Taking Risks
At my last job, I gave talks, wrote staff reviews, and otherwise did lots of things that would make most anyone sweat. But I had a team to back me up. And behind every decision I made was a precedent or cluster of data points. Sharing creative work was different. Aside from a handful of community classes, I had no formal training as an artist. And like the rest of the world, I had just spent 2020 trying to minimize risk.
But I wanted to be braver. So I picked up a copy of Seth Godin’s The Practice. And I started “shipping” my work. I asked the professional designers in my MeetUp group for feedback on my cartoons and sent them to The New Yorker. I gathered up a few pieces and applied to the Teeny Tiny Trifecta exhibition at the Second Street Gallery.
I bought a used DSLR camera and found a $3 broken tripod at Goodwill that, with some two-part epoxy, worked enough to help me take better photos of my work.
Building a bed for the epoxy that would hold the missing camera mount.
With the epoxy poured and threaded screw in place.
Shooting in the Virginia humidity. Equipment had to be left outside for several minutes to warm up and allow condensation to evaporate from the lens.
And I signed up to start selling at local markets and events, cobbling together a booth out of yard furniture and a painter’s dropcloth.
Most of it wasn’t pretty. I felt isolated and silly. I got rejected a lot.
But I didn’t quit.
Y(art) sale booth at Visible Records Studio.
And then, at a community event hosted by Visible Records Studio, I sold three T-shirts, two drawings and a print. I designed and printed notebooks with the familiar school sentiment for immigrant kids—“Don’t Screw This Up”—and sold 8 in one afternoon, giving half the proceeds to local nonprofit Creciendo Juntos.
Notebooks for the Not-From-Here, featuring illustrations from my own immigrant heritage.
Finally, three miniature sculptures were accepted into the Little Museum exhibition at University of Virginia’s Fralin Museum of Art.
This was all worth celebrating for sure. But I know I can do better.
My new challenge is to make sure my work does more than just make me feel good. Ultimately, I want to create things that actually help people in a measurable way. I hope these “firsts” will be building blocks I can climb to get there.