When Michael Duffy brought home his midterm report card during his second semester of college, his parents took one look at his oil painting elective and gave him a choice: Wake up and smell the coffee, or find a new sponsor for your education.

So Michael traded his brushes for a business degree, earned a tax law degree, and spent the next three decades figuring out how to build a bridge back to the creative world.

Today, alongside his West Coast colleague Sonja Moro—who started in fine art painting before realizing she’d rather protect the work than make it—Michael heads up Bank of America’s Art Services Group.

Together, they operate in a rare intersection of high finance, deep emotion, and estate law.

Life is short. Art is long.

It’s easy to relegate art to pure passion. A reflection of someone’s soul, a record of where they’ve been. A quiet testament to the things that make life feel rich.

But behind closed doors in the world of high finance, a collection looks very different. Unmanaged, that coveted painting hanging over the mantel is rarely passed down as a source of family pride. More often than not, it becomes an estate hot potato.

If you paint, collect, or stand to inherit anything more complex than a blank canvas, here are a few hard truths happening behind the scenes that you might want to keep in mind.

Your kids probably don’t want your collection.

This is the hardest conversation in art planning, but it’s usually the one that gets avoided until it’s too late.

Most collectors assume their kids will treasure the pieces they spent a lifetime hunting down. But tastes change dramatically across generations, and Michael makes a clear distinction between deliberate buyers and accidental collectors. Accidental collectors are the kids who suddenly inherit 40 oil paintings they have no room for. To them, that collection feels more like an expensive, even confusing, burden than a treasure.

So what’s the best move? Have an honest, unvarnished conversation with your children in your 50s or 60s, not your 80s. Ask them outright: Do you actually want this work? If they don’t, you’re free to sell, gift, or donate the pieces while you’re still around to enjoy the process. And you spare your family a logistical nightmare down the road.

You can’t slice a painting into thirds.

What happens when you have three kids who all love the same piece of art?

Unlike a bank account or a stock portfolio, a painting is indivisible. Physically. When parents leave these hand-offs unsaid, it often (or…almost always) leads to resentment after they’re gone.

If you’re facing a potential jumpball over specific pieces, there are ways to manage it while everyone’s still on good terms. Some families set up a shared trust. In that case, kids rotate holding the artwork in their respective homes for a year or two at a time. Others make the tough decisions during their lifetime, and establish a family board or lay out clear expectations so there aren’t uncomfortable (read: ugly) surprises later.

Museums don’t want your art without a check attached.

There’s a widespread myth that a local museum will jump at the chance to accept your collection the moment you pass away.

In reality, an artwork isn’t a gift to an institution. It can be, of course. But most often, it’s what Michael calls an “asset-bility.” Taking in a single piece of art requires a museum to handle transport, specialized installation, storage, insurance, and docent training.

Because most museums operate on thin budgets, they often turn down generous bequests unless the art comes with a cash gift meant to cover the ongoing carrying costs.

If you plan to leave art to an institution, talk to their acquisition committee years in advance. If they can’t take it, you’ll have time to find a home that actually can.

Art is a terrible financial investment.

You’ve probably heard some iteration of the romantic story: an unknown artist dies, their work skyrockets, and the family strikes it rich. Or maybe this one: somebody flips a contemporary painting at auction for 10 times what they paid.

From a transactional perspective, art is one of the hardest assets to turn a profit on. The math is brutal: buyer’s premiums run around 25 percent at major auction houses, seller’s commissions take another cut, carrying costs for insurance run 1 to 2 percent every year, and capital gains on collectibles sit at a steep 28 percent.

As a general rule, a piece usually has to double in value just for you to break even.

This does not mean we should stop buying art. It means we need to stop expecting financial dividends.

Collect for the emotional, intellectual, and community returns. When you support an artist’s studio or a local gallery, the real return on investment shows up in the quality and beauty of your life.

Turning a collection into a living legacy.

Legacy is about the echo we leave behind and the values we share with the people around us.

Instead of letting art become a source of friction, top advisors encourage families to use it as a way to connect. Give the next generation a vote (and a small budget) on the next piece added to the family walls. Or give younger family members a modest allowance to donate to local arts, theater, or community organizations of their choice.

When we invite our families into the process of supporting the arts, the objects on the wall stop being static and turn into ongoing, intergenerational conversations.

As Michael puts it in an ArtStorming interview, life is short, but art is long. The things we make and gather outlive us. They hold our taste. They harbor our stories. They express the quiet moments of our lives long after we’re gone. Creative work demands immense bravery from the artists who bring it into the world. And taking care of those objects, and the people we leave them to, deserves that same grace, intention, and love.

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To help families navigate these exact conversations, ArtStorming is developing The Art of Legacy Toolkit—a practical guide to help families talk through art succession without the drama. Stay tuned for its release.

