This is a preamble to this post.
At the end of 2024, I was feeling like it was truly finally time to call it. Time to wind down my practice, pack it up and figure out what could possibly be next. It was a year where I’d submitted over 60 applications to open calls with proposals for projects I feel really strongly about and have been wanting to make for many years now. Projects that speak to critical issues like our acute loneliness, our radical destruction of our planet, and the very deepest inequities we live with every day as if they were normal. Projects that would have let me scale up, stretch my capacity, work with new tools and in new contexts. I had been awarded some really wonderful opportunities through applications I’d submitted in 2023 (like the aforementioned studio that I’m so grateful for!) which I knew would carry me into 2025 and some even into 2026, but almost every single proposal I submitted in 2024 was rejected. And that was tough, though it goes with the territory.
But also…I spent half of November 2024 performing within a friend’s genius project at the Venice Biennale—a context frequently described as “the Olympics of the art world”—and experienced a massive awakening there. The whole time I’ve been making art, I’ve been assuming that the reason it’s so psychologically grueling, crushingly unhealthy and poverty-inducing is because I’m not operating at a very high level of the game so to speak. In November of 2024, I learned incontrovertibly that this is not true. That the exploitation baked into the system at the bottom, carries all the way up to the top. And though having my own work featured in the Venice Biennale had not ever been something I was consciously aspiring to, my experiences there rattled my entire sense of what there even was to aspire to within this system if it is all oriented towards the ideal of operating at the “Olympic” level.
And then finally, right before the end of 2024, I was informed that I was not chosen for a major grant and honor—the inaugural Wagner Arts Fellowship—that I had been nominated for. (I actually haven’t told anyone about this until right here, right now.) But it was crushing. I was on the edge of feeling like I just couldn’t lie to myself anymore about how little I had to show for the amount of effort and energy and (really unhealthy) sacrifice I’ve made in the past decade or so, in order to center art making and art community building in my life, and being nominated for the award felt like the first glimmer of hope I’d experienced in that whole time that what I was doing had meaning to anyone but me and a few (very dear) champion-friends. Waiting for the outcome of the jurying left me feeling like I could hold on for a few more months juggling just enough random freelance work to stay out of deep debt if there was even a chance of finally being seen and cared for by the mystical system of art benefacting. And when I was not selected for one of the three awards, it was just too much for me. This was the 5th time I’d been nominated for a Boston-focused award with this small a pool of invited applicants, and not been selected, and I was just done. I felt (and still feel,) like these are the worst possible kinds of art awards: being pre-selected and then still not being X enough to become a finalist (and of course never knowing why…) somehow cuts far more deeply than being rejected with dozens or thousands of others in a wide-open call. I still feel like these kinds of awards should just be decided on quietly by a jury and given out without anyone who isn’t chosen for them ever knowing that they were a contender for them at all.
So that’s where I was at the end of last year. I do still feel awakened in some way that I can’t go back to sleep about. I am fully freed from some illusions about what there is to aspire to within the arts that I used to be hypnotized by. I also took almost all of 2025 off from applying to open calls. With the exception of a few that I have applied to annually for my whole life that are essentially lotteries, and some programs I’ve applied to in order to produce other people’s work as a facilitator or presenter, I have (sometimes easily and sometimes with a lot of difficulty) pulled back from this fairly compulsive habit which was starting to feel a lot like a gambling addiction. I’m starting to apply for things again just now for the first time, but with a lot of new boundaries around how much time and energy I’m willing to expend. I do still feel like there is a strong chance I will have to shift gears professionally soon because the model I’m currently working within is not a sustainable one (please let me know if you have good ideas for what I might be doing that uses all of the skills that art builds, but is a healthier way of being in the world!)