artists
making now

Many members of the McIntosh County Shouters are elderly and will shout as long as they are physically able. As the group’s youngest member, my mission is to carry on the legacy of the McIntosh County Shouters and my ancestors.

It’s so vital for artists to have a deep connection with spirit and faith.

Because of certain insecurities about my unorthodox training as a musical artist, the first years of my musical journey were marked by isolation. I would create, compose, write, and, once I had something ready, I would then open up to my band members and other collaborators. At this stage of my career, and in part ignited by all the hardships that have come with surviving in this colony, I have opened up my work process more and more, and I have learned to allow others to bring their differences and surprises into my work. I am learning to relinquish control and enjoying the richness that this has brought to my work and to my personal life.

There is a beauty of truly letting go and allowing myself to evolve fluidly and vulnerably.

I have learned that trusting yourself — editing out things, projects, and people that do not resonate with you — and that purely creating what you want to make will eventually align, honor your truth, be seen, be heard, and be loved on a very high frequency.

I’m a workhorse, but with the experience I’ve built over the years, rigor is a given. A more telling measure of success for me now is how much joy I’m generating, moment to moment.

“…The play’s the thing…” Shakespeare. This past year affirmed the play is not “the thing,” but the community. When putting people first, the collaboration is richer and more complex with inclusivity and intersection of identities, and the art, the play, can then reach an excellence that honors our collective humanity!

This year, I’ve been surprised to discover how much work I’ve done and how deeply connected I feel — even though the pandemic forced me to slow down, say no, and stay put much more than I ever have in the past.

With SoulWork, I am enjoying teaching the teaching of the method as an embodied pedagogical practice. I am constantly reminded that the art of teaching performance deserves the same rigorous attention and study as the creative practice of performance. An artist training in SoulWork as a creative practice alone is not qualified to teach it. Teaching SoulWork requires an advanced, multilayered expertise and journey of training that is distinct from the training one undergoes solely as a performer or practitioner.

To build infrastructure for trans liberation we’ve had to integrate radical experimentation into our work. It has required consistent internal inventory, as well as a firm commitment to periods of rest and play created for us, by us. We encourage everyone to be curious about how they provide room for other Black trans artists to do the same.

I’ve noticed many of my Navajo students are going back to the old ways. Acquiring sheep, shearing, and processing wool yarn in the traditional ways. A lot of weavers tend to buy commercial, so it is nice to see the young ones rediscovering their roots.

The innovations of the past are considered traditions of the present. The same is true for what we consider innovations today and how the future will look back on them. Creativity is constant and the stories we preserve through our practice is what stitches time together.

After becoming a mother, I was concerned that I would never be able to get all of my work done and that I would have to make compromises in my practice that I didn’t want to make. Motherhood has become an asset to my practice — it has created a clarity around what projects I urgently pursue (and which opportunities I don’t), and it has shifted my work in surprising, personal, new directions.

With each project, I aim to create something new that reflects current connections between people and place only to find the echoes of repressed expressions that belong to my Ancestors in a joyful, brilliant, and endless future.

I’ve only begun to find myself in the company of older artists as there is a lack of mentorship in the Deaf community. I’m grateful for their time.

This year I have learned that I can handle a lot of things: activism, healing, mutual aid, and art making. I have been able to donate a lot of time to the church and do fundraising and still maintain a studio practice.

I was introduced to the Sphagnum peat moss by a group of amazing women in Karukinka, Tierra del Fuego. This little moss has erect terminal heads that resemble a starry shape. They can store large quantities of water and have been accumulating carbon over thousands of years, making them an invaluable carbon sink.

Brancusi was a Romanian sculptor living and working in Paris. African art was a confirmation and an extension of a tradition he was already working in. In much the same way, Brancusi and Noguchi are important to me because they confirm and extend what I do.

Rest is important and so is Land Back.

I learned I am part of a community of breadth, depth, and spirit. That revelation was surprising to me because I had never before felt I was a meaningful part of a community.

[I’ve learned] to receive a dream — and to give the hours, days, life.

A surprising thing I’ve learned through my practice of writing this year is that, despite the tremendous challenges our society has been going through in the last couple of years with the pandemic and other global concerns, there is always the opportunity to look upward and see the beauty of nature and what it still has to offer. Particularly in the Sonoran Desert where the beauty is so unique and astounding sometimes. I find solace and rebirth by simply looking out at it and maybe taking a short walk. This desert for me is home just as it has always been for my ancestors. It offers comfort and safety like a home is supposed to.

