Small Shifts
Circling HomeWork #21
Warm wishes for the new year! I was meant to get out another newsletter before the end of December and our buy one year / get one year special offer, so am extending it through this Friday, January 17 — join as a paid subscriber at the annual level, and you’ll get an additional year’s worth of access for free.
You can gift it to a friend, or choose to extend your own paid subscription by a year. Sign up today, and we’ll reach out to sort the details.
One more housekeeping item: we’re excited to continue our partnership with CreativeMornings and host another iteration of our virtual FieldTrip Sustaining Art in the Home: A Zine Exploration on Tuesday, January 21 at 7pm EST. Registration is free and you can join us from anywhere in the world — RSVP at the link below, and feel free to bring a friend or five!
When I think about my practical values and priorities in terms of day to day life — not grand ethical ideas, more “how we spend our days, is of course, how we spend our lives1” — what emerges is time with family and friends, art, and health. My busyness and burnout have led me out of alignment with these things. I haven’t worked on any drawings other than some quick sketchbook pages in four full months since getting home from my residency at the beginning of September. I missed calling my brother on his birthday, never responded to a gallerist who reached out with interest in my work, pushed through physical and mental health struggles when I probably should have taken a sick day. This newsletter has been basically done for weeks, but here I am finishing it up late at night right before publishing.
So much of this past year has felt like just hanging on by a thread mentally and emotionally, and time keeps on passing. Although I’m proud of what we accomplished (I led the launch of a successful, high-profile weekly program, and we just celebrated its one-year anniversary this weekend!), my time and attention and mental energy were so drastically tilted towards work that it’s been hard to recalibrate even as I approach a steadier state of affairs.
Over the past two years of working on Circling, Krystiana and I have oriented ourselves toward the question, “how do you create a home in which art can survive?” I’ve been thinking about it a lot during this turn into a new year. I want to hold on to art. I want to make drawings and zines and essays and gatherings, to visit exhibitions, read novels, and take in performances. In a world rife with grief and injustice, I want art to survive — at large, and in me.
In keeping with our typical Circling focus on the practical, these are some very small shifts I am attempting in how I organize my time, tasks, and attention in an effort to sustain my art practice more steadily for the year ahead. They are intentions, not resolutions, and subject to revision. Everything’s a process. Here we go: