you know? It's a technical term. Get kooky.
But appropriate, especially during these days. We have to. Now's such a hard time, you know, but now it's kind of like, okay, artists are really good at problem solving.
Yeah. So if you have a problem and you're stuck in your pajamas in your bed, you know, that's a sight, man. Go for it. Yeah.
I love that being proactive. And I think it also stems back to your first few slides where you're just talking about making goals, like, right, coming up with those goals. And writing all that down, I think that's great. So you can get yourself a deadline.
By the end of April, come up with a project you could actually do during a pandemic. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Right.
Like, come up with a solution. I'm going to write that down. And then all of you could share it.
Right. You could all get together and say, okay, here's my pandemic exhibition solution. Right.
And who knows what you would come up with. It could be just incredible. And then maybe you could all do it. Yeah.
Right. So that's your homework. That's great. Oh, thank you.
And piggybacking on that, Isabel wrote to me a question for you is, is there any limit towards publishing your own work as an independent artist, especially working under a social media format? I think the only limitations for publishing your work, whatever that means, is your own mind and perhaps technology. So because we have so many resources to publish these days.
You don't have to wait to be validated by anybody. So for instance, you know, I thought about getting a publisher for my book. And when I started it, nobody could write shit on the internet, right?
So it's called getting your shit together. Who, what publisher is going to actually publish that? They probably do it now, but I thought, wait a minute.
And a publisher takes over half and you get like a dollar a book. So I decided that I would just self-publish. And, you know, it's been fine, right? You can actually go through lots of different distribution sources.
So whether you're publishing video, performance, a talk, a book, you know, all that stuff, you know, self-doing things is pretty easy these days. So don't... don't think about the conventional ways to do something. Think about the kooky ways to do something. You know, again, that's the kooky factor.
Sometimes you have to go out really far and go off the deep end to get a really good idea because you can always come back. Yeah. If you don't, if you don't brainstorm the wackiest thing that you could ever imagine. So I once met with a student and I'm and asked the student to come up with an idea that could not be done.
And so we had a meeting the next week and said, she said, well, I want to paint the moon pink. So we were thinking, and I said, well, do you have any ideas how you would do that? And so after a couple of minutes, I came up with a brainstorm and I said, I've got it. And she's looking at me like, yeah, sure.
Uh-huh. So I said, go out during a full moon and put on pink sunglasses. So in a sense, conceptually, you're still painting the moon pink, right? You don't have to rent a spray thing.
And, you know, it's like you don't have to deal with all of those things. But again, conceptually is where it matters, right? If you can get someone to think about something.
And so then once the moon's pink, then where do you go? Right? So it's interesting how you can solve things.
Yeah. I had a question about, particularly about Instagram and how you feel about Instagram as a platform for showing your work. I think it's a great platform.
I think that, again, you have to match what you're doing to the thing that you're using, the tool. So if you're just putting up images of your artwork, that might be okay, but there might be something else that's more interesting. It might be things about how you do something or, you know, making those connections.
I think that there's a lot of artists that are using Instagram as an art supply. There's other ones that are using it as exhibition space. They're actually using it to produce their work.
And that is their venue. It's the easiest venue to get accepted to. You can actually do kind of anything that you want, but again, you might think about, well, how can I make Instagram more interesting? And how can I actually make it work in a way? So for instance, you might do a series where they check in every day and there's something new happening, or maybe every hour.
So make it kind of matter, as opposed to just using it as a display space. I would try to get really crazy and think about, well, what could you do with Instagram? Right?
So I come up with a hundred ideas. So again, I tell people, you know, it's like when they're trying to think of something, write down a hundred things. Because the first 50 are going to be boring and ones that you've already thought of.
It's the second 50 that are going to get interesting, right? So you concentrate on the second 50, pull out five things that seem really, really interesting and start thinking about them. Yeah, absolutely.
Oh, that's great. Again, Instagram is just a tool. Yeah. I use tools all the time in which no one had ever invented it for that reason. So again, it's like, you know, you're the artist, solve the problem and, you know.
rock on thank you i'm showing my age i love no it's great no this is so helpful and and appropriate especially again during during these times where we're trying to trying to stay connected to people and trying to show work um so uh this is this is i think a good question and you started to talk about but i think it's good that we address it is uh you For one's art to be taken seriously, is it always necessary to have it framed? Oh, God, no. Framing will kill your work, man.
