Studio visit magic
Studios hold our doubts and wonderings. How and when do we choose to share them with others?
I’ve been very gradually putting together a small ceramic studio in an old adobe building behind my house. The building is divided in two, and on the studio side, there are concrete floors and a single fluorescent light bulb. The walls are crumbling and the wooden doors sometimes lose slats spontaneously, often leaving splinters in my fingers if I open them quickly. The sink is a garden hose and bucket. The walls are lined with shelves full of banker’s boxes: my graduate school archive of papers and articles and ephemera from exhibitions. One time I left a small bag of cat food on the table near some drying ceramics and a feral cat came in to eat and took a bite out of the rim of a soft bowl. It’s a work in progress to make this a functional space. This is, very much, a studio for tomorrow.
When I talk to artists about their studios, they are often thinking about how to present their work to visitors. How to set up for a studio visit and arrange everything to be seen in its best light (and lighting!) possible. Some artists ask me if they should bring food or gifts for their visitors (a resounding not necessary! from me), or if they should show only new work or work from across their career. A studio visit is a strange thing because of the ways that relationships between artists and curators or gallerists also imply certain power dynamics present in the art world. A curator might be able to show your work; a gallerist might be able to sell it. It’s easy to imagine that if you show work with bad studio lighting, or don’t know exactly how to talk about it, that you’ll be responsible for missing out on one of the rare opportunities in this resource-scarce art world that we participate in.
But the other strange thing about studio visits is that you’re inviting someone you might not know that well into the space where you work. Studios are intimacies. Studios hold our doubts and wonderings. Many of us are building them with limited resources, so the lighting might be cobbled together, or there might be feral cats wandering through. A very well-known artist in Houston refuses to let anyone go into his studio. He says it’s because so many of his materials are toxic, but the mystery of the studio-that-can’t-be-seen also adds to the mystique of his work. He meets curators and gallerists for meals or coffees instead, preferring the neutral space of a shared meal to the unequal unveiling that a studio visit implies.
Wouldn’t it be interesting (okay, terrifying) visit a curator’s office instead of bringing them to your studio? Or, better yet, to visit their living room and ask them to explain every object you find there? If they answer in a compelling way about how this arm chair and that tchotchke tell you something relevant about their views on postmodern excess and the construction of community, or how comfort aligns with kitsch in middle-class America by looking at their hard-edged sofa and campy 1960s-era science fiction movie posters hanging above it, perhaps you could give them a few dollars for a cup of coffee as a reward… Or offer them a chance to hang one of their essays on the wall of your studio for a few weeks. If they hand deliver it, of course, and bring the right hardware to hang it appropriately.
I’m probably extending this analogy too far. But sometimes I wonder what would happen if we thought of studios as spaces for magic or ceremony, if we kept them entirely for ourselves, and if none of our career aspirations relied upon showing them to others. How could we think of other ways to show our creative work and thinking processes to the people who are interested in seeing them? How can we re-balance the power dynamic between the artist and the curator or the gallerist? And the question that I find infinitely engaging: what else might we get from studio visits, rather than career opportunities?
For many folks, the chance to welcome a curator into one’s creative space is an exciting opportunity to share new ideas and see how they might react to different bodies of work. Indeed, most curators have such a wide familiarity with so many artists that they might be able to help you work through an idea or approach by comparing it to another artist’s process. They might be able to suggest something to read or look at that upends your approach to a bigger set of questions. And, in turn, you might be able to explain a new process you’re trying out, or share your own research methodologies with them, allowing them to see alternative ways of organizing information and materials, visually.
Ideally, studio visits are generous reciprocities, marked by careful looking and attentive listening. Sharing your studio with someone is a delicate and courageous action, a way of being vulnerable and open that, if your visitor is perceptive and sensitive, can bring you a wealth of new ideas, an occasional solution, a new approach, and an ongoing colleague in conversation with your work. That’s the magic we’re all hoping for, the reason we keep opening our doors to outsiders and showing them our gorgeous messes in process, wishing for collaborative alchemy to turn this feral cat den into a pile of golden ideas.
In one of my most memorable studio visits, I met an artist for the first time at her home studio in Guatemala City. Armed with my thickly inflected Spanish and natural introversion, I began with some greetings before she interrupted me in English and said, “Okay, but tell me what you want from me.” It was an insightful moment into the ways that studio visits are often extractive encounters rather than genuine exchanges. Thrown off by her directness, I sat down (in as non-threatening a posture as I could manage) and began to tell her my life’s story. I thought to myself, “okay, let me get vulnerable too, and then we can figure out where to go from here.”
Another artist friend used to keep a pile of their published books in the studio. Their thinking was that if a visitor wasn’t convinced by their visual work, they could point to their successes in a related field and convince the visitor that they were, indeed, brilliant. When they finally took that pile of supportive books out of the studio, I knew that their practice was becoming more confident and more vulnerable, too. It’s not easy to let someone into your unfinished thoughts. What would your studio visit support system look like? What’s your lucky charm that gives you the unfettered confidence to make your most brilliant work?
Take care of your studios, dear ones. Open them up only when you are ready. Sharing your process and your work is a gift, not to be lightly bestowed. I wish you the most generative and engaging visits, the most productive and enlightening exchanges, and all the opportunities your heart desires.
Laura
If this piece of writing was valuable to you, would you please share it with another artist? That would mean the world to me. Thank you, so much, for your support.