Sustaining in a Time of Change:

A Workshop by and for Artists

Based on fifteen years of work with artists locally and nationally, artist leaders Andrew Simonet and Michaela Pilar Brown will build conversations and offer tools for making a balanced, sustainable artist life.

This workshop is an opportunity to build clarity around your artistic practice and the resources that sustain it. It is community organizing, creating positive and rigorous conversations across artistic disciplines, ages, and cultures. And it is specific and practical: the principles, tools, and prompts artists use to make sustainable lives and to make the art and impact that matters most to them.

This workshop is free, however registration is required. A lunch will be provided. This project is made possible by the generous support of the South Carolina Arts Commission, Scotty Campbell State Farm Insurance, The Citizens Bank, and ArtFields.

We will talk about:

▪ The role of artists, our impact and value

▪ Planning, i.e. setting long-term intentions, the most powerful tool for sustaining as an artist

▪ Time design: identifying and prioritizing the time your art practice needs, doing fewer things better, and tackling all that administrative work.

▪ Financial thinking for artists: Knowing your time cost (hour, day, and week), understanding revenue streams, negotiating, debt, home buying, and how artists can reach beyond solvency to stability and security.

▪ Your mission: What audiences, communities, and impacts matter most in your work? We will work individually and with a partner to generate language around your practice and mission, not just what you create but why it matters to you and why it matters to your communities, publics, and audiences.

The Details:

When:                                                                        

Friday, October 20, 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Saturday, October 21, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm             

Where: 

The Continuum

208 West Main Street

Lake City, SC 29560

We will take breaths and breaks. There will be writing prompts and time for discussion. We will use Making Your Life as an Artist and the Making Workbook.

Andrew Simonet is writer and choreographer in Philadelphia. From 1993 to 2013, he co-directed Headlong Dance Theater, creating dances like CELL (a journey for one audience member guided by your cell phone), and This Town is a Mystery (dances by four Philadelphia families in their homes). Andrew left Headlong to focus on writing fiction. His debut novel, Wilder, was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2018; his second novel, A Night Twice as Long, was published by FSG in 2021. In 2006, Andrew founded Artists U, an incubator for helping artists make sustainable lives with ongoing programs. All Artists U programs are artist-led and open source. Through workshops, convenings, and one-on-one planning sessions, he has worked directly with over 5,000 artists across all disciplines. His book Making Your Life as an Artist, an open source guide to living as an artist, has been downloaded by 200,000 artists worldwide and is used as a textbook in dozens of university and graduate arts programs. He has served on the leadership team for the Philadelphia Assembly, the Artist Parent Residencies working group, and Creative Capital’s Professional Development Program.

Michaela Pilar Brown is an image and object maker. She studied sculpture and art history at Howard University, though she has always been a maker of things. Born in Bangor, Maine and raised in Denver, Colorado, she cut her teeth in the halls of a museum where her mother worked as a security guard, and has been immersed in the culture of objects, their making and interpretation ever since. Her practice explores the body through the prisms of age, gender, race, sexuality and history. She explores the ritualized use of common objects, and architectural spaces, often queering their size, orientation or form to blur the line between memory, dream and experience. Recent work explores home as a physical structure and repository for memories. She chronicles beginnings, departures and returns to this symbolic yet physical place, believing it to be the genesis where history, memory and myth are joined. The characters and the spaces she builds for them to inhabit demonstrate the capacity in our lives for monsters, angels, heroes and giants, and illustrate our reactions to occupation and absence, desire, responsibility, and obligation. Michaela has led Artists U/South Carolina for a decade, and facilitated Artists U workshops regionally and nationally.

Testimonials:

The Artists U workshop was a jolt of clarity, community, and validation—a reminder that our work as artists matters. I came away with practical strategies for setting goals, managing time, negotiating for fair pay and re-committing myself to the work that makes me feel alive.

-performing artist, South Carolina

I have been working full-time as a self-supporting artist for ten years, but there was not a single idea or observation in this workshop that did not make an impact on me.

-visual artist, Philadelphia

Our local art sphere is changing with these workshops. People are talking about things differently and feeling more empowered. The impact is deep.

-visual artist, Baltimore

It is far too easy for individual artists to feel alone and ineffective. The thoughtfulness, compassion and support that the workshops condense and facilitate is quite amazing. I am deeply impressed with the integrity and earnestness of the content and presentation.

-visual artist, South Carolina

In the past, I have hired “arts professionals”—spent quite a bit of money on them, truthfully—only to land in a space with a person who doesn’t know what the struggle of making one’s way as an artist really entails. Due to Artists U facilitators background as artists, I get so much more out of Artists U than any other “resource” to date. It is focused, delivers a punch, and is full of hope.

-filmmaker, Los Angeles

With Artists U, my practice has soared. Artists U has given me direction, answered my most vulnerable questions about being an artist and applying for opportunities, but also provided a community that I rarely have the privilege of feeling. I am deeply grateful for what I have received. Instead of a smattering of gigs, I now have the burgeoning of a real career as a professional writer.

-literary artist, Baltimore