Listen to the full episode of ArtStorming with Lili Pierrepont, Sonja Moro, and Michael Duffy here on Substack or on your favorite podcast platform, or drop by artbridgenm.org to support our listener-funded mission.

ArtStorming is a flagship project of ArtBridge NM, a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to nurturing genuine human connection, community resilience, and courageous conversation through transformative arts engagement across New Mexico and beyond.

Your art collection can be a source of joy for decades or a source of conflict the moment you’re gone. We sit down with Sonja Moro (Los Angeles) and Michael Duffy (Atlanta) from Bank of America’s Art Services Group to talk about the intersection of passion, high finance, and the surprisingly delicate art of letting go.

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ArtStorming is thrilled to announce our official partnership with Zeitgeist Dance Theatre and Francisco Gella Dance Works! Like us, they believe in pushing creative boundaries and amplifying vibrant artistic voices. Zeitgeist Dance Theatre and Francisco Gella Dance Works are dedicated to advancing contemporary dance and dance education in New Mexico and beyond. Together, we create a powerful, shared space where art thrives and audiences can connect deeply.

Music for ArtStorming was written and performed by John Cruikshank.

There are legacies among us that are often (and often rightly) considered toxic. Political rage, religious bigotry, trauma passed unconsciously from one generation to another, to name a few. Sometimes, though, these patterns keep us in ruts. And sometimes, shifting where we stand totally changes what we’re looking at.

Back in the 1960s, French Catholic philanthropists Jean and Dominique de Menil were asking tough questions. Reeling from the horrors of World War II and the deep complicity of European institutions during the Holocaust, they found hope in Vatican II; it was a moment when the Catholic Church finally began dismantling centuries of anti-Semitism that had been woven into its theology.

At the time, the de Menils were living in Houston, Texas. There, deep in the land of anti-Black racism and segregation, they wanted to bring the same moral urgency to America’s own deep wounds.

They envisioned a sacred space outside of strict dogma, a living, art-inspired sanctuary for human rights. And they commissioned a Jewish artist carrying the weight of multi-generational European trauma to execute it.

Mark Rothko spent years designing the chapel space and painting 14 massive, dark, deeply introspective canvases.

“It’s an institution built by a French Catholic couple, commissioning a Latvian-American Jewish artist, and now led by a Turkish Muslim Imam,” Abdullah Antepli, the newly appointed president of the Rothko Chapel, tells Host Lili Pierrepont in an ArtStorming interview.

The Rothko Chapel is a sanctuary built in layers. The French Catholic vision provided the space. A Jewish master poured his inherited grief into the canvases. And now, a Turkish Muslim Imam is illuminating these quiet walls into a living and active icon of peace.

Three distinct lineages of pain and faith are stacked together to hold up a single room. Crossing lines of faith, culture, and centuries of inherited wounds, these unlikely custodians all share one core belief:

that art has a unique power to hold up a mirror, protect us from our worst impulses, and remind us of our best.

One day, a busload of high school students walked into the Rothko Chapel. To these kids raised on screens, the panels looked like giant, blank black boxes. A 16-year-old student named Carlos looked at the walls in confusion and asked, “Why aren’t the screens turning on?”

Abdullah walked over to him and said, “Why don’t you sit down, close your eyes for three minutes, and think about what is weighing on your heart? Then open them and see if the screens turn on.”

A short while later, Carlos walked out of the chapel with tears in his eyes. He hugged Abdullah and said,

“They turned on.”

Carlos’ mother was battling breast cancer. In a world of noise, clinical explanations, and empty platitudes, he’d found no language to process his pain. But three minutes of unmediated stillness in front of Rothko’s dark panels opened an internal door that words couldn’t reach.

When we hit a linguistic impasse—when politics, theology, or law fail to bridge our divides—art steps into the void.

Art is a meta-language.

Abdullah points to the national anthem of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a powerful example. After the devastating Bosnian genocide, Catholic Croatians, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslim Bosniaks had to rebuild a nation together.

But they couldn’t agree on the words for a national anthem. The vocabulary was too bruised, too loaded with trauma.

Their solution is beautiful; they adopted an anthem made entirely of music. No lyrics. Just melody.

Where words divide, art creates space.

Under Abdullah’s leadership, the Rothko Chapel is stepping back into its original calling as a spiritual and creative think tank for global healing.

Moving beyond standard one-off panels or lectures, the Chapel is launching year-long leadership programs that bring together emerging leaders from opposing political, religious, and ideological sides.

It’s explicitly engaging two things polite society tends to avoid: faith and art.

Instead of yelling into the noise of the public square, the Chapel invites us to slow down our judgments, sit with the uncomfortable, and build practical pipelines for democracy and civil rights.

“There are so many people who are rightfully complaining about the darkness,” Abdullah says. “But not enough people are lighting a candle.”