I mean, it's like, you have to think of frame as content. You know, it's not just something that's conventional in a gallery space. But frames were invented for a reason. And anything that's framed is going to reek of commodity. Anything that's framed is going to reek of conventionality.
So why are you framing it? It might be convention. It might be what your gallery wants.
It might be. So I actually just recently did a project with somebody. His name's Joe Lewis.
And I actually, he had some work printed on fabric. And I did, what's the word? oh yeah, embroidered all these images.
And they were on this kind of really, fabric that was really kind of loosely woven, and it had just been cut up. And he was actually going to frame them. And we laid them all out, and they were all frayed, and they were kind of like on burlap.
And the fact that they weren't framed made the work so much better. And so he decided not to frame them at all. He just tacked them on the wall with all these fuzzy frayed edges.
Because he was actually talking about slavery and how people escaped through Mexico as well as going north. They actually also escaped through Mexico. And there's a lot of things going on now that relate to those kinds of images. And people sort of leaving and, you know, things that are going on in the political system.
So again, it's like, you know, his work was so much better. If he had framed it, it would have looked really conventional. But this way, it really, it popped.
It was really great. So again, don't make any decisions until you ask yourself, why are you doing this? Like, why are you painting in a rectangle? Well, because I bought it at the store. Really bad answer.
What does a rectangle have to do with your work? Again, this is convention. And I think that we can look at every single conventional thing and ask ourselves, well, why? Why are we doing this?
Why am I using this? Why am I using that? Why is it a rectangle?
Why is it, you know, why is it on the wall? Why is it on the floor? Why is it on the ceiling?
Why isn't it outside? Why, you know, why don't I throw it in the ocean and see what happens? Or whatever, right?
You guys are close to the beach, right? Yep. So, you know, think about those kinds of things, because if you're doing it just because someone else did it before you, it's, you're probably making your work more boring. or less interesting or whatever. So convention is there for a reason, but it doesn't, it's necessarily for artists, right?
It might, it might actually kill your practice if you do things without thinking about it. You know, if I had just not done that projections in the theater project, you know, I mean, it's just, but it, but it changed so many artists'work. I had an artist who I included that was a poet and he was writing. these white phrases on a black background and he created a film noir with text.
So he completely, and he wrote me later and said, you've completely changed my artwork. I'm now doing the whole series of these things and creating every genre of film just using text, white on a black screen. And they were fabulous. Oh, that's wonderful.
Again, you know, box thinking is out. Yeah, it goes back to intention, right? Asking those questions.
Yeah, what do you want? Everything, yeah. Yeah, what do you want your work to do? What do you want to say? Who's your audience?
you know, if, like I said, if your audience isn't right, you know, making your work is the most important, and it's just figure out that match, right? Don't hang in your studio, and don't go to a gallery, and do something else, you know, if you're doing work about, you know, ocean water, go to the ocean, you know, think about different ways to do things like that, you know, if you're interested in animal rights, go to the zoo, right, if you're interested, you know, whatever. There's a thousand billion places to show work and not all artists have discovered them yet. Oh, that's wonderful.
Emily is asking, how do you stand out among all of the other artists flocking towards grants or other opportunities? What are common pitfalls to avoid? Conventionality is the worst thing that you can have when you apply for anything, I would say, unless you're applying to a conventional space.
If you're applying for a grant, you know, most people are looking for different ideas and different ways of thinking. So if you're making a bunch of watercolors and you're going to frame them and hang them on the wall, you probably aren't going to get money unless you're doing something really interesting with the work. Again, it's, you have to be And I think part of it is like, let's say, let's talk about grants for a second. When I've been on a ton of grant panels, I've read everything in the universe. And I've probably read probably over 10,000 artist statements in my life, which is something that you don't want to do.
But again, a lot of it has to do with what you write about yourself and how you come across. If you apply for a grant and you... don't get accepted, find out why.
