Group photo by Olivia Obineme, courtesy of The Contemporary.
BALTIMORE – Last week I had the pleasure of participating in The Contemporary’s first artist retreat. The first, I hope, of many. For four days, 50 artists from Baltimore joined dozens of “consultants” and “guests” that included national arts professionals and artists, representatives from nonprofit organizations, gallerists, curators, and critics at a Jewish retreat center with a farm in rural Maryland. The program included presentations from artists, numerous panels and workshops, and one-on-one meetings; all catered towards networking or “this weird vortex hellhole that is professional development for artists,” as director Deana Haggag described it. What follows is a diary assembled from the notes I ended up scribbling near-constantly.
THURSDAY
Haggag (yes, our dear friend with the Pokémon problem) introduces the retreat. She contextualizes the trip as a response to the realization that the city’s art scene is actually a plurality of scenes—far larger, more diverse, and often less networked than is usually understood by its constituency, “after Freddie Gray passed, we realized we underestimate Baltimore’s art community, and how fast they mobilized.” For example, during the following uprising and curfew, many artists scrambled to assist or document protests, fundraise, and begin politically-charged collaborative works across the city. The Contemporary itself launched a last-minute artist-run daycare center in response to school closures and many parents finding themselves detained or having to work despite a breakdown of services. Unfortunately, so many of the artists and groups working independently of each other had no idea what the others were doing. This retreat was intended to introduce individuals working in the sometimes-overlapping, sometimes-not spheres of art and activism to each other, supporters, and contacts in other cities.
Lu Zhang, The Contemporary’s deputy director, credits Creative Capital’s retreats (of which Paddy raves about) for inspiring the long weekend. Creative Capital’s founder, Ruby Lerner, gives a keynote speech so packed with wisdom from her experiences, and speculations about the future, that it’s taken me nearly a week to process.
A few of these takeaways:
- “Support for the arts and support for the artists aren’t the same thing.”
- We need to secure funding for a variety of cultural activities for an art scene to thrive, including critical writing [!!!] to create “informed audiences.”
- “We stopped talking about ‘DIY.’ Very early on, that was our focus, but now we’re talking about ‘DIYWO’—Do It Yourself With Others.”
- Artists might be valued more “for their ability to advance the creativity of others than their own work.”
- The fate of artists remains unclear in an ever-changing, tech-driven world: “If human beings are not valued for our labor, will we be valued at all?’… Contemporary art is not a luxury to be left to the vagaries of the market, because we need artists to guide the human future. I see you all as public intellectuals.”
FRIDAY
Early in the morning, we gather for a marathon of 50 artist presentations that lasts well into the evening. The Contemporary team has carefully curated a mix of different practices that seldom overlap—from in-your-face social justice warriors and gregarious curators to introverted studio artists and aloof performers. Oddly, many of Baltimore’s more well-known artists are not present, but that ends up being a positive. By the end, I simply marvel at how much happens in Baltimore that I’m totally unaware of. At times, it seems the selection process wasn’t based on who’s work was the “strongest” or most “polished”, but rather what practices had been the most underexposed to the other artists in the room.
I’ll post more about that later, because it is a day of surprises and revelations too lengthy to tally here. But among those revelations: Joyce J. Scott, one of Baltimore’s best-known artists, should probably run for President of the Art World. She begins her flawless presentation (after a brief acapella intro) “I’m one of the geezers in the room… I’ve been making art forever… I was an artist in vitro—when I was born, I had the BEST looking placenta!” After laughter subsides she adds, “I told the doctor, ‘you’re in my light!’”
Similarly, it’s a testament to Sean J Patrick Carney that he manages to have rapt audience, presenting the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s myriad activities, as a consultant at the end of a grueling 12-hour day. It helps that BHQF has one of the best origin myths of all time: Bruce High Quality was an artist who perished, along with all of his work, on 9/11. That is, of course, not true, but makes for a great introduction. In reality, “Bruce High Quality” is a text-to-speech option from antiquated Apple software, assigned “authorship” over the anonymous works of the collective. Those works include art-pranks given New York Times coverage, a retrospective at The Brooklyn Museum, and inclusion in the 2010 Whitney Biennial.
More impressively, BHQF has channeled their unexpected success into launching a free art school that’s now larger than NYU’s art department, issued honorary doctorates to the Guerilla Girls, rewards interns with punk patches in the spirit of Girl Scout merit badges, and actually pays its “professors” a living wage. It serves as a reassuring capstone to the day—the notion that “why the fuck not?” art in the spirit of fun can lead to quantifiable good in the world.
SATURDAY
Our personalized itineraries diverge for lectures, workshops, and group discussions. What’s important to note here is that these are by and large the beginnings of conversations that should be continued with more focus later (hint, hint… we want this to be an annual event).
For example, workshops about navigating the world of gallery sales and how artist-run network Common Field could help Baltimore tend to dissolve respectively into discussions about the need to disassemble the silos of wealth amassed through capitalism. That’s a valid point, but might not be the most practical use of hour-long roundtable talks about financial sustainability for artists, who unfortunately do have to survive in a nation of intensely-privatized resources.
In a weekend of exhaustingly jam-packed programming, a bit of useful content gets lost with emotions running high in non-hierarchically-formatted panels.I am told one panel ends in tears. I, for one, still don’t know how to sell art. A notable exception is BmoreArt founder Cara Ober’s presentation about finances for artists, which is full of practical “things you can be doing now” advice, such as types of accounts to deposit money into (and what to avoid).
It’s my hope that the retreat returns next year, because the general impression is that most of these discussions are more successful at gathering questions than providing didactic answers. And that’s definitely not a bad thing—we all leave the conversation about real estate for artists with optimism that we can work with moderator Priya Bhayana back in the city.
SUNDAY
There’s probably no better evidence to how successful this retreat has been at encouraging new collaborations and networking than the fact that Sunday morning—our last morning—is a bit of a blur. Saturday night ended with a dance party and numerous conversations that lasted until sunrise. The hangover is well worth it. I was never one of those children who made lifelong friends and happy memories at a summer camp, but I think The Contemporary has more than compensated for that. And importantly, a bunch of us city kids get to spend some quality time petting goats. With that out of the way, maybe next year we’ll get to the elusive bottom of career development.
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