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    Your Art Will Save Your Life
    Your Art Will Save Your Life
    Your Art Will Save Your Life
    Ebook96 pages1 hour

    Your Art Will Save Your Life

    By Beth Pickens

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A candid guidebook about art-making in the midst of oppression—"a slim, necessary revelation" (Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts).

    Visiting the Andy Warhol Museum as a teenager, Beth Pickens realized that art was imperative for reflecting—and thus remaking—the world. As an adult, she has dedicated her life to arts nonprofits and consulting, helping marginalized artists traverse the world of MFAs, residences, and institutional funding.

    Writing in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Pickens reminds emerging artists that their art is more important than ever. She gives advice on fostering creativity and sustaining an innovative practice as conversations about grants, public programming, and arts funding in schools grow ever-more heated. Part political manifesto, part practical manual, this resource reminds us that art has always been a tool of resistance.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Feminist Press at CUNY
    Release dateApr 10, 2018
    ISBN9781936932306
    Your Art Will Save Your Life
    Author

    Beth Pickens

    Beth Pickens is a consultant for artists and arts organizations with a master's degree in counseling psychology and a decade of experience. She is also the author of Your Art Will Save Your Life (2018, Feminist Press). She lives in Los Angeles with her wife and pets.

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    Reviews for Your Art Will Save Your Life

    3.5/5

    10 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Sent to me by a sweet friend who read a review and thought it would be right up my alley. It was to an extent, as it was a useful self-help book for artists giving good and practical advice about how to get by in the real world, to be able to make art and pay the bills too, and still have time to develop your practise and experiment etc. That bit was all good and actually quite practical and useful advice. That was about half of the book. The other half was a kind of extended wail of anguish about what a Trump governed America will be like for artists, LGBTQ people, people of colour and anyone else that somehow deviates from the norm. I get the pain, and I feel it too to some extent, but it dates the book to one very specific time and place and makes it a less useful document overall, I think. Still, it needed saying and I appreciate why this lady felt she had to say it.
    • 1/5
      It feels like a bait and switch. This book talks mostly about politics.
    • 4/5
      While this was more aimed at a professional artist or someone looking to break into professional art it was an interesting look at how you should carve out time for yourself and for your art in your life. This is one to remind you to feed yourself with more than just food and work.

    Book preview

    Your Art Will Save Your Life - Beth Pickens

    Preface

    Dear Artist,

    You are holding my love letter to artists.¹ Artists are the most important people in my life, and I need you to stay active and creatively engaged through this and all political shifts. Your art will help you navigate the world, and it will light the way for others.

    I have dedicated my professional and volunteer life to artists, especially those who are marginalized in the dominant art worlds: women, queer and transgender artists, artists of color, low-income artists, emerging artists, dropouts, artists who never sell anything, and brilliant weirdos who make work that defies commercial understanding. I want artists to reflect the world back to me, interpret it, and create new worlds for me to imagine.

    After the 2016 presidential election, many of my artist clients said things like, Maybe I should quit making art, It’s kind of selfish for me to focus on my art now, and I should help people in a more effective way. These are expected grief responses to the shock and horror of our times, but I beseech you: DO NOT STOP MAKING ART. I need it profoundly. We all do.

    Anytime you feel overwhelmed by humanity’s impact on people, animals, and the planet, or, really, anytime you think you cannot leave the house because the world is too hard, I want you to think about the art, performances, music, books, and films that have made you want to be alive. Think of how those artists, like you, probably felt overwhelmed by their lives—and the times they were living in—but made the thing anyway. Your future audiences need your work, so you need to make it.

    I focus on history for perspective; this helps me take strategic next steps. I read about artists making work during war, in times of violence, and despite systemic neglect. For example, I like to look to artists living during the AIDS pandemic. I read a lot about the role artists and activists played in changing science, research, policy, and culture; the anti-AIDS movement was largely orchestrated by artists and activists, many of whom were young and watching their friends die.

    Today we are in a different time and place. Depending on who you are, the Trump administration may not impact you drastically or you may encounter devastating, life-changing experiences. We don’t know what will happen, but historically, under oppressive regimes and fascist governments, it is the brave and creative ones who lead, who solve problems, and who incite, inspire, organize, comfort, satirize, and reflect.

    You are not alone. You have what you need for your life, for art, and for justice. Stay with your creative path, trust your vision, and know that your contributions will matter to someone else.

    Part One

    You’re an Artist, Keep Making Art

    The realization that art could first save and then expand my life came when I was a teenager in a troubled home. Life with my mentally ill mom and alcoholic dad near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, before the internet, was difficult. A smart, queer feminist without the language to talk about any of it—let alone identify with those lineages—I was profoundly depressed and mostly miserable. I ached for art and counterculture (remember that word?), but they were really hard to come by in small Rust Belt towns in the nineties. I read books, made zines, bought 45s, and ordered Sub Pop record catalogs out of the back of SPIN magazine, which at the time was a wonderland filled with mysterious ads for things like The Anarchist Cookbook.

    Then, in 1994, the Andy Warhol Museum opened in downtown Pittsburgh. I was fifteen and fortunate to be present for the museum’s midnight opening thanks to my neighbor Carol, an artist and public school art teacher who saw in me a deep need for connection to something beyond what was available in my sad town and busted school. Something new was born in me that night as I wandered the museum from top to bottom, looking at Warhol’s iconic and more obscure works, obsessively combing through the gift shop, gawking at the drag queens and kindred freaks clamoring to explore this unfathomable building. That museum opening uncovered an intuition stifled by my surroundings: there would be places I belonged and there were communities I must find.

    Back then I could barely understand, let alone articulate, what was so important to me about the museum, but now I know it clearly—it was a history and lineage of queer art. Andy Warhol made an exciting life for himself despite his impoverished Pittsburgh upbringing. I saw color and humor and possibilities for a better future. I saw strange people who made their own world, and it looked wild and limitless. I saw political discourse and tongue-in-cheek paintings, sculptures, and drawings. The Factory, music, art, women, style, humor, sex, and outrageous drugs—I just had to turn eighteen and move away! That became reason enough to live through my remaining years in high school.

    It’s been more than twenty years since that night at the Andy Warhol Museum, and since then I have consistently, heavily relied on artists to make me want to be in the world at its worst and embody a deeper experience of life at its best.

    My early career background was in professional feminist activism and higher education—I cut my teeth in a university women’s center where I learned a lot about how to be a person, a feminist, and a friend. I decided I should be a therapist, so I earned a master’s degree in counseling psychology. In 2007, after a decade in the Midwest, I moved to San Francisco to live in a queer community filled with artists. There, I began working exclusively in the arts and with queer artists, learning how to raise money for artists and for nonprofit arts organizations.

    From 2009 to 2013, I helped organize a queer writers’ retreat through the San Francisco literary nonprofit RADAR Productions. Along with the writers Michelle Tea and Ali Liebegott, I hosted dozens of LGBTQ writers and artists each year, providing them with weeks of quiet working space, delicious group dinners, and creative community in the Yucatán Peninsula. As it was a passion project, we worked hard to raise the money to create this free retreat for the artists and writers we adored, many of whom had little to no access to other colonies and residencies. We knew so many gay geniuses and

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