Again, have somebody read it. It could be that the project has been done 20 times before and you just didn't know it. Or it could be that you're, you know, you've left something out in the budget. I once had a, went to somewhere where they were reviewing people's proposals just to give you feedback. And I had done a project that had a garden and the one person.
read it over and said, this is really great. You actually included everything, including fertilizer. But if you had submitted this grant and you didn't list those things that were required, I would know you're not ready.
So again, a grant, your budget in your grant is huge. That's equal to probably your project description. So again, when I go to do a project, I have different budgets that I create. And I think artists should create a budget for everything they do in their lives.
So you can make sure that you know you can do your own project. An example is I once had someone in one of my classes come up to me and they were all excited and they were going to have a show and it was going to open in three months and they were going to do 10,000 one-inch paintings. And I looked at him and I said, well, are you just doing blocks of wood? Because I thought, well, that's probably doable.
No, I'm actually stretching canvas in one inch. So I said, okay, go back and find out how long it's going to take you to do this and what your budget is. He came back very sheepishly the next week and says, it's going to take me three years and $10,000.
And I said, aren't you glad you didn't write the press release? Imagine putting all this information out there and then having your opening and you only have 300 of the 10,000 you were going to do. So again, knowing what you can do and you're and your budget can actually give you all kinds of ideas. So I do a budget that's pure fantasy. It's like everything I would ever want, right?
So when I did the first budget for the projections in the theaters, I think it was like $100,000. There was some really cool stuff, right? So of course that's not gonna happen.
So every time I apply for something, I rewrite that budget for something that's attainable. So it could be that you're writing a grant for a part of the project. Maybe it's, you know, there's some grants that allow you to write seed grants, you know, for things that you're planning.
Sometimes you have to have it completely done. I think that you only have to, when you're applying for something, you only have to beat out the people that are participating. You're not doing, you're not trying to beat out the whole country.
So the way that you remain viable is to write a really kick-ass proposal and have really great images. And, you know, mostly you have to be innovative. If I've seen the show that you're proposing, you know, by 50 artists in the last 20 years, or in the last 20 years, I've asked artists about what they make work about.
And the most often reply is memory. And I want to pull my hair out because it's like every artist cannot make work about memory, which means nothing unless you define it. But that's the thing that comes back to me and I just cringe. So let's say you meet somebody in the elevator, right? It's like goes back to the elevator speech thing.
And someone asks you a question about your work. And you say, well, I'm an artist. And I say, well, what do you make work about? And you say, ecology.
Well, that's the biggest bucket of information that tells me nothing at all. So I'm going to look at you and lump you into every other artist making work about ecology. It was about 50 million.
Okay, so how do you do a better job? You talk about what within that. And now this also has to do with making work.
If I walk into your studio and you tell me you're making work about ecology, and I'm just going, oh my God, okay, that's 50 billion. different subjects. Which one are you doing? The more specific you get, the more interesting you get. The more you delve down into a problem that we don't know about or don't have a solution for, the more interested we are in your work.
If you're making a generic statement about, you know, using plastic is bad, I'm not going to look at your work very long, right? If you give me something interesting about that or you delve down behind it. If you're doing work about race and you just say racism is bad, that's not interesting.
But if you get below it and you talk to me about why it exists or how to change that, or you challenge my perceptions about that, that might be different. So if you're making generic work, stop, because I've seen it. Like I can't tell you how much work I have seen in my lifetime.
So again, that's the big part of it is you have to be true to something that you're thinking about and you have to get underneath all of the hoopla. Because if you're telling me the same thing in your artwork that I can hear on the six o'clock news, you're not changing the dialogue at all. You're participating.
So this is the way I explain it. Do you want to participate in culture or do you want to create culture? Participating is called... in culture is just using what we all have, showing in galleries or doing, you know, the usual stuff.
That's participating. If I go to see a theater project, I'm participating, but I'm not active. If I want to create culture, that's my job.
And I make that work to change the way we think, to ask questions, to challenge perceptions. And so I'm creating culture, which is very different than in participating in culture. An artist...
without knowing it, usually choose one or the other. And I think it's really important to realize that. It's like, what do you want? That's part of your fantasy. Do you want to change culture?
