Cleaning the House

Ute,
Thank you for agreeing to this electric space with me. Such relationship-based topics can be difficult to discuss, especially in plain view. Having courses is a great way to move the conversation forward. I have found that over dinner, I can be both candid and political depending on who’s at the table. I hope today to be the former primarily with room for political moments when appropriate. While I have become accustomed to speaking on behalf of large groups of people, I will resist this habit as there is a whole world of other artists and funders who may be able to share their own thoughts. With this said, let’s begin with a bit of house cleaning as guests to this blog site will be arriving soon. Looks like we have 10 days to get through a fair amount of relationship building. My house cleaning thoughts will just be to lay out who I am and how I enter the conversation of arts granting.

• I have been a practicing artist for about 15 years, both visual and performing.
• While I did not complete either a formal BFA or MFA, I have been invested in learning about the field for as long as I have been making.
• My degrees are in Urban Planning, Religious Studies and Public Art Administration.
• For almost 8 years, I worked in clay exclusively.
• Relationships have always been more important to me that objects.
• I have been applying for grants for over 10 years with many more rejections than awards at the outset.
• I have also had the opportunity to set up selection committees, determine the amounts for awards, design the call for artists and fight for artists who I really believe in. This process of being on both sides of the fence, I think is really important for artists in order to understand how processes work (will come back to this point over and over again).
• I am 36, African American, raised in the Black Church, with strong convictions about the pitfalls of cities and their redemptive value.
• I have shown work in museums, gallery settings and alternative spaces of my invention. Often, performance accompanies my installations.
• I sing when I am alone.
• Winning things is important to me sometimes, but just playing is also fun.
• The grant writing process can be a real challenge for me sometimes because I am not always empowered enough to pick up the phone and just ask questions to an anonymous-seeming program officer and other reasons that we can share later.

This process is already cathartic.