I write that my words may become obsolete. I’ve been thinking a lot this year about the way writing is always a rebuilding practice — always the blank page to face, always a new world to usher into being. The dream is that we remake the world and then the cycle of art repeats, the present becomes the past and the world again anew.

my practice is not in silo. my current body of work is an invitation to collaborate with me, weaving connection and community with one another. it is an invitation to return home to ourselves as we all have movement within us. in this way, we build steady relations with self, others, and the lands we are from, living on, or occupying.

This year has opened me up to new ways of collaborative creation and has deepened my appreciation for the exercise of design, art, architecture, and making as an act of trust-building in culture and community.

Tracking my personal growth and embracing my humanity through my practice has been surprisingly beautiful. This year my work reminded me that embracing what makes my relationship with society and food atypical gives myself and others an accessible way to create, play, and engage with the world around us.

I am a collaborative creator. I truly get the most joy from working across disciplines and media.

The contemplative pandemic year has shown me how resilient and regenerative the studio practice can be. My practice constantly surprised me and recentered me during difficult times. The studio also became a sacred space for metabolizing transformations — of material, self, and my own purpose on this earth.

I discovered that integrating my creative process with sacred journeying from the practice of Curanderismo has the power to transform art into a tool for conducting Limpias, a Mexican spiritual cleansing ritual used for recovering sacred essence energy that has left the body as a result of trauma.

Lately, when I’m not making paper, I find myself writing about other people. I didn’t used to believe that they could change my life. But they can, and they do. J and I drove out to Brookline last Tuesday to see a painter. We met her three years ago. That summer, she was like radiation, immaterial and powerful, not of this world. When we left, it was raining a little outside and the roads shone like the backs of fish. I enjoyed our walk back to the car. I always like the walk back. J said that walking involves a perpetual delay and a suspension of belief. It’s not here; it’s also not there. It doesn’t have to be. Like art, transitional, a distance. Neither love nor melancholy.

Becoming an artist has been the foundation for everything I value in life including self esteem, love for my family and friends, and service to my community. I have not so much been surprised by my work but affirmed in my belief that making art can sustain our humanity in the face of diminished values that favor injustice, dishonesty, and greed.

FREEDOM.
Time moves on with or without artists or art in this society.
Therefore, USA becomes a critical element in our lives and practices.
Hopefully, its continued support will allow all artist to speak freely through their works

In 2022, I rediscovered craft’s ability to realign and revive my spirit through the grounding, haptic pleasures of handwork in the face of a painful and uncertain experience of houselessness during the pandemic. Making didn’t solve the problem, but it kept me alive long enough to meet a solution.

I am learning new languages and methodologies that allow me to further accept, access, love, contrast, and name my own as well as PISO’s practices, experimentations, and processes. I am learning to release, thread, and build relations in new ways through allowing myself new choices. I am holding space to receive and experience even more sensation in my own body, deepening and expanding.

I’ve come to appreciate that the art I make is primarily about the relationships that I create and nurture — I have started to realize that taking a relational orientation towards my work makes my life feel more alive and connected as a whole.

I’ve learned there is no limit to the exciting experiences or beautiful places and people your art will bring you to when you approach every day with joy, grace, and gratitude.

I learned to never lose faith and that divinity is watching to help us connect with each other and everything.

The sway of native grasses in the wind, the warmth of the sunlight on skin, geese improvising with water, and the traveling clouds in the empty sky resonated and affirmed, “Dance has power to bring us back to our origins, grounding ourselves, reminding us who we are, and celebrating life.”

Over the past year, I have been practicing collaboration, allowing others deeper into my process both materially and analytically. Contrary to my usual, more insular way of working, this exercise is teaching me new things about my own predispositions, forcing me to negotiate ideas in new and meaningful ways.

The waning days of the pandemic have found me diving deeper into my practice to unfurl generally-accepted stories about our wider society — and even about myself — that are far more intricate, haunted, and yet somehow more glorious than I could have realized before. We are at a real spiritual, ecological, and evolutionary crossroads as a species, and the arts have never been more essential to helping us chart the strange terrain of what both we and our world are becoming.

I’ve learned to embrace contradictions and am trying to find inspiration in the things I find most personally and creatively challenging.

I’ve learned how important it is to slow down. I’ve been rushing to make my feature since the first draft. Four years later and x number of drafts, I have an ending that surprises and excites me. I needed that time and space, and I have a little more patience now.

This past year, I have come to understand that, as an artist, the more of myself that I pour into the work — both my shadows and my light — the more the work can serve as a spiritual offering or medicine for the collective.

This year I have focused on the value of knowledge that comes in the forms of dreams or visions. I am interested in the unknowable, the unthinkable, and the indescribable.

My practice this year has been impacted by life circumstances, which has provided an unexpected spaciousness and slowness into my practice, a need to reconnect, and an opportunity to rebuild from the roots back up. I have learned how to observe and find inspiration in new, simple, unexpected, everyday things.