Do you want to participate in it? Me personally, I'm going to change culture. I'm interested in changing the art world and changing life for artists. So everything that I've done has something to do with artists. Now, I might fail or I might not.
But the idea is that, you know, I'm working somewhere and doing something that nobody else has done. So putting all my, you know, my book online for free was kind of a radical thing to do. But it's also incredibly important.
People don't have the same access to resources. So I'm trying to level the playing field between you and somebody who has a trust fund. Or somebody who already is a relative of somebody who's famous in the art world. That's where most really famous people.
They're already involved in some way. So again, how do you level the playing field for someone who doesn't have the same kind of access? That's do something different. That's participate, not just participate, but I mean, create culture with your own work. Yeah, absolutely.
And I think the real core of that is specifics, right? being specific with everything and not being generic. And I think that applies to many platforms, many situations, including the artist statement.
I think that can also communicate. Yeah. And so we have a question actually about artist statements that just came in that I want to work into to this talk is from Sarah who wrote, are artist statements actually necessary? Do you really think that that's what separates artists and people who just paint, sculpt, draw, et cetera?
What if an artist just paints because they want, because that's what they do, or work on wheel because that's what they do, and it works? Not because... there needs to be a deeper meaning behind everything that's created.
Again, that depends on the artist, right? So again, if you are a potter and you're making 100 mugs a day, then you have to think about what the ramifications of that are. And it might be that that's the perfect thing for you. It could be that those hundred mugs just go into store and just whatever. You're participating in culture.
That's fine. But I think if you want to create culture, that's probably not the best way to go about it. So I think that we need all kinds of artists. And I think that, you know, this is what's so interesting about planning and thinking ahead about what you want to do and what impact you want to have in the world.
Maybe you only want to make enough money so that you can pay your rent and have a good time. That's a perfectly legitimate thing to do, but you might not be a part of the art world or the cultural dialogue. So again, it kind of depends on kind of what you want. I think everybody is necessary on some level. So doing something for yourself is fine, but it also means that you have a limited impact and a limited dialogue and a limited interest of an audience.
so you know a mug might be actually spectacular and be something that I've never seen before or it could just be something that I can buy from the 99 cent store again it depends on who you are and what you want and I'm not here to tell you that those people are not necessary I think they are I mean I much rather drink out of a mug that's made by somebody than you know something else but again it has a different cultural relationship to an audience So again, that's why you need to find your audience. If you want to make 100 mugs a day, then you need to find an audience that loves hand-thrown mugs. That's your audience.
If you're doing something else, you need to find a different kind of audience. And that's why I think matching your audience to your work is what makes you successful. So it's not what you do as much as it's how you make those connection and what makes you happy.
Again, you know, I... I like changing things up and I like, you know, challenging perceptions and I like getting people to think. I think if you can get people to think, and the idea of one of the reasons that I made artists my art practice is that I have a secret fantasy that I don't tell very many people, but I guess it's out now, is that, you know, the fantasy of being able to actually change culture. And if artists survive, we'll actually live in a better world. Because artists tend to challenge things in lots of different ways.
It could be that the person throwing 100 mugs a day is challenging something, right? It's hard to say. I mean, I don't know. It could be a very conventional set of mugs.
They could be wacky. They could, you know, they could be part of an installation project. They could be all...
end up on the beach somewhere. You know, it's like what you do with those things, I think, matters as much as what you make. And this is one of the reasons why I wanted to show lots of different images today of what artists have done, just to kind of think about, well, okay, if I just want to sit and throw on the wheel, that's really great.
But, you know, am I going to be disappointed because I don't get a review in the LA Times, you know, for my hundred mugs? It's being conscious and understanding what you want and how to get there. So I'm not here to say that, you know, if you're just participating, you're a lousy artist. It's just a different way of thinking. Does that make sense?
Yeah, totally. Okay, so let me go back to the artist statement thing, because that was the front of the question. Your artist statement stands in for you when you cannot be there. If you apply for something, you're not in the room. If someone's looking online and they're looking at your work, you're not in the room.