That is the ultimate promise of this space. We don’t have to be defined by the toxic legacies we inherit. Nor do we have to remain trapped in the ruts of historical rage. By stepping out of the noise, by sitting in stillness, by letting art do what words cannot, we shift our perspective.

And in doing so, we light the candle. We turn on the screen.

To hear Abdullah’s incredible personal journey, from growing up in the Middle East to working in the Obama-Biden administration and now leading the Rothko Chapel, listen to the full episode on the ArtStorming Podcast. (Also available here on Substack, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.)

How do you carve out space to turn on the screen in your own life? Let us know in the comments below!

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ArtStorming is a listener-supported initiative under ArtBridge. Special thanks to Zeitgeist Dance Theatre and Francisco Gella Dance Works for underwriting this episode.

If you enjoy these free dives into conscious lives of creativity, presence, and remembrance consider becoming a paid subscriber or donating to ArtBridge here.

This hour, this sanctuary, is brought to us by ArtBridge—our nonprofit organization devoted to human flourishing—and ArtStorming, our public home. ArtStorming is our podcast, our in-person gatherings, our community and creative initiatives, our Art of Conversation dinners. It’s how we connect together, far and wide, to explore creativity and nurture connection through conversation.

Today’s session was a special one. I was joined by ArtStorming’s podcast editor and a brother in somatic exploration, Seb, who co-led the sanctuary and grounded our shared practice. Seb invites us to spend an hour inspired by creativity as relationship, both interpersonal and within our own beings.

Together, we muted our screens to focus inward; that inner exploration—or, as we put it in the Live, an inner relationship—can be a long-delayed project, writing in a journal, sketching, reading, creating music, co-creating with a friend, or simply sitting in quiet reflection.

Showing up for this hour always reminds me there is no wrong way to create. I sat down to read (I always feel my writing is withering if I am not reading, too) poetry, but instead read an email about an author who took her own life in July, and whose death became my muse for this hour.

In the spirit of the Art of Remembrance, I invite us to consider what it means to create as way to untether and free ourselves while we are still alive.

Here is the section of a poem I read by at the closing of the hour:

at first you think you're just making art.
then you realize you're making space.
space to pause, feel, and finally
meet the parts of yourself
you used to outsource
to lovers, mentors,
money, followers,
status, religion,
approval.
your patterns
show their faces.
your projections unclench.
you stop throwing your pain at strangers
hoping one of them will hold it right.
you start holding yourself.
everything shifts from there.

The magic, I find, is in the commitment to this practice, to carving out the boundary to be present with ourselves.

If you missed the live stream, you can watch/listen to the recording above and use this hour as your own self-paced sanctuary whenever you need a boost of creative accountability.

Next Online Substack Sanctuary:
Date: Monday, September 7, 2026 (First Monday of the Month)
Time: 12 – 1 pm Mountain Time
Where: Right here on Substack Live!

Next In-Person Gathering (ArtStorming: Santa Fe):
Date: Monday, August 17, 2026 (Third Monday of the Month)
Time: 6 pm – 7:30 pm Mountain Time
Where: Vital Spaces in Santa Fe (In partnership with CreativeMornings)
Come meet face-to-face, cross-pollinate across artistic disciplines, and help shape our local creative community.

Until next time, protect your creative practice, stay curious, and art on.

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Something is breaking in how we talk to each other, and yelling louder is not fixing it. ArtStorming Host Lili Pierrepont sits down with Abdullah Antepli, the newly appointed president of Houston’s Rothko Chapel, to explore a different approach: art as a sanctuary for slowing down, telling the truth about our past, and rebuilding trust across deep divides.

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ArtStorming is thrilled to announce our official partnership with Zeitgeist Dance Theatre and Francisco Gella Dance Works! Like us, they believe in pushing creative boundaries and amplifying vibrant artistic voices. Zeitgeist Dance Theatre and Francisco Gella Dance Works are dedicated to advancing contemporary dance and dance education in New Mexico and beyond. Together, we create a powerful, shared space where art thrives and audiences can connect deeply.

Music for ArtStorming was written and performed by John Cruikshank.

By his late 40s, Chip Conley had built Joie de Vivre from the ground up into a massive 52-property boutique hotel empire. Externally, he looked like a runaway success story. Personally, he was suffocating.

It's a common tipping point. There seems to come a moment in midlife where the tools, habits, and coping mechanisms we used to get to the top (or wherever we happen to find ourselves) suddenly stop working; they become underwhelming or overwhelming or even unbearable. When that wall hits, the question shifts from "How do I survive this?" to "How do I build something that actually matters?"

For Chip—boutique hotel pioneer, early Airbnb mentor, and founder of the Modern Elder Academy—the answer came through a series of life-altering disruptions that stripped away the illusion of control and demanded a completely new internal operating system.

The Great Recession was punishing his business, a long-term relationship was splintering, and, most painfully, he lost five male friends to suicide. All in midlife.

