Tell Your Story or Someone Will Make One Up for You
Do you remember the last time you stood in front of an artwork and felt something — really felt something — and didn't know why? Maybe it was a scene in a gallery that ...
For Artists Building Their Careers: Waiting Isn’t a Strategy
Every year, thousands of freshly graduated artists leave art schools with a diploma in one hand and vague ideas about the future in the other. They know how to paint, sculpt, conceptualize, theorize. But ...
The Poetic Power of Nothing: What Star Trek Can Teach Us About Silence in Art
Last night, watching Star Trek with my husband, I stumbled onto something unexpected. In Season 7, Episode 3 ("Interface"), Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge walks into Data's quarters to find the android staring at ...
Why Your Art Isn’t “Just Decorative” (And How to Stop Sabotaging Your Own Practice)
"Maybe my work is just decoration." This sentence, spoken quietly during our recent session, stopped me cold. Not because it's unusual—I hear it constantly—but because it reveals a deeper truth about how artists sabotage ...
Gallery Approach Strategies That Generate Responses (And Why Most Artists Avoid Them)
Or: What happens when opportunity meets the terrifying reality of being seen Last week, an artist contacted me about what appeared to be a dream scenario: direct access to a foreign gallery, potential representation ...
The Radical Act of Reading Slowly in a World That Won’t Stop Scrolling
It took me three months to finish Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World. Three whole months for a 294-page book. In our swipe-left culture, that feels almost embarrassingly slow. But here's what ...
The Myth of the Fully-Formed Artist
We love our origin stories in the art world. The narrative goes something like this: genius emerges, fully-formed, with a distinctive voice and unwavering vision. Think Basquiat exploding onto the scene, or Banksy materializing ...
The Art of Telling Your Story: Why Presentation Matters
Why Narration Matters Think about the stories you’ve read on social media that hooked you from the very first sentence. Were they personal revelations that spoke to you, or just raw information about something that ...
Art Curators as Art Critics: Responsibility and Standards
Or: No, I Won't Write a Forward Just Because Your Check Cleared Yesterday, I had one of those conversations with my husband that left me wanting to simultaneously laugh, cry, and deliver an impromptu ...