Your artist statement can make or break whatever you do. For instance, if you apply to art school, one of the things is that I always read the artist statements because that's how I find interesting people whose work hasn't quite gotten there yet. But their ideas are fantastic. Their knowledge is good. And they just, it's like, they just need to go to school.
If their artist statement says something and their work does not match it, that means I know they're not ready for money or an opportunity because they don't know what they're doing yet. If I read an artist statement that's incredibly provocative or use a lot of theory and, you know, technical jargon and $50 words and your work is not matching it at all, I know that there's a disconnect between your brain and the actual output. So if you're applying to a show at my, you know, gallery space and your artist statement doesn't match the work, you're probably going to get rejected.
Same thing with a grant. Or if you write a grant and your budget doesn't match at all, like you're asking for things that don't relate to the description. So an artist statement actually becomes incredibly important if you ever want to talk to somebody outside of your initial purview. So again, when people, when curators go look at the web, they go to your artist statement to see what you are thinking about your own work.
And they're not going to necessarily, you know, get jazzed about your work if your artist statement is shitty or doesn't say anything interesting or is so generic that I can't see what's going on. And again, you could just write the word ecology on a page and I'd be like, next. Right. So, so people who are in the arts who are really interested in cultural dialogue are looking for cultural dialogue. So if your artist statement and your work addresses that in some way, and they match and they work, but that's one of the things that people look at to see if you're savvy about your own production.
You can weed out people really fast by reading an artist statement. And it could be that the artist knows what they want, but they don't know how to write it. And this is why I started an artist statement review service.
Because again, sometimes you can write something out and someone else reads it and it's really obvious what's going on or what's not going on. And so again, you know, this is why you should share things with other people. Again, share your artist statement with your colleagues.
One of the things that I was doing when I was teaching this class at CalArts is that I would read everybody's artist statement out loud. I wouldn't say who had written it, although they could kind of guess, but everybody gave feedback on that artist statement. And what was so great is that everybody got 30 different perspectives on what was read and they could pinpoint it and say, this is unclear.
This doesn't make sense. And this is the most interesting part. You should write more.
So that's one of those things is that the artist statement is still, it's about you and it stands in for you. so you can't be everywhere at once, so let your artist statement kick ass, because it's working for you when you're not working, you know, you could be sleeping, and someone in China is like looking at your website, oh my god, so that's my answer to that, I think artist statements are so important, you know, if you want to have a life outside of your immediate purview, I guess, does that make sense? Yes, it does, thank you. Thank you. I'll keep going with the questions.
A few questions actually talk about style. So I'm just going to combine them into the one question. It seems like every great artist has their own signature style, something that separates their work from others to the point that they can just look at it and instantly tell who it's by.
What's a good way of going about finding your own signature? Well, My initial response to that is style is just an art supply, like everything else. If you're painting an abstract in 2020, you better have a really good reason for why you're painting an abstract because there's a thousand billion abstract painters.
So again, what is it within that work that's interesting or what are you doing? If you're just looking for a style in order to sell, that's a really easy thing to do because it's very easy to convince somebody to buy work. If you have a gallery, it doesn't mean that your work is good. Just because you get a gallery show doesn't also mean that you're a good artist. So again, a lot of it has to do with your own perception of what you want from your own career.
I think style is a very old school way of looking at things. And I think it's also a market strategy. Galleries want you to have a style because if you don't have a style, they can't sell your work and they can't make money off of you. So style, again, it's like every, think of everything as an art supply and then decide if you actually need that art supply. If you're, you know, if you're, so for instance, like, I once met with an artist who was making a lot of work about TV and making paintings.
And I said, why are you making paintings? Right? It doesn't really make sense to make a painting about television.
When you could do something so much more interesting if you did video and you actually utilize the context of what you were addressing. So again, I think it's more about the kind of work and the content of the work because style denotes content. If you want to make a really serious painting about something and you're using a cartoon style, that might or might not work for what you want to do.
So instead of thinking about style, I would think about ideas. Because ideas will determine what your style should be or what's interesting. So again, what do you want to do with your work? What do you want the impact of your work to be? And everybody can choose anything, right?
So that determines things a lot more. And, you know, the whole marketing of artists and all of that stuff, you know, you might have a 22-page resume. and still not be famous.