The moment Chip broke open, he was fighting off a nasty leg infection. He had taken the stage for a speech in St. Louis, and was mid-presentation when he had an allergic reaction to his antibiotics. That afternoon, he passed out on the stage and flatlined nine times.

While he hovered in the gray space between life and death, Chip had a strange, quiet hallucination. He was soaring through a sunlit room surrounded by 40 birds who brought a single, stark realization:

“Slow down. You will not see beauty or awe unless you slow down.”

This was the dividing line of his existence. Having brushed against mortality, Chip felt a soul-deep drive to spend whatever time he had left pursuing a true calling rather than ego gratification. Chip calls this Holy Urgency.

“Holy urgency and slow down—it’s a strange combination,” he tells ArtStorming host Lili Pierrepont. “I’ve learned how to love spaciousness, but I’m pursuing a calling. I have no idea how many years I’m going to live, so I need to figure out how to have spaciousness while being completely true to why I am here.”

In our modern Western culture, we tend to death-march like pouting toddlers toward midlife as if it were a threshold we’d rather not cross. But Chip points out modern longevity has transformed midlife into a new, 40-year life stage, stretching from age 35 to 75.

In 2013, Brian Chesky, the young CEO of Airbnb, approached Chip to help scale his fast-growing tech startup. Chip was 52, entering an office full of tech prodigies half his age. He didn't even have the Lyft or Uber apps on his phone yet.

But despite his age and experience, Chip chose to keep his head down and learn. He traded his decades of hospitality wisdom for an education in internet culture. He made himself listen rather than of give answers.

His 20-something coworkers started to call him the Modern Elder. At first, Chip didn’t love the title, but its actual meaning became deeply significant to him; a Modern Elder is a person who pairs deep wisdom with an equally deep curiosity.

Chip realized that while raw processing speed and memory peak in our 20s and 30s, the ability to recognize patterns, synthesize complex human dynamics, and offer deep empathy actually peaks in our 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Feeling at a crossroads after his run at Airbnb, Chip retreated to a small, quiet surf town in Baja, Mexico. There, he realized that society provides clear rites of passage for teenagers (like graduations and driver’s licenses) and retirees, but it doesn’t offer any ceremonies, guidance, or schools for midlife transitions.

So his question became, “Why is there no university for the second half of life?”

His answer birthed the Modern Elder Academy, the world’s first midlife wisdom school, anchored on a beachside campus in Baja and a 2,500-acre regenerative horse ranch in the Galisteo Basin outside of Santa Fe.

At MEA, thousands of alumni gather to practice long-life learning. They develop transitional intelligence and reframe aging. They move from the first half of life’s focus on ego to the second half of life’s focus on soul.

Ask almost any of us what legacy means in our 30s, and we’d probably describe an empire, an inheritance left behind, maybe a monument or a name on a building. But around the campfire at the Modern Elder Academy that definition is transmuted.

Chip often shares how first-half-of-life ambition is about accumulating knowledge, about being the smartest person in the room, about having all the right answers. The second half, though, is about distilling that knowledge into wisdom. It’s about moving from being a knowledge worker to a wisdom keeper.

That transformation is the heart of what psychologist Erik Erikson terms generativity, the quiet instinct to stop hoarding light and start passing the torch, distilled in five words, “I am what survives me.”

When we reframe legacy this way, midlife becomes an awakening. And the work becomes learning how to listen without correcting, learning how to ask questions that unlock others. Midlife becomes the tuning of our ears to moral beauty. It becomes aligning with the unmistakable awe of witnessing ordinary people act with extraordinary grace, courage, and kindness. It becomes a life lived from the soul.

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How to transmute a midlife crisis into a midlife reboot

Moving from ego to soul, as Chip puts it, requires purposeful daily practices. In the spirit of our Art of Legacy Toolkit, here are some tools Chip recommends to anyone navigating a midlife transition.

Cultivate curiosity over certainty.

Don’t try to be the smartest person in the room. Practice asking open-ended questions that unlock the potential in younger colleagues, friends, and family members rather than providing instant answers.

Identify what you need to edit out.

The first half of life is about accumulation and the second half is about editing. Ask yourself: What mindsets, obligations, or ambitions am I clinging to purely out of habit or pride?

Embrace the messy middle.

Recognize that every major life shift involves an ending, a messy middle, and a new beginning. Give yourself permission to sit in the uncomfortable space of not knowing what comes next.

Seek awe in human grace.

Natural beauty inspires us, but witnessing human courage, selflessness, and resilience builds psychological strength. Really LOOK FOR and praise acts of moral courage in the humans around you.

Join the movement

• Learn more about upcoming Modern Elder Academy workshops, retreats, and campus visits in Santa Fe and Baja at meawisdom.com.

• Pick up a copy of Chip’s Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better With Age.

