Underneath that is a sheet of paper silkscreen printed with a pattern inspired by maram grass, which grows on the dunes of Lake Michigan. I worry that I’ve made it feel too precious & people feel uncomfortable taking them but they are for taking!
This was so moving and a reminder that we don’t have to live in a world without rituals, without attunement to the seasons, without ways of calling back to the Earth and offering something of ourselves. We can live an a world teeming with life💫❄️
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Most of the works I’ve put in this show are best experienced through touch.
ID: a video pans across two sheets of rough, pale blue paper. The top sheet has embossed shapes that resemble stones or shards of glass. As the camera moves, the shapes reveal themselves in the light and disappear again.
As smooth as glass and hidden in plain sight. Handmade and embossed cotton and abaca fiber paper with embedded wood shavings from driftwood found on the shores of Lake Michigan.
I’m excited about this little experiment and can’t wait to make more.
A sheet made from small rectangular fragments of recycled, metallic, tetrapak packaging material held together by tiny stainless steel jump rings rests on a concrete floor. Various sculptural objects rest on its surface: a hand-carved bowl holds water and a floating piece of driftwood, chunks of petrified wood and a single smooth, oblong stone are cast like dice.
This week, I’m in the last stretch of installing a big project I’ve been working on for months. This is one tiny part:
Electrolyte Shield [homeostasis], 2025,
Salvaged Tetrapak, stainless steel jump rings, hand-carved poplar wood, petrified wood, stone, drift wood, water.
Edit: *than*
We will not be able to quantify all of this labor into 1:1 perfectly transactional relationships
where currency is exchanged. So how else will we ensure that labor is distributed equitably and that we are honoring each other's contributions?
Conversely, what do you need from other artists?
Extend these questions beyond your circle of artistes and into other dimensions of your
communities.
This is a bigger problem then
"where else do we look for funding?"
Ask yourself what kind of labor you can and
are
willing to do for and with other artists to 1.) meet your basic neeeds & 2.)
continue making artwork
A webpage screenshot reads: “New NEA Grant stipulations: In addition, the applicant agrees that, if the applicant is selected and becomes a NEA grant recipient: • The applicant will comply with all applicable Executive Orders while the award is being administered. Executive orders are posted at whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions. • The applicant's compliance in all respects with all applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws is material to the U.S. Government's payment decisions for purposes of section 3729(b)(4) of title 31, United States Code, pursuant to Executive Order No. 14173, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity, dated January 21, 2025. • The applicant will not operate any programs promoting "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI) that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws, in accordance with Executive Order No. 14173. • The applicant understands that federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology, pursuant to Executive Order No. 14168, Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
New nonsense targeting arts funding & demanding censorship keeps dropping every day so am just continuing this thread so all of these thoughts are in one place. Today’s dispair re:
The NEA (described in alt-text):
And to be clear, there have always been artists systemically locked out of these credentialing mechanisms, even as certain programs/opportunities attempted to be (or appear) more inclusive. So, as we see rollbacks, remember those who still have never had their first shot at support & recognition
And I genuinely hope this is a time that compels the U.S. art ecosystem become more porous in its social networks and resource allocation. I also hope we can reconsider who our most important / valuable audiences and “collectors” are. I hope to make things that can travel where they are needed.
I hope to see a proliferation of artist’s run spaces, collectives, co-ops, tool exchanges, second hand supply free-stores, alternative schools, basement and apartment gallery shows, zines and small publications, artist-built websites that get us off the socials for a second.
Already established artists have a responsibility to help reimagine ways emerging artists enter the field and gain recognition. And all of us, regardless of our career stage, have a responsibility to understand what resources we have access to and how we can share those with artists who need them.
And I want artists to be prepared to support other artists in finding ways to continue making work, to share material resources, space and time with each other. I want there to be a wide-scale recognition across the art world and academia of the disruption of the opportunity landscape.
And I say this to highlight that there may be an entire generation or multiple generations locked out of these particular kinds of credentialing norms for many years. The prestigious MFA programs, the competitive grants and residencies etc. may not be financially available in the same way.
The same way that academics have to have continuous, up to date publishing records, we have to have exhibition records. Being qualified for jobs in arts academia, for example, is more dependent on these track records that demonstrate a “consistent practice” than our teaching qualifications/desires
And I think people outside of the arts may not fully understand how artists, a relatively recently professionalized category of workers, are asked to endlessly credential ourselves through amassing exhibition records, winning grants, attending prestigious residencies, or selling to certain buyers.
For a long time, I’ve anticipated the collapse (or weakening/fracturing or coopting) of current U.S. arts funding streams. Federal, state, and local grant funding, & academic/institutional funding, but also the withdrawal of private foundations afraid of getting caught in political cross-hairs
Congrats to Finnegan Shannon, whose work was a touchstone for Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (edited with Rebecca Sanchez, avail. open access)
nyupress.org/978147981936...
UbuWeb · All rivers lead to the same ocean: find your form of resistance, no matter how small, and go hard. It's now or never. ubu.com
One thing I am genuinely excited about that is coming out of my current institution :
I spend quite a bit of money on subscriptions, but at this point I really think the mantra has to be, pay for the media you wish to see in the world
I had a really great conversation with another artist today about this kind of possibility. Many people are thinking and feeling the same thing I think!
I would like to offer that artists may also have a role in immediate, urgent needs for emotional and spiritual support within our communities. And that we have tools other than spoken or textual language with which do do that. That possibility brings me a lot of hope and a very clear directive.
I think there is a misconception that the only useful thing artists can do in a crisis is document or communicate or represent the crisis and/or the events leading to it. Sometimes we are even called to envision speculative futures—still, mostly through means of representation.
Art making, processing complexity through material, taught me new strategies for holding grief, in myself and communally—something that seems increasingly harder to do in an individualistic, secular society that also distances most people from natural, material cycles of life and death.
