How do you fit art into your life now and what does that look like?

Annie Image

Annie: Yeah, well I am a person who really benefits from structure. If I'm wandering in the woods alone I would just lay down there in one spot and zone out and commune forever and never bathe. I really benefit from structures. For me what had to happen was that I had to get rid of the bar that [my art] was still going to look like what I made in school. When I am working, which I have to work, it's not going to look like what I made in school. I put some structues around it. So Regan has actually helped me come up with a series that I work on everyday so I don't have to re-decide everyday, you know. So like doing it everyday and accepting the fact that its not going to be as much time as I want. Also more recently since the pandemic, I have been free-lancing and doing part time gigs which has been much easier to work art in, rather than the full time work. I don't know how full-time people do it, cause when I have had full time jobs, I haven't made art and it was pretty miserable, even though they were good jobs that I believed in. I'm glad I did them but it was just, when you have a full day, especially if its a non-profit, and you're trying to do the best you can, and its short staffed, because its a non-profit, it's very hard to make art at the same time. But you are never not an artist. You are creative in your job, but its not for you, it's for what the mission says, and you put your whole soul into that, well I was, so now like the last few years, doing freelance, and everything, has made it a lot more possible, and to be able to take a week off and have time to just make art with courses and everything. I haven't been the most successful person at like making a whole lot since [I graduated] cause I have to work and not be funded. I haven't done the grants and residencies and all that stuff, funding. Cause I like to keep it very separate. I have other things that keep my life stable and I keep those separate. But I really admire people that are like I'm going to figure out how to do art and make it financially stable. And maybe that will change. But I like to keep them really separate. It doesn't confuse anything. I literally make whatever I want and it has no connection with my paycheck whatsoever.

Vidya Image

Vidya: Well first things first, I was focused on being employed. Um, which started me working in custom framing and a local art supply store while I looked for a white collar job, which I got at the Natural Histoy Museum in New York City. So, I the got into exhbition deisgn and spent the next decade in that field and that world in house and in client services. I got to make a lot for things both expicity in art- related institutions and not, um, and so I as squarely in the field of applied arts and having my mind open to different possibilites for applied arts. At the same time, all the people I was meeting and working with, a huge number of them, a large percentage, had a creative practices that they were doing outside of their jobs. Um, and my own creative pursuits outside of my paid job, never felt real or special to me, or like Art with a capital A. And I still don't know that I really think of the things that I do as Art with a capital A. Um, but I'm realziing that Art with a capital A. might not exist. So yeah, there was so much unlearning happening but letting go of those things took years. And I think I came out of my education, I had since abandoned Art with a capital A, because I had chosen Design with a capital D, but I was attached to that capital letter that...I had such a dismissive attitude towards design with a lowercase d and art with a lowercase a, that I missed a lot for many years. A lot of beauty that was happening around me and so it took a long time, it was only when I sort of decided to commit to my own salvation that I, um, gave other poeple permission in my environment to own their own creativity and legitimize their creativity. In 2019 I quit my job and now I'm a pregnant creative, domestic, person. And there are things I want to make, and I am figuring out how to combine the resources and how to make those things happen but the first resources I need and the hardest to summon are the ones that are inside of me, nurtured or taken away from me, so it's 2022. So it has bee 3 years and I am still trying to light that fire inside. But it's a better place than the place where I don't believe the fire exists.