• ArtStorming relies on our community to ensure vital artistic voices remain accessible to all. Become a paid subscriber for $8 a month to directly sustain the production of ArtStorming, Daily Doses, and our Creativity Toolkits, or visit artbridgenm.org to make a direct impact.

What happens when motion, emotion, and global perspectives converge in the high desert of Santa Fe?

Inside the walls of Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, something quiet but electric took place. Hosted in partnership with Zeitgeist Dance Theatre, ArtStorming, Francisco Gella Dance Works, and moderated by ArtStorming host Lili Pierrepont, The Alchemy of Motion brought together an incredible panel of international choreographers: Francisco Gella, Vladimir Conde Reche, Livona Ellis, Jessica Miller Tomlinson, and Madison Falconer.

Their presence in Santa Fe was no coincidence. The panel marked a central moment in Zeitgeist Dance Theatre’s intensive three-week international summer residency. Gathering over 75 dancers, apprentices, and guest choreographers from across New Mexico and around the world, the residency has been built with a singular purpose: to establish Santa Fe as a major nexus for contemporary dance, where world-class creation is rooted in the high desert, but speaks directly to a global audience.

Rather than treating dance as a pristine, untouchable art form, the conversation unveiled choreography as a living, breathing instrument for human connection, a universal dialect of non-verbal empathy.

The panel offered a rare peek behind the curtain at the creative laboratory taking place before the company’s world premiere concert at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, on August 1, 2026.

To understand the art, you have to understand the humans embodying it. The panel comprised artists who have spent lifetimes translating the intangible into movement:

Chicago-based Jessica Miller Tomlinson discovered her rhythm long before formal training, developing a breath-centered approach where movement springs organically from internal impulses and the subtle cadences of human speech. Livona Ellis arrived from Vancouver by way of the classroom, falling in love with choreography through teaching—turning the studio into a sacred space for deep, collaborative relationships. From São Paulo, Vladimir Conde Reche—who took his first dance step at 16—uses the stage as a platform for artists of all ages to reclaim their agency and speak raw, real-world truths.

Madison Falconer operates with a deeply physical, hands-on methodology. For her, the rehearsal process is an active playground.

I’m very much a part of my rehearsal process,” she says. “I’m a very physical choreographer, so I really delve in there and get in. Especially in partnering—that’s my favorite. I like to treat it like a jungle gym kind of, getting on top and underneath to see all the different avenues.”

Rounding out the ensemble, Francisco made a radical pivot from engineering to dance at 19, bringing a structural mind that fuses visceral reactions to classical music with the everyday geometry of city overpasses.

When these distinct backgrounds meet in a room, magic begins.

Dancers arrive with wildly different physical dialects. Instead of demanding exact replication, these choreographers teach initial movement to observe, watching how each body digests, transforms, and articulates the idea.

Choreography becomes less about imposing control and more about listening.

Whether starting with a thunderous Vivaldi score or total silence, the journey is constantly shifting. When Francisco spoke about re-staging older works, he revealed that a dance is never truly finished; it must be retrofitted to the living, breathing humans in front of you.

The piece inevitably undergoes “the natural edit.” It’s the quiet filtering process that happens in rehearsals, a natural shedding where what feels forced is cast aside, and only what organically resonates is allowed to remain.

But perhaps the most profound shift discussed was a cultural one.

The days of rigid, punitive studio environments that view the body as a instrument to be worn down are gone. Today’s process is grounded in physical safety, psychological trust, and genuine empathy. Dancers are no longer tools; they are co-creators.

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Keep the motion going

The best creative partnerships are a two-way street of inspiration, and we are thrilled to celebrate Zeitgeist Dance Theatre’s fifth summer season.

• Experience the Premiere: Celebrate five years of groundbreaking movement by catching Zeitgeist Dance Theatre’s 2026 premiere concert following their summer residency. Find performance details at zeitgeistdancetheatre.org.

• Connect with Francisco: Explore educational immersives, mentorship intensives, and archival works via franciscogelladance.com and follow the daily process on Instagram at @franciscogelladance, @dancingwithfrancisco, or @filipinofran73. Read his Creativity Toolkit, listen to his podcast interview, or read his story in our Substack post, When Structure Sets Us Free.

• Support Community Arts: ArtStorming relies on our community to ensure vital artistic voices remain accessible to all. Become a paid subscriber for $8 a month to directly sustain the production of ArtStorming, Daily Doses, and our Creativity Toolkits, or visit artbridgenm.org to make a direct impact.

What am I holding onto that isn’t working for me? And what creative habits, projects, or joys have proven themselves worth keeping?

The First Monday of every month, we set aside one precious hour to gather on Substack Live. We turn our cameras off, carve out a quiet boundary in the middle of a busy world, and hold ourselves accountable to our creative practice. These gatherings are a dedicated time to slow down, reflect, and art on without pressure or deadlines.

