I’m For The People: Autumnal Reflections
The leaves are changing. My sweaters and boots are readying themselves to return to rotation. The air temperatures are dropping, and the apple cider donut road signs are appearing.
It’s officially autumn in New England.
For me, autumn still brings with it a flush of new energy that I associate with “back to school”, even though my life hasn’t been set around an academic calendar for years. Working in the art world has always carried with it a bit of a summer pause feeling, as many international colleagues take longer breaks in the summer, and I spend a chunk of time disconnecting.
Having that break helps me clarify what feels right as a direction to turn my focus, come the fall return. I think of it like the way sleep helps our brains clear plaque so we can remember and think and all around function as better humans. So the autumnal energy flush I feel has a “back to school” renewal to it. My life plaque gets cleared, and I’m ready to pay attention to new things.
But my autumnal energy also comes with a quieter, more introspective side.
This is a season where the world around me (in my corner of the Northern Hemisphere) is getting ready to hibernate, to rest, to burrow in against the cold and let the fields lie fallow and winter (in the Katherine May verb sense of the word).
That means the ideas and enthusiasm I have for fall projects are almost always entwined with a good dose of care for my reserves. How do I want to wrap up the year? What have I learned? What do I want to keep and let go? What feels like the best, next place to concentrate in this season of easing, quieting, hunkering focus?
Where has all of this led me in fall of 2022, you might be wondering.
First of all, it’s led me back to Mapping Your Path, a creative and vibrant community I’m looking forward to being in conversation with again after a year off. It’s led me to offer my expertise as a mentor to NEW INC, the boundary-pushing incubator space affiliated with the New Museum in NYC.
It’s also led me to honing in on this pretty fundamental reality: I’m for the people.
As I work toward change in the arts and culture world around me, I am delighted to do that with companies and museums and other organizations that are of like mind. But more than focusing on the organizations themselves, I’m really in it to work with the changemakers. The people in those spaces who are dancing the delicate internal, political dance of change over time. The folks trying to find their way toward change in a moment of seeming hopelessness. The ones who work independently, organizing their own plans and projects.
I’m in it for all the talented colleagues I know who have left the museum field in the last few years amid the pandemo-political upheavals that changed so many of our priorities.
I’m here for the people who are still working in museums or have changed jobs and are wondering how to sustain their inspiration, how to keep on keeping on.
I’m here for the folks who came to the field out of passion and now know that’s not a healthy basis for a working life and want better for themselves and their colleagues.
I’m for the changemakers more than the places where they make change.
It’s my year of (r)evolution, after all. It makes sense that I’d be turning my scope toward growth and shifts.
That’s where I’ve come to in this fall season of reflection and energy guidance.
And people is something I’m good at.
I’m a great gatherer and a good listener and a creative facilitator. I’m a strategic thinker and a builder of relationships. I’m a proactive instigator and a host for productive collaboration. I’m a space holder and an improviser and a pirate.
As all of those things, I’ve been in chat after chat after rant after commiseration session with people currently and formerly working in the arts and culture field who need somewhere to turn for hope and inspiration.
I’ve been working with two dear, dedicated friendleagues to finalize and share Lost Jobs, Found Voices (a documentary theater piece about professional loss in our sector), excavating the painful stories that over two dozen people vulnerably, bravely shared.
In all the richness and emotionality of these communities, I’ve felt able to share more publicly about my own times of professional hopelessness. I’ve felt able to lean into the VULNERABILITY I try to embrace, talking openly about when I’ve experienced some of the same things that have sent so many colleagues to mentally unhealthy places or into entirely new life situations.
I’ve worked for someone who showed me little respect as a person or as a professional. I’ve had my personal boundaries crossed and my labor uncompensated and my moral red flag waving ignored. I’ve felt the fruitlessness of trying so hard for something so small and the gaslit frustration of no one else appearing to care. I’ve had to deliver huge amounts of work in tiny increments of time, and then seen that work ignored.
Even so, my experience is still leaps and bounds behind that of folks who are putting up with all those things and so much more and yet are still out there organizing and protesting and working to be that proverbial change they want to see in the world.
I know how frustrating being a culture worker can feel right now. So I’m putting my skillsets to use for my frustrated peers.
Throughout this fall, I’ll be sharing a few different ways people can join together with me in community. I’ll be offering both one-off experiences and sustained ones. I’m exploring models of guided member communities where folks can learn and share together. I’m planning retreats and workshops to build inspiration and fortitude. I’m still going to be offering virtual sessions, as well as venturing back out into the in-person gathering space.
(I am also working on keeping the price tags of these accessible to a range of underpaid, overworked non-profit folks [you’re my people, I know that life] while still compensating me for my labor.)
I hope that many of you reading this might have seen yourself in some of the above descriptions. If you’re interested in making change in the arts and culture sphere, I hope you’ll join in for these new community offerings. To stay in the know as far as what’s coming, please join my mailing list here.
Here’s to a fall season of purpose and reflection. Here’s to a season for the people.
Creative Prompt Coda: Reach out to someone you haven’t talked with in a while. Use a different communication tool than normal (if you usually text, try calling; if you usually talk on the phone, try sending physical mail).
