Tuesday, December 17, 2013

"to fail and fail big" In Action: Getting Lost in the Loss?

by Jennifer Wright Cook

The Field hosted a free public panel in July for our National Network Conference with Octavio Campos (dance theater artist and queer activist), previous long-term Field director Dr. Steve Gross, Melanie Cohn (Executive Director of Staten Island Arts) and Sacha Yanow (Director of Art Matters Foundation).  The panel was focused on resilience and building artists’ capacity for resilience, and thus, building their capacity for risk!

The astute Melanie Cohn (whose Sandy and post-Sandy work in the arts is deep and strong) reflected on how artists deal with devastation and their resilience in light of this: "Some people get lost in the loss... and other people are able to envision where they go next."

As artists (and as people) we experience loss all the time, small losses and big losses: the loss of a grant or a gig; a bad review (or no review at all!); insufficient recognition and visibility; seeing our peers succeed where we feel invisible; or deciding to stop making work because we are just too darn tired of feeling rejected or invisible or broke.

It’s no joke that artists speak about having postpartum depression after they close a show.  The show’s end, (or any ending) can be devastating.

The list of losses is not short. 
So our question to you, dear reader, is how do you grapple with loss?
Tell us on Facebook if you like.

One of our answers and our aha moment: reflection and goal-setting are key to our capacities to hold loss (and to hold “gain” too!).  Reflection on failure (or success, or even stagnation) is key to our growth and our sense of contentment.  Reflection and goal-setting build our awareness of who we are, what we want and how we can try to get it. 

Reflection builds our resilience.

But one of my failures as Executive Director at The Field is that I convince myself that I am too busy to reflect, to analyze, to set goals.  I gotta get things done! Now!  I prioritize action and product over process. 

Many of us do this in our art-making too: the show is somehow more important than the process of making of the show. 

The rub?  The creative product often reflects this rushed, unclear, unreflected creative process.

So here are some questions for you to provoke your reflection and goal setting:
What do you want to achieve with your art-making?
What’s realistic? Really realistic?
What is essential to your vision and its implementation?
Why was something successful for you?
Why was another thing not successful?
What can you change or work on?
Do you have a trusted colleague with whom you can speak honestly about your work, goals, process and product?

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

"to fail and fail big" In Action

by Jennifer Wright Cook

In keeping with our focus on live arts, over the past six months The Field took “to fail and fail big: a study of mid-career artists, success and failure” from the page to the stage and into action.  As we promised in “to fail” we are aiming to talk with every prong of “the big we” in the arts sector so that we can move the work in “to fail” forward. 

And we are doing it. 

And we want to be über transparent about what we are learning, what we are risking and where we are headed…..So over the next few months we will unveil a few of our most titilating takeaways and ahas.  We will include provocative questions and actionable tactics about what YOU (artist, art-lover, arts administrator, Board member, donor, etc) can do to fail and fail big too.  So here we go….

Who’s hot and who’s not? The Field did a public launch panel at SITI Company on May 1st with artist Okwui Okpokwasili, producer Tommy Kriegsman, funder Moira Brennan and artist Somi - facilitated by the crazy smart Georgiana Pickett of Baryshnikov Arts Center.   An aha moment from an artist in the audience (paraphrased), “I am mid-career and I’ve been somewhat successful but I feel invisible now.  I am not in the ‘it club’ that gets the Doris Duke money, the Genius grants or the European tours.  Do I have to change my work and my self to be in the ‘it club?’”

The question to you, dear reader: What ways do you contort yourself or spin your work so that you get a gig, a grant or a review?  Is it worth it?  Do you end up feeling like you aren’t being honest about your work?  Or is it all just part of the game?  We've started you off with our answer below. Join the conversation with us on our Facebook page.

Our answer: We’ve contorted ourselves at The Field for sure!  Five years ago the “it club” in funding was all about innovation.  We didn’t really do “innovation” per se but we had a big dream for a re-grant program called ERPA.  So we applied to the Rockefeller Foundation Cultural Innovation Fund and amazingly we got two big grants!  We were in the “it club”! 

Now “innovation” is over it seems.  It’s all about creative placemaking.  We don’t do that. And we have no big dream programs that are contort-able to fit into creative placemaking.  So are we out of the “it club”?  What do you do when your work is out of fashion?  Do you contort and spin? Do you let go and wait for the next round?