Your Art Will Save Your Life

Beth Pickens

• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781936932306
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Creativity

A candid guidebook about art-making in the midst of oppression—"a slim, necessary revelation" (Maggie Nelson,   The Argonauts ).

Visiting the Andy Warhol Museum as a teenager, Beth Pickens realized that art was imperative for reflecting—and thus remaking—the world. As an adult, she has dedicated her life to arts nonprofits and consulting, helping marginalized artists traverse the world of MFAs, residences, and institutional funding.

Writing in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Pickens reminds emerging artists that their art is more important than ever. She gives advice on fostering creativity and sustaining an innovative practice as conversations about grants, public programming, and arts funding in schools grow ever-more heated. Part political manifesto, part practical manual, this resource reminds us that art has always been a tool of resistance.

Part One

You’re an Artist, Keep Making Art

The realization that art could first save and then expand my life came when I was a teenager in a troubled home. Life with my mentally ill mom and alcoholic dad near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, before the internet, was difficult. A smart, queer feminist without the language to talk about any of it—let alone identify with those lineages—I was profoundly depressed and mostly miserable. I ached for art and counterculture (remember that word?), but they were really hard to come by in small Rust Belt towns in the nineties. I read books, made zines, bought 45s, and ordered Sub Pop record catalogs out of the back of SPIN magazine, which at the time was a wonderland filled with mysterious ads for things like The Anarchist Cookbook.

Then, in 1994, the Andy Warhol Museum opened in downtown Pittsburgh. I was fifteen and fortunate to be present for the museum’s midnight opening thanks to my neighbor Carol, an artist and public school art teacher who saw in me a deep need for connection to something beyond what was available in my sad town and busted school. Something new was born in me that night as I wandered the museum from top to bottom, looking at Warhol’s iconic and more obscure works, obsessively combing through the gift shop, gawking at the drag queens and kindred freaks clamoring to explore this unfathomable building. That museum opening uncovered an intuition stifled by my surroundings: there would be places I belonged and there were communities I must find.

Back then I could barely understand, let alone articulate, what was so important to me about the museum, but now I know it clearly—it was a history and lineage of queer art. Andy Warhol made an exciting life for himself despite his impoverished Pittsburgh upbringing. I saw color and humor and possibilities for a better future. I saw strange people who made their own world, and it looked wild and limitless. I saw political discourse and tongue-in-cheek paintings, sculptures, and drawings. The Factory, music, art, women, style, humor, sex, and outrageous drugs—I just had to turn eighteen and move away! That became reason enough to live through my remaining years in high school.

It’s been more than twenty years since that night at the Andy Warhol Museum, and since then I have consistently, heavily relied on artists to make me want to be in the world at its worst and embody a deeper experience of life at its best.

My early career background was in professional feminist activism and higher education—I cut my teeth in a university women’s center where I learned a lot about how to be a person, a feminist, and a friend. I decided I should be a therapist, so I earned a master’s degree in counseling psychology. In 2007, after a decade in the Midwest, I moved to San Francisco to live in a queer community filled with artists. There, I began working exclusively in the arts and with queer artists, learning how to raise money for artists and for nonprofit arts organizations.

From 2009 to 2013, I helped organize a queer writers’ retreat through the San Francisco literary nonprofit RADAR Productions. Along with the writers Michelle Tea and Ali Liebegott, I hosted dozens of LGBTQ writers and artists each year, providing them with weeks of quiet working space, delicious group dinners, and creative community in the Yucatán Peninsula. As it was a passion project, we worked hard to raise the money to create this free retreat for the artists and writers we adored, many of whom had little to no access to other colonies and residencies. We knew so many gay geniuses and wanted to support them.

That first year, I heard the writers talking at dinner about the fears and anxieties that impacted their work. I noticed that the same problems and questions came up again and again. One day while I was making ceviche for dinner during that inaugural retreat in 2009, it occurred to me that many artists encounter similar issues and stumbling blocks but don’t know that they aren’t alone and that there are paths out of those woods. I heard artists talk about their feelings of not being “real” enough, fear for the future, confusion about how to both make money and have time to write, concerns that there weren’t enough resources to go around, bewilderment at the world of grants, and panic that they would never reach a level of success that would make them understand they had made it, whatever it was.

In that moment, steeped in lime juice, I had the profound realization that I could integrate my fundraising skills with my counseling background to provide specialized consulting services and focus specifically on artists. I launched my one-on-one consultations with artists in 2009, and my practice has grown ever since.

Now I live in Los Angeles and have written at least a thousand grants. I write grants year-round and have raised nearly four million dollars for artists and arts nonprofits, largely comprised of relatively small grants in the ten-thousand-dollar range. I have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours talking to artists about their lives, careers, fears, hopes, anxieties, problems, projects, and dreams. I help my clients get funding, get into residencies, find career-launching opportunities, and build strategic partnerships. I also help my clients dig into their trauma and fear, develop new habits, grow their communities, heal their relationships with themselves, and shift their perspectives on success and happiness.

In reality, I have very limited time to work one-on-one with artists. When an artist is referred to me and requests consultation, I frequently have to tell them I don’t have the time. Over the years, I often found myself thinking, “My time is limited. I should write a book.” After the 2016 presidential election, the urgency to write it all down skyrocketed; I wanted something concrete to give to every artist whose ongoing struggles are heightened by the Trump administration.

