Dear Art Grove Artists,

May is upon us and with it, the beginning of summer, and the season of graduations. 

When we began planning this issue, my mind was aflutter with the excitement and potential to share wisdom with the graduating class of 2024 as they enter a new chapter of their lives, bubbling with possibility. 

It all feels so different now. 

I am writing this as students around the country and the world are protesting institutional support for the indiscriminate slaughtering of Palestinians by occupying their college campuses with encampments. These students are being kettled, pepper sprayed, tear gassed, and arrested for exercising their constitutional rights. If history has taught us anything, it’s that students are powerful, and when they use their strength and voices to speak out, the world will hear them. 

As artists, we also carry power. The power to unsettle, discomfort, and call to action. The power to collectivize and demonstrate our values through action. The power to invoke beauty and call to the humanity in each of us. 

We must use this power for good, or at least try to. 

To that end, I want to share some thoughts that expanded my artistic outlook and philosophies back when I first shed the title of “student” and embraced my role in professional and vocational art making. 

To be an artist is to make a daring choice. While we’re studying to be artists in undergraduate and graduate programs, we are so often subjected to the confines of assignments and the will of our professors and mentors. It feels like we are not eligible to make a choice, or made to feel that our choices will simply not be good enough because we lack the experience of our professors. In many ways, I feel that this is the unspoken desire of an institution that charges tuition: to ensure that students feel inadequate and thus enter into a cycle of perpetual studenthood and spend more money on their education. 

At the end of my first year of graduate school in New York City, I received some life-altering advice from a dear friend, Ariadne Greif. I remember speaking with her about feeling the pressure to pay to attend a summer program thinking the exposure and experience would add value to my career. I didn’t feel particularly inspired by the offers I had received, and I wasn’t sure how to proceed. Ariadne told me that if I do not stop viewing myself as a student and begin viewing myself as an artist, I am liable to be perpetually stuck vying for the approval of teachers and institutions.  

As I ruminated on these words, I asked myself a series of questions as follows:

• Why can’t I validate my own work? 

• What do I gain from catering my artistic practice to the approval of gatekeepers?

• How can I create a career and life in the arts that aligns with my values and still sustains me financially? 

These are big questions, and I am still answering them. I think every good artistic practice is littered with unanswerable questions. That’s what makes artistry a life-long pursuit. 

But back to the daring choice. As you enter the world of professional art making, or even just allowing art to take a larger place in the priorities of your life, I urge you to embrace your own voice and value your own perspective. 

You are entering uncharted waters. Your artistic practice has been handed back to you, chewed up and spit out maybe, or perhaps empowered to forge on. You must decide what you’ll do with it. When you’re establishing yourself as an artist, you must accept that your work will change with you. The daring choices you make in your first year out of school will vary greatly from the ones you make ten years down the line. Accepting that your perspective will shift and change is the freedom to make mistakes and to change your mind. You can still value your perspective as you grow into your fully-fledged artistic self but do not wait until you are “ready” to make art. 

While you’re learning to trust your voice and make use of your new-found independence, you will encounter a lot of unsolicited advice (this letter included). People will attempt to sell you courses, lead you to a more traditional path, put you down, or invite you to follow their teachings. A good rule of thumb I’ve always followed is that people who are trying to sell you something are not giving you advice with your best interest at heart. 

The work then becomes an exercise in figuring out who you trust outside of yourself. I’ve found the approach of creating a “board of directors” for myself and my art-making to be a good practice. This means that I have identified a handful of people who work in and around the industry whose opinions I trust, intentions I understand, and values I largely align with. Each person on your board of directors does not need to check each of those boxes, but collectively they can fulfill those needs. For me, my board of directors consists of my partner, my dad, a dear colleague of mine, the aforementioned wise and fabulous Ariadne Greif, and a few professors who have empowered me over the years. I do not allow these people to guide my decisions so much as I check in with them when I feel hesitant or unsure about something to gain some more perspective. Ultimately, unlike studenthood, I make my own decisions. 

Trust and relationship building can often feel in direct conflict with maintaining your artistic independence. But similarly to a romantic relationship, artistic relationships and trust function best when you feel comfortable with who you are as an artist and a person. Establishing a balance between independent work, collaborations, and advisory relationships is only made harder when insecurity rears its ugly head. 

Harkening back to the earlier unanswerable questions, for me, my inability to validate my own work came from a deep-seated insecurity and devaluation of myself, my artistic perspective, and my worthiness to take part. Managing insecurity and learning to love yourself is in and of itself another life-long process, but that’s what you’ve signed up for as an artist. Explore yourself as a person and an artist. Relationships with other artists, organizations, and audiences come from a place of authenticity that is best achieved through hard-earned self-respect. Building real friendships is the gateway to further artistic achievement. The value of collaboration and connection can not be understated. 

For many years, I felt too afraid to collaborate with other artists on a deeper level. I felt like they would find out that I was a phony or not good enough for their time and talent. I am still unlearning that pattern of behavior, but the rewards from opening up myself to collaboration have been bountiful. Even Art Grove itself is the product of a deep collaboration that has revealed the cracks in my confidence as an artist while simultaneously filling them through the connection and care imparted by my collaborator and his complementary skills and perspective. 

So, as I draw this letter to a close, I want to leave you with a few activities to consider as you embrace your artistry to its fullest potential. 

• Engage in a project that is totally different from your discipline (I.E. If you’re a singer, paint a picture, if you’re a sculptor, write a song, if you’re a writer, dance!) Allow yourself to be bad at something and see how you react. This is valuable information. 

• Explore what ways you’d like to introduce structure into your life. Trial run some systems for completing your work – keep what works, throw out what doesn’t. Track your process. 

• Reflect on the time you’ve spent engaged in devoted study and write down information that has stuck with you. Revisit this document and add to it, this is now a guide filled with personal reminders to fortify you throughout your artistic life

• Build in time to rest and recover. Sometimes rest feels like a chore, but you cannot pour from an empty cup. Take time to fill your cup and reset yourself.

• Make something. Anything. And share it. To quote Mary Oliver, “You do not have to be good,” and neither does your work. Perfect is the enemy of done. 

• Make a goal to do something you’ve never done before every day. It can be small. It will expand your perspective.

I hope that you’ll find joy and excitement in exploring who you are, engage actively in your duty as an artist to tell the truth, and utilize the power you carry to change the world. 

We are all rooting for you. 

Sincerely,

Betsy Podsiadlo, Creative Director