You could have worked all over the world, and you're still not like, you know, up there with the fame people. Again, you have to decide, you know, what your goal is in life. My goal in life is to shake shit up, right?
And that's just, so that's what I do. Your goal might be completely different. So again, I think style is just an art supply.
It's everything. There's a really great article written by Thomas McEvely called 13 ways of looking at a blackbird that I always gave my students because it asks all these questions about what you use to make artwork. You know, color has an effect on the content of your work. Size has an effect. You know, all these different kind of aspects.
History has an effect. Style has an effect. All of those things contribute to the content of a work.
So again, it's a really interesting way to look at what you're doing and saying, well, why am I doing it this way? Is it working? Do I need to do something else? Am I just falling into a rut?
Am I doing what I always do? Because I feel really comfortable. If you're comfortable as an artist, you should run like hell. Because it means you're not doing something new.
It means that you're not pushing itself. It means that your brain is kind of like, oh, well, these things look really good and I sold all of them and I'm gonna do that. That's great. That's a whole strategy. But I think if you're trying to do something else, it might not work so well.
So every single thing that you're doing, could be looked at in a really interesting way. Well said. Hit the last button.
Well said. Thank you so much. Awesome.
So more questions? Yeah, yeah. Are you okay with just... Oh yeah, I'm fine. I just hit the forward button.
The caffeine's still in? Yeah, it's still there. It's not worn out yet. I'm here for you.
Awesome. Thank you. We have a question from Jacob.
Hi, Karen. Thank you for all the information. I have found it really hard to find a free call when I look for shows. I've heard that it may have to pay and apply for the jury show to build up the resume first in order to be a stronger artist and show yourself to others.
Do you have any comments on that? Don't do it. The reason I say that. Is that juried shows are not what you should be participating in because they're not considered professional in the art world. So that means that you should never, I mean, so think about it this way.
Juried shows are the most conventional, uninteresting shows out there. They're usually scams and they do not look good on your resume. So why participate?
You can find, so let's say you want to find a show. So there's. over 3,000 artists run spaces in the U.S. and they love showing people from all over the place.
You can apply to any of them, absolutely no entry fee, and they usually pay you a fee to show there. So there's so many opportunities. If you can't find an opportunity, make one. Curate a show, put something together.
You know, there's so many different ways to participate in interesting ways. that you can actually make your own opportunity. So juried shows look really bad on a resume and they're not considered professional.
So I just wouldn't do them. If I look at somebody's resume and it's all juried shows, I know that they're not seeking professional opportunities. It's the easy way out to send stuff in. I once had somebody who took one of my classes and she said she had budgeted $100 a month to enter jury shows.
And I said, do you ever get anything out of them? And she said, well, I got an award once and I said, well, what did it do for you? She said, nothing.
People don't look at this stuff and take it seriously. If you pay to play, you're not considered professional. So again, you have to think about those things. If you want to still do them and be radical about that, that's great.
but be really smart and savvy about what they mean to somebody else who looks at your CV or your resume. Sorry. No.
We have a way to play. Right. So we have a question.
I got one more thing to say about that really fast. Yeah, yeah. The more artists that continue to support these scams means that more of them show up. There is, it's not. So artists are desperate everywhere.
And if you're desperate and you can't find something, and the easiest thing to do is to enter a juried show, that's who actually enters those shows. You're not showing with other professional artists. So your work is seen in a completely place that doesn't make sense, right?
I know an artist that once entered a juried show and went to the opening and she was so horrified. by the context and the other work that was in that space, she never would have shown with those people. So again, it's just, you know, I mean, think it through. But cutting your foot off before you get started by just going for jury shows, go to those spaces.
There's hundreds and thousands of them that don't charge you a fee. So do your homework. So let me give you another resource.
If you go to my Pinterest site, and there should be a link on the website. I actually have a couple of boards that might be really interesting for artists. So I use my Pinterest as an activist site, not as a like, here's the spaghetti recipe I like.
There's actually, I have three boards. One of them is every artist-run space in the greater LA area. The other one is every artist-run space I can find in the US. And the third one is every artist-run space I can find in the world.