During our July session, we offer a resonant prompt to help us navigate the second half of the year.

We invite you to look back at the trail you’ve walked since winter, and ask yourself what you are ready to keep, and what you may need or like to lay down.

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Even when technical hiccups pop up, or life gets noisy, showing up for this hour always yields unexpected gifts. As the hour wrapped up, ArtStorming Host Lili Pierrepont reflected on how sitting in the quiet sanctuary brought her a moment of profound personal remembrance.

“This moment allowed me to slow down enough to remember that it’s my mother’s birthday today,” she said. “If I hadn’t just sat down and written in my notebook, ‘July 6th: Mom,’ I wouldn’t have noticed. There is so much to be said for slowing down just to remember things like that.”

Whether you use the hour to write, sketch, tone, or sit in quiet reflection, there is no wrong way to do this.

Community Highlights & What’s Ahead

We have some exciting updates as we streamline our initiatives and expand our physical footprint in the community.

To make things simpler, we are merging our initiatives under the ArtStorming umbrella. While ArtBridge remains our active 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation (powering our patronage, grants, and strategic partnerships), ArtStorming is our public home for podcasting, Substack essays, and community gatherings.

We’d also like to extend a humungous thank you to everyone who joined us on July 20 for our very first live ArtStorming: Santa Fe gathering in partnership with CreativeMornings and Vital Spaces! It was a beautiful, inspiring, and intimate evening that reminded us how much power there is when we show up and trust our shared intentions. Everyone brought such vulnerability and enthusiasm to co-creating a brave space for local creatives.

We invite you to carve out time for your creative spirit at our upcoming August events:

• Next Live Substack Sanctuary:

  Date: Monday, August 3, 2026 (First Monday of the month)

  Time: 12 – 1 pm MT

  Where: Substack Live (In your app)

  Bring a notebook, pens, paint, an uncompleted project, or simply yourself.

• Next in-person ArtStorming: Santa Fe gathering

  Date: Monday, August 17, 2026 (third Monday of the month)

  Time: 6 – 7:30 pm MT

  Where: Vital Spaces in Santa Fe

Until we meet again, stay curious, protect your creative practice, and art on.

Get more from ArtStorming in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

ArtStorming is thrilled to announce our official partnership with Zeitgeist Dance Theatre and Francisco Gella Dance Works! Like us, they believe in pushing creative boundaries and amplifying vibrant artistic voices. Zeitgeist Dance Theatre and Francisco Gella Dance Works are dedicated to advancing contemporary dance and dance education in New Mexico and beyond. Together, we create a powerful, shared space where art thrives and audiences can connect deeply.

Subscribe now

Find here on Substack and @chipconleyauthor on Instagram.

Music for ArtStorming was written and performed by John Cruikshank.

Your contribution ensures that these posts and podcasts remain open for everyone.

• Become a paid subscriber: For $8 a month, you help us sustain the production of ArtStorming, Daily Doses, and Creativity Toolkits.

• Make a direct donation: Every dollar goes directly toward uplifting vital artistic voices and cultivating creative expression in our community and beyond.

Visit artbridgenm.org to learn more about our mission and our initiatives.

When a boat moves through water, it creates two distinct disturbances. First, there is the prow shock: the sudden, dramatic parting of the water at the very front of the bow. Then, there is the wake: the long, spreading waves that trail far behind the vessel, rippling long after the boat has passed.

A human life does the same thing. We create a prow shock when we are born, pushing into the world with a unique, immutable essence that belongs to us alone. And we leave a wake behind us when we go.

That wake is the physical trail we leave behind. It is the cardboard box in the back of the closet. The worn-out brass key to a house we no longer live in. The half-empty notebook with a grocery list written in handwriting that’s no longer scribbled on this earth. The whiff of a pipe that might be the ghost of a grandfather.

These are the waves still rippling behind the people we loved. Daniel Wheeler points out it is no accident that we use the exact same word for both the physical waves spreading behind a ship and the quiet gatherings we hold after a death.

Taught to hoard the present and ignore the end, we tend to treat death like a flaw we can outsmart with enough productivity, products, or the right hacks. But when we lose someone, or when we contemplate our own departure, we are smacked with a hard question: What do we do with those physical remnants of a life?

Daniel is an artist who operates at the sacred, sometimes surreal intersection of wood, metal, and memory. Long before a catastrophic family loss reshaped his world, he was already working as a cartographer of grief, carving physical vessels for the things we cannot bring ourselves to say. His practice is built on a simple and comforting truth:

We can use physical objects to help us reassemble the people we love after they are gone, finding a sideways path to healing.

If a life is a boat moving through space, the art of remembrance doesn’t need to act like a literal biography. It doesn’t need to capture every single chapter. Rather, like a poem, a memorial sculpture needs only to capture a single, essential tone.