You cannot possibly know right now how much your work is going to impact someone, someday. A single piece can change and save a life, you know that. Likely, you’ve been on the receiving end throughout your life. Your work—the work you’re making right now and the work you haven’t dreamt of yet—is going to impact the people who need to experience it. But first, you have to get the work out of you and into the world!

Your career—like social change—is a marathon, not a sprint. I want you to be in it for the long haul so that the work you’re eventually going to make has a chance to be in the world. But you must get out of your own way. The world you have grown up in—regardless of your identities and experiences—has taught you limiting ideas about being an artist. You and I both know that you need to make your work in order to be alive. Artists have to make art.

I want you to rethink how to engage your practice during these oppressive political times, to grow some new skills, and to learn some support strategies that will ensure you can keep going, upward and outward.

The following sections are designed as a workbook for artists—especially artists deeply affected by our political reality, i.e., practically everybody! I focus on both the internal work and the external work that will strengthen your practice, your well-being, and your ability to take steps toward the kinds of success you want. You will find concrete assignments that will help you build core skills to support your practice for years to come. The skills and techniques will have a cumulative effect; the more you use them, the better they work and the easier they get.

Election Aftermath

Post-Election Illuminations

1. Trump isn’t your asshole stepdad.

I am in California on Pacific standard time, but I went to bed well before the election was called, hours before Trump’s acceptance speech. I was at home with my wife and our pets, and, in what now seems like psychic intuition, we had turned down every invitation to Election Night watch parties throughout Los Angeles. On my couch, rhythmically petting my elderly cat, I watched in disbelief as state after state went red. My stomach churned, and my wife and I grew more and more crabby and despondent. We agreed it was better to go to bed not knowing the outcome. That way we could at least get one more night of sleep with a Democratic-led future. We would need that sleep. The next morning, over coffee, she read me the headlines and we both wept.

The first few days after the election are now a foggy stupor. I cried a ton, exchanged outraged texts with everybody I knew, avoided phone calls, and reloaded the news on my phone every ten minutes hoping for a different outcome: It was a hoax! There was a miscount! Trump admitted it was all a PR stunt! I wanted to hide. Who could leave the house? People canceled on me; I canceled on people. It felt like a nationwide hate crime had been perpetrated against 75 percent of the country by a small but angry voting minority.

One of the great benefits of working a type of job where helping people is key is that I had to move through my own feelings of being overwhelmed and depressed pretty quickly so I could support my artist clients who—it was swiftly revealed—were losing their collective shit. Within a couple days, I had sessions with many clients, and focusing on and serving other human beings really helped me get some perspective. This helped me feel my feelings and more thoughtfully respond to what was happening around me. I believe this is what establishes the conditions for action.

The election season and the national embarrassment of the debates raised a lot of issues about widespread anxiety and PTSD that received ample media coverage. As Election Day drew closer, mental health professionals throughout the United States described increasing anxiety in their clients, who used sessions to talk about the presidential race and the conflict it caused at work, at home, and in public.² After Trump creepily stalked Hillary Clinton in the second debate, people who had experienced assault reported increased symptoms of PTSD.³

I witnessed both of these phenomena in sessions with my own clients. The artists I met with were fighting with their friends and families, cutting off social media “friends,” and feeling anxious, angry, and afraid throughout most of their days. My clients with physical- and sexual-assault histories felt newly at risk, like someone was following them, or that they were now not safe out in public.

As a member of an anonymous twelve-step group, I watched other members cry openly and talk about the larger political atmosphere’s devastating effect on their lives. Everyone around me, it seemed, had been suddenly emotionally transported back to their childhood homes with their dysfunctional families.

A week after the election, it dawned on me: “Holy shit, this feels like an abusive alcoholic father. The creepy pervert Mom remarried has just been elected president of the United States.” Finally! I understood my emotional reaction to the election and why I felt as if I were walking through slime, shrouded in denial, and eager to fistfight any mustachioed white dude in golf clothes I passed.

Now I want to tell you the good news: Trump isn’t your father or your stepdad or any other awful man that loomed horribly over your childhood. You will likely never meet him. He will probably never hear your name. You may never even be in the same state as this man or his many vile cronies.

The White House isn’t your or my actual childhood home (unless Malia and Sasha are reading—hey ladies!), and so the embarrassment we feel about who moved into it isn’t singular, it’s collective. Our individual family’s dirty laundry isn’t being aired; it’s our entire nation’s past and present hanging out to dry.

On the flipside, Barack Obama didn’t abandon you. He didn’t leave you with a crazy man in charge because he wasn’t our dad and you probably never met him or his family. But the symbolism of our political times combined with childhood trauma can yield some powerfully personal reactions in which our pasts get mixed up with our reactions to the present. This mixing up of past pain with current events happens all the time, definitely in a shocking election with the unforeseen changing of powerful figureheads. You may have old feelings swirling around over a present condition.

And by you, I also mean me! Throughout November I had to say to myself: Barack Obama isn’t my dad and Michelle Obama isn’t my mom. I had to reflect on the sinking feeling in my gut and the general embarrassment I felt that I coul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One
• Part Two
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by Feminist Press
• About Feminist Press