So All you have to do is go and check out these spaces, go to their website, read about them, see if they make a match, and go from there. So there's a lot of those kinds of resources as well. I have tons and tons of extra resources that I haven't talked about on my Pinterest site that you could sort of check out.
So go find those spaces. Wonderful. That's very helpful. A few more questions coming in. It was asked, what if being in a structured system, say school, makes you lose your passion for art?
Get out of that school. If, you know, we all end up in different places and sometimes it has to do with economics and what we actually can do. Maybe we can't afford a highfalutin art school.
You make the best of what you can. The only reason to actually go to a graduate program, a good school, is depending on how serious you are and you learn stuff. faster.
You can learn everything that you can in graduate school outside of graduate school, but you got to be tenacious about it. So again, if the school itself doesn't fit your plan, get through it, get your degree, graduate, and then just like work like hell and whatever it is that you really want to do. I still think that artists need to do what's important to them. So don't be making work for something else.
Don't make work and then try to apply to a gallery because that's what you do. And then you're going to like be miserable. I know somebody who started making paintings for a commercial gallery and he could never quit because the gallery dealer kept asking for more blue ones, you know, and he was so sick of making blue paintings, but those are the ones that sell. I said, don't get into something that you can't support or that drives you nuts. Wonderful.
And we have one final question to wrap this up. So as a 20, Catherine wrote, as a 2020 graduate, what is the best way to prepare myself for the world outside of school in general and during this pandemic? I would say be smarter than everybody else you know.
Learn absolutely everything that you can in relationship to your own practice, the things that you want to do. Now's a really good time to read. Now's a really good time to archive all the work you've ever made.
you know, put it together in a system so that you can find it, you know, document your work really well, make sure that when these, when you're out and this pandemic has shifted, that you're ready to go. It's the people who are going to sort of like get really lazy and and you know not use this time appropriately that are going to be kind of behind the eight ball. So again this is the perfect time to actually get organized and get yourself into order. If someone asks you about a work you're gonna you know and you know everything about it you can actually talk about It's like, well, it costs this, it's this size, this is where it's stored and blah, blah, blah. Then, you know, you have your shit together.
So again, it's like if you can, so there's another funny thing that happens and artists never hear about a deadline until three days before. I don't know what's out there in the ether, but somehow you hear about it and you got three days. If you have an artist statement, if you have your CV, if you have your images, you have your.
image list, you have a project description, you have a budget, and you can apply for something in three days, you have your shit together. If you can't apply in three days, you need to get going. Because there's, you have to be ready at all times, because something will come across your path that is so perfect for you.
And if you can't do it in three days, you need to get it together. So that's kind of my final thing about You know, do you have your shit together or not? Think about that.
Could you do everything in three days? Well, if you have your artist statement written and it's kick-ass before you graduate, you're way ahead of the game. You know, so then you start on the next thing and the next thing and next thing and it will be fantastic. So be self-driven. Make calculating decisions based on your own work and who you are and what you want.
And don't feel compelled to do something that someone else thinks you should do. If you want to make 100 mugs, make 100 mugs and do the best job that you can. And make a name for yourself. Start a scavenger hunt with mugs in the city. You know, do something kind of like, you know, like I said, the kooky factor, right?
And go out and just, you know, and try to have some fun with it, right? It's like working in your studio and doing stuff that you hate is not a good way to have fun. But you have to have fun with ideas, right? So go forth, kick some serious ass, and I want to see what you guys do. Wonderful.
Well, I second what a lot of people are saying in the chat, which is we really appreciate you talking with us and giving so much informational and inspirational information. It's been wonderful chatting. And I want to thank everyone for joining me today.
we'll just do a virtual thank you to Karen. I can hear you all. Thank you across the country. And I'm so sorry that I could not be with you in person. But you know, this was really fabulous.
I don't know what any of you look like or what you're doing, but I hope that something has resonated and that you'll go out and be the best artist you can be on your terms. Not anybody else's turn. Screw everybody else.
do your job, have some fun and participate and or create culture, whichever one makes sense to you. Awesome. Thank you, Karen. All right.
Go out and kick some serious ass. That's all I ask of you all. Bye, Karen.
Okay. Bye.