And sometimes, capturing that tone is a physical adventure. Daniel recounts visiting his grandparents’ grave in Massachusetts. There, he found their two-ply slate headstone delaminating.

Knowing his grandfather had always loved a specific island in Maine, Daniel and a friend sailed up the coast, rowed a tiny plastic dory to the shore, and rolled a massive, rugged piece of pink granite across the beach on a boat dolly. They loaded the heavy stone into the dory, almost sinking the tiny plastic boat in the process. Realizing they couldn't carry it on board, they tied the granite stone to the back of their sailboat instead, towing it through the open water for three days just to get it back to the harbor. From there, it went into the back of a minivan, and then into a cousin’s garage.

Because cemeteries are notoriously slow-moving institutions, Daniel is still gently pushing through the administrative red tape to get the headstone set. But the vision is clear: a natural slab of pink granite shaped like the sails of a boat, with their names sandblasted directly into the stone. A simple, stubborn, beautiful marker.

For decades, Daniel has championed sincerity in the art world. It’s a stance that isn’t always trendy.

“Visual irony is important,” Daniel says. “Dramatic irony is important. But emotional irony? I can’t accept that. I feel like it’s a hedge against fear. The memorial work has given me permission to abandon irony, because there is simply no room for it in someone’s grief.”

This commitment to earnest, physical connection is beautifully illustrated in his piece “Post Whole.”

In Japan, cremation is a slower process than in the West. The bones are not crushed into uniform dust; instead, large fragments remain. In a sacred ritual, family members use long, specialized chopsticks called kotsubashi to ceremonially place the bones into the urn, starting at the feet and working up to the head.

Inspired by this physical contact with loss, Daniel was carving a pair of massive, oar-like wooden arms tipped with hands when the devastating Los Angeles wildfires swept through his community. A friend’s home was entirely destroyed.

Daniel went to the property and salvaged the charred wood of the family’s burned Victorian box trees. He used that blackened wood to complete the piece.

The resulting sculpture resembles a set of ceremonial tools—oversized kotsubashi that double as a post-hole digger. It is a literal sifter designed to search through toxic ash for the things that didn’t completely melt: a piece of silverware, a scrap of jewelry, a fragment of home. It is a functional tool for processing grief.

Daniel reminds us that if we only treat death with hushed, solemn reverence, we miss the full spectrum of what it means to be human.

“This shit is funny, too,” he laughs. “It’s dark, but it’s dumb and funny and deep and ridiculous and tragic all at once. If you can’t laugh, you’re screwed.”

His current project, Pret-à-Portage, embraces this friction. Created for the opening celebration of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new Peter Zumthor building, the piece is a brilliant spoof on pret-à-porter (ready-to-wear) fashion shows.

It is a cross between a cortege—the traditional, solemn military funeral procession featuring a riderless horse with empty boots turned backward in the stirrups—and a Trojan horse.

The piece is a wheeled, rearing equestrian monument made entirely of salvaged street trees, cardboard, paper, cork, linoleum, found pallets, sawhorses, and pallets—but it has no horse and no rider. The horse’s body is a hollowed-out Ponderosa pine trunk, representing the hollowed-out myth of the American West.

During the parade, Daniel will pull this massive wagon himself. He will be dressed in a costume stitched from paper shopping bags, wearing a garment that is a cross between a Western duster, chaps, and a ceremonial wizard’s robe covered in bells. On his feet, he will wear heavy, carved redwood platform clogs that clatter and clippity-clop on the pavement with every step.

He is literally the horse pulling the cart of the horse. It is a grand, tragicomic, deeply sincere performance of carrying our burdens forward.

This playful, surrealist approach to the heavy things in life is also how Daniel envisions his own eventual departure. When asked if he has ever designed his own final vessel, there’s a smile in his voice. His plan? A ceramic cloud.

He wants to place his ashes inside a beautifully sculpted clay cloud and have his family bury it in the dirt. There is something wonderfully absurd, defiant, and poetic about digging a dark, heavy hole in the earth just to throw a cloud into it.

Daniel’s humor also, of course, holds a deep truth, as humor so often does:

Our physical bodies are themselves vessels of remembrance.

He recalls a sculptor friend who spent her life in a wheelchair after an accident at age 18. Her body was covered in tattoos. When asked if she regretted the ink she got when she was young, she replied, “No. My body is a map of my living. If I regretted what I did at 18, I’d be saying I don’t accept who I was.”

Daniel didn’t get his first tattoo until he was in his 50s, following the sudden, cataclysmic loss of his nephew, Lucas.

To map that grief onto his own skin, Daniel had an intricate design tattooed on his arm: encircling his arm is the image of a single wire which becomes the script of a phrase Lucas lived by (“love fiercely”) and from which hang several flowers, some in bloom and some dying. It is a direct tribute to Lucas’s funeral, where the family hung thousands of cut flowers from wires spanning the church ceiling.

