On sustaining an artistic practice over time

Could you explain what you imagine ARTPOWER being? The way I see, it’s like a tool to teach to help people with financial literacy, or to creative people with financial literacy.

ARTPOWER is making a tool called TORTOISE. TORTOISE launched in December (2024). It is a personal finance tool for artists, to help artists determine what their needs are financially and have a really good understanding of what the true cost of making a project happen are, how to take really overwhelming tasks, like planning for a big purchase, or a big move, or a big life change, and how to approach those tasks in small chunks, small bites.

It’s named TORTOISE intentionally. It is about… Of course, I think it’s going to be obvious to people, the slow and steady. It’s about realizing that we’ve got all the tools we need in our toolbox, and applying those tools every day to our financial lives will make our financial lives better, will make our practice better.

Right, and tortoises also live for a long time, too, so hopefully you’ll be helping artists sustain their practice for a long time.

They live for a long time…I’m so glad you said that. This is about sustaining your artistic life over time, so we can all age beautifully, gracefully as artists, and have the things that we need. I encourage everyone to go to the ARTPOWER website, download, and try it out. And we’re looking for feedback, too. There’s been three years of planning on this, Brandon, so there’s been a lot of thought, a lot of thinking, but we know there’s more to learn. We’re excited for people to actually get in there and start using it, and tell us what’s missing, and also what works.

It can be difficult to start something new. What made you decide to start ARTPOWER, and once it was an idea, or a spark, how did you get going on it?

This began as a research project, looking at the ways that artists and arts organizations were supporting each other, recovering from a pandemic and coming back to, how do we prepare ourselves to be more resilient for the future? Sadly, people were surprised how poorly artists were doing financially, even artists that they thought were doing very well professionally.

I can’t tell you the number of folks who’ve said to me, “I’m just not good with money, I’m just not good with finances. I’m creative, I don’t do math.” I have this fundamental belief that, as artists, we’re creative people. We make things happen. We have ability, we have resilience, we have creativity. Why should we feel less capable than anybody else when it comes to taking charge of our financial lives? I would like to see us come to it with a sense of manifestation — the same power we bring to our art practice, when we’re writing a poem or making music, bring that same sense of creativity and commitment.

People sometimes assume if you’re creative, that’s all you can do. Like, if you’re an artist, you can’t do anything outside of that. I’m like, “Hey, you can also walk around the block and get a gallon of milk, right? You know how to do a lot of non-artistic things…”

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It empowers creative people to take control. I truly do believe a lot of people can do more than they think they can.

We can all definitely do more than we think. I think it’s not our fault, as artists, that we necessarily feel that way because we get a lot of reinforcing messages that tell us that. When you’re a kid and someone notices you’re creative, they start to put you in this box of left brain, right brain, smart, creative. They put the two opposite. I’m talking about just thinking about your future and saying, “You know what? Here’s what I would like for my future. I would like to own a home. I would like to take six months out of the year to travel. I would like to go back to school,” whatever that is.

Taking the time and feeling like you deserve that time, to name what your desires are or what your needs are, and then making a plan for how you’re going to get there. You might think you get many chances to live it, and maybe you do, but this is the one you have right now.

It’s important as an artist. We’re in such an attention economy now, where you really have to grab that moment and make the most of it. If you don’t, it’s going to just pass. A week later, people will be onto something else.

Absolutely. I mean, yeah, it would be nice to be lucky for sure, and have things happen that you didn’t expect, and it’s like, “Oh, wow.” So we want that, if that happens. For most of us, though, it’s like, it’s everyday work and attention you’re bringing to your future goals, to your desires. And I’m not saying it’s easy, it’s definitely not. And it’s not easy to have your head and your heart in your practice, and then also in your finance. It’s very hard. And we have all kinds of relationships to money, right? Some people are ashamed to think about money, to talk about money. Some people feel like their value is tied up in how much money they have or don’t have. So there are a lot of emotions attached to money and our relationship to it.

Do you find it difficult as someone who is an artist, whose focus is also helping other artists, to balance the time for you to make your own creative work?

Yes. I was an executive director for a little bit more than a decade, a little bit before I started ARTPOWER. And as executive director, my job was to run this community arts organization that provided opportunities for other artists, for artists to make things. During that period, I think I did one gig as a musician, maybe. I wrote some poems, but really loosely. It didn’t even occur to me that I could really do both of those things, the energy wasn’t there. I also became a mother during that time period. I made the choice to put those things aside and focus on the community-based work I was doing. I think I’ve learned some lessons about that.

I’m coming to ARTPOWER very differently, Brandon. I write every day. It’s on my calendar, I make time for it, I do it. So now, it’s different. Now, I am as equally committed to myself and my own creative practice as I am to ARTPOWER and to the work we’re doing to help other artists.

If you have a thing called ARTPOWER, but you’re frustrated in your own work, then it’s not a good balance, you know?

No, and then, I don’t feel like I would be a good example, either. It’s hard starting something new. I mean, like a new entity. There are moments that are overwhelming and frustrating, disappointing, or just complicated, hard. In those moments, I’m really glad I have some poems I can turn to, and poems I can write, and music I can try to make.

What have been some of the biggest hurdles in getting this going?

Any kind of technology tool, that’s already hard. One of the biggest challenges with big ideas and ideas that have lots of parts is that you want to try to do them all, so the hurdles have been staying focused on what we’re trying to do, which is to make something that people can use and want to use, being clear that we can’t do everything all at the same time. And then, I don’t even know if I want to say this, but it’s hard working with people. I mean, I’m a writer, I like to be by myself.

