Studio for Tomorrow
What is your future studio, and who am I to tell you anything about it?
Welcome to Studio for Tomorrow, this brand-baby-new-newsletter about your studio practice and the future. I’m smiling with gratitude that you’ve found me here.
What is your future studio, and who am I to tell you anything about it?
A long time ago, I believed I would be a historian. Some days I still think of myself that way. I study the past—from the level of the individual to the level of the cultural or national—thinking about how it offers ideas for us now. I love the thought that constellations of artists and writers and myriad creative folks have lived lives that reflect their own ways of surviving, cohabiting, imagining, and making, full of doubts and experimentations similar to the ones I still hold, in community with artists. The world is hard, always harder, and so looking backward is one way of finding examples of how to live a life.
I never left history intentionally, but I began to meet and work with artists, in their studios, in museums and galleries and nonprofit art spaces. On the street, at the bar, over coffee, sharing meals. I love to go on walks with people: walking with artists has been one of my favorite ways of seeing a place. I sometimes make exhibitions from these collaborations, and I often write and publish about contemporary art, but all of my professional work since 2015 has been in conversation with folks who find and create themselves from within the many kinds of thought processes of a studio.
Maybe it’s better to say, I never left history at all. But as I began to live with artists, I began to be more oriented toward the present.
To share space and ideas with artists is a powerful way of imagining alternative futures, of brainstorming and getting dreamy, of project-scheming, of challenging the systems of oppression so often around us. And in the day-to-day, it’s a way of grounding myself in innovative and imaginative potentialities of now, with folks who are dedicated to ways of being that are outside of normal.
In 2020, connection—my beloved walks with artists—changed. In fact, it’s been ages since I had one of those walks, and I went for more than a year without looking closely at a sculpture or painting, or watching a performance. I continue to work closely with artists, particularly in a virtual classroom or reading group setting, and through text messages and phone calls. We talk about how to be in the world, when we can’t be exactly in the world. How to be in the world differently. We talk about how to imagine exhibitions, find funding and distribute mutual aid. We talk about grief, sickness, violence, and racism before we talk about what we’re making, usually. How do we continue working in a studio when tomorrow seems so uncertain, and today seems so tough.
I am a writer and, in recent months, a gardener. In both of those parts of my life, there are seasons. In past versions of my lives as a curator or scholar, I never had the luxury of stillness. In part, my financial precarity made stillness challenging—ask me about the 20+ times I’ve moved house and studio since 2003 sometime—and, in part, movement felt like currency in the contemporary art world, particularly for someone based outside New York or L.A. or London or Berlin. To be in movement meant I could see more, make more projects, write reviews, connect with more people. I could be an intellectual magpie, in the orbit of brilliant people working everywhere, always flying in from the mysterious-mundane locations of Houston or Guatemala City.
But, in the slow stillness of this past year, my lens has shifted to a small, remote patch of earth and its many small living things. I see so many things, and I see them in processes of change. Rather than seeking currency, I am curious about the subtle changes that happen here, which I can only see in the luxury of my stillness. I’ve never been in a place so long…. And I’ve only been here since March. But in those months, I am learning to see the ways that consistent tending in the garden and daily practice in the studio (my writing studio, but also my in-progress newbie potter ceramic studio) leads to incremental daily change, toward something new tomorrow.
Several years ago, I received my first big writing grant. It was the first time in my life that someone outside my immediate circle made a significant investment in my life as a writer, and it gave me the outside validation I needed to go freelance, to move to Central America, to claim a public voice for myself. For that grant, I started a project I called Piedrín, a Central American term for crushed rock used in construction. Small pieces are how we build a thing, I believed then. I still believe this.
Studio for tomorrow is a series of small pieces. Observations from walks and phone calls with artists, from my classes, and ongoing conversations with my clients. The questions I propose here, the advice I give, is about how to work on those small pieces of your studio practice, as you build toward a particular tomorrow. They are peppered with ways of thinking about community, distance, activism, gardening, caretaking, and sadness: that is to say, they are filled with the ways I am thinking about this particular time we share. I’ll write about the questions I get most often from artists: But what should my artist statement say? How do I work with a curator? How do I apply for a residency or a grant? How should I title a work? Do I need an MFA? And I’ll write about the movements that inspire me as they challenge the systemic inequities within the worlds of the museum and the university (the two sites I am most invested in as sites for the care and presentation of art). We’ll talk about how to imagine a future as an artist, in the worlds that we’ve inherited and built. I’ll write responses to questions you ask, and I’ll feature artists whose practices inspire my own.
Please feel free to support the work by buying me a coffee (or seven) each month. Or if your coffee budget is tight, please share this work with your friends and colleagues who might find it a kindred thing. I’ll occasionally mention other work I do here, too, and I’ll include some photos of the desert light as the seasons change.
Thank you for finding me here. I send you warmth and encouragement in your studio practice, whatever it might look like in seasons of change and periods of stillness,
Laura