You know, you can doubt yourself and start to question, “Well, can I even do this? Can we even do this?” So it’s a hurdle not staying in that place for too long.

Sometimes, you have to make the concept so simplified in order to sell it, or to get someone to get behind it. And they often want comps, like things that are similar to it, but maybe you don’t know of anything that is quite like it.

There’s a difference between making your art and selling it. I do all right selling ideas, I guess. But I recognize that, I can keep it simple in the doing, but the simple in the explaining is hard. And so you find other people who can do what you can’t do.

How do you avoid burning out, when you’re pushing against things that don’t necessarily come natural?

I don’t know that I’ve been burnt out yet. I mean, I’ve definitely had moments where I’m like, “Okay, I need to pause on this.” I try to read myself or be aware of when my energy meter is going in the red zone, where it’s like, “Oh, I am angry. I am frustrated. I am not being nice to people.” When it’s edging there, I pause, take walks, read, and it feels better. I know all the things that we should do—eat well, hang out with good friends, stay in community with people, help other people. I just need to do them!

When I was younger, and had moments where I was a really anxious child, I talked to my father about it. His advice to me was, “In that moment where you’re feeling very afraid, very scared of something, there’s probably at least one other person near you that feels even more afraid than you do. Maybe you can say something to that person or help them in some way.” That advice helped a lot. I still do it even now in the moments where I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, I am so overwhelmed. I’m afraid. I don’t think I can do this. I don’t know if this is going to work.”

When I am afraid, I pause and ask myself, “Is there someone who could use my positive energy in this moment?” Then, I make a phone call, I send a text, I go see people. Give a little bit of care and compassion to yourself every day and try to be aware when that’s going out of whack.

People will come to you with their deadlines and their needs, and next thing you know, your workday has been sucked up in like five Zooms and whatever.

I agree. And, where you’re saying you write every day, no matter how busy I get, I do the same thing. I found that if I write just a little bit every day, it also, it becomes this… I always say to my kids, “Slow and steady.” When I was younger, I would make the mistake of thinking, “I’m going to write the great American novel,” and sit down for this planned week-long writing jag, then get myself all psyched up, and never actually work on it.

I’ve had that. I went to graduate school during COVID for creative writing, and I was like, “Oh, I’m going to write a marriage memoir.” That was my big project I came up with, and I started to do research, and it was this big thing in my head. And then, for like a year, I made no progress. No progress, like nothing, nothing. I was like, “Why am I having a hard time with this?” Well, first of all, I’m writing about my own marriage and my relationship to marriage, so that’s already difficult.

But then, I think it’s that I was making it so big—something about that made it seem impossible. So I said, “Let’s just write a little bit every day, or many days.” I gave myself certain time checks, where I would take a pause and see, “Okay, what have I got?” And so far, I mean, that feels much better. You know, like, “When is it forthcoming? Not quite sure, but at least it’s happening.”

It works, though, and then you’ll stop, and you’ll be surprised at how much you have. That’s what I’ve done, where I’ll be working on something, then I go back, “Oh, wow, I have all this stuff that I now have completed with this thing.” I think, too, it’s important that the person running a project like your has the experience of being an artist and working with finances. You were telling me before this that you had a band with your sisters, and that’s how you paid for college, right?

Yes.

There’s this quote by Emma Copley Eisenberg from a recent interview that says, “You have to talk about class if you’re going to talk about art, because making art is not rewarded under capitalism. If what you make isn’t helping you live, where does the support come from? Where does the ability to imagine yourself as an artist come from?” I was thinking about how for so many people, so much time is spent just figuring out how to live, you don’t have time to make your work.

No. And almost now, it’s become this vibe of like, “How educated are you?” before you can even talk about being an artist. Like, “Well, where’d you get your MFA? Where’d you go to school?” In my young days, there were all kinds of artists, all types. Some went to fancy schools, some didn’t. Some studied with their mentors or favorite artists. Yeah, I paid for myself to go to college, playing in a band, and it didn’t seem strange to me to do that. I had the skill, we had the gigs, and I got the tuition bill, so I had to do it.

I think now, that’s definitely something I want to encourage for everybody, we all can live artists’ lives. We deserve to if we want to. And I don’t like the fact that some people are getting the message that if they can’t go to the right schools and get the right MFAs, or they can’t live in a certain part of the country or have a certain amount of money, then they can’t look forward to an artistic life. I think that’s not okay. We all can, we all should. I’m not coming to ARTPOWER with stuff that I’ve just theorized. It’s been my lived experience to think about money, make art, be an artist, be a teaching artist. I was a teaching artist for like a decade. All of that’s part of how I come to being a producer, come to be an organizer, come to be an executive director, coming to being a CEO.

When you were just saying everyone could live an artistic life, for you, what would be success with ARTPOWER?

I think for me, what would feel successful is that we’ve got a product that artists are using and they feel like it gets them. It doesn’t feel like it was cobbled together by people who didn’t understand that artistic experience. I’ll also feel good if we’ve got a great team of folks working with ARTPOWER and for ARTPOWER. If everybody comes to work every day pretty excited, that will feel like success for me.

And I think if artists are using this and feeling more powerful, and we’re hearing stories about how, “Oh, I felt good. I know what rates I should charge now, and I feel good charging those rates,” or, “I have a better understanding of my value, so when I negotiate this contract, I’m going to fight for these things that matter to me.” If we’re hearing those stories, Brandon, then I feel like that will feel very successful for me. My focus right now is, “Let’s make something that when people do start to use it, they feel like it was made for them.”