“I wanted it to be written on me,” Daniel says. “And I wanted it to hurt.”

In the heavy fog that followed Lucas’s passing, the family adopted a vital mantra. When getting out of bed feels like climbing a mountain, people often say to just put one foot in front of the other. But Daniel and his brother found a better path:

“Just do the next indicated thing.”

While one foot in front of the other implies mechanical survival, doing the next indicated thing restores our agency. It might mean screaming into a pillow, sitting in a quiet corner, or going back into the studio to build something. We get to decide what is indicated.

In the wake of losing her son, Daniel’s sister-in-law, Deb Todd Wheeler, initially confessed, “I don’t think I’ll ever make another thing.”

But slowly, inexorably, the creative impulse returned. Today, she is making some of the most sensitive, active, and deeply reflective work of her life.

Grief can easily freeze us in place, but often, loss is a fierce, heartbreaking invitation to step into our deepest creative agency. When Daniel’s mother-in-law passed away, and his wife faced the daunting task of clearing out a lifetime of belongings, Daniel gave her a piece of advice we can all carry with us:

“I know you’re gonna feel terrible. But in there are a bunch of reveals. There’s stuff to be learned, and there’s stuff to be seen that you didn’t know about. Those are the gifts buried in there. Try to stay curious.”

In the wake of genuine curiosity, we find that legacy is a beautiful gift, an unpredictable wave we send out into the water, which ripples long after we have sailed past.

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Today’s Art of Legacy Toolkit prompt

This week, if you’re sorting through the remnants of a loss—or simply looking at the objects that define your own daily existence—try to stay curious. Look for the reveals. Look for the gifts. Write them down, draw it out, sing, speak it out loud.

Dive deeper into the wake

If this exploration of physical legacy and creative grief resonated with you, there are several ways to continue walking alongside these ideas:

• Listen to the Podcast: Experience the full, raw warmth of our conversation on the latest episode of ArtStorming: The Art of Remembrance. You can listen directly on Spotify / Apple Podcasts.

• Step Into the Gallery: Daniel’s philosophy of tactile mourning is a guiding pillar of our upcoming virtual multimedia exhibition, Remains To Be Seen, premiering later this summer. Keep an eye on your inbox for an invitation to explore this digital sanctuary.

• Discover Daniel’s Work: To view the twisting tree trunk urn, the cherry blossom vessels, and the progress of Pret-à-Portage, visit Daniel digital archive at danielwheeler.com and instagram.com/wheelermadeit,

• Circle Back to Deb’s Story: If you missed our earlier, deeply moving episode with Daniel’s sister-in-law, Deb Todd Wheeler, on navigating the immediate wake of Lucas’s passing, you can find that conversation archived. You can also read Screaming Trees and Silver Dust: Art as a container for the unthinkable with Deb Todd Wheeler here.

• Support the Infrastructure: ArtBridge is the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that fuels ArtStorming. We believe that art is the fundamental infrastructure for human integrity and survival. The labor of curating these stories, hosting these courageous conversations, and maintaining a sanctuary for remembrance requires collective support.

Your contribution ensures that these clearings remain open for everyone.

• Become a paid subscriber: For $8 a month, you help us sustain the production of ArtStorming, Daily Doses, and Creativity Toolkits.

• Make a direct donation: Every dollar goes directly toward uplifting vital artistic voices and cultivating creative expression in our community and beyond.

Visit artbridgenm.org to learn more about our mission and our initiatives.

The impulse to speed up might be the greatest modern threat to a lasting legacy. In this culture driven by instantaneous metrics, viral snippets, and algorithmic velocity, the act of creation is consistently pressured to skip the middle and leap to the final product. We’ve been trained to outsmart our creative patience with tools that mimic speed. And ultimately, we forget that a rush toward the finish line can wash away the depth we hope to leave behind.

To counter this digital drift, we look to the intentional ground of the dance floor.

This summer, Zeitgeist Dance Theatre marks its fifth summer season and a massive three-week creative residency in New Mexico. Under the stewardship of award-winning artistic director, choreographer, and educator Francisco Gella, Zeitgeist has solidified its place as a world-class contemporary force. Rooted locally but resonant globally, Francisco’s work is a testament to what happens when an artist strictly refuses to rush the process.

For those looking to anchor this approach in their own life, ArtStorming Host Lili Pierrepont is hosting a live panel discussion with Francisco and a cohort of boundary-pushing choreographers on July 25 at Zane Bennett Contemporary.

As a preview to that live gathering, Francisco shares how he preserves the sacred practice of slowing down, the talismans that track his decades of evolution, and why genuine legacy is less about artistic immortality and more about community survival.

The anchor of intentional space

If we were to photograph the space where Francisco feels closest to the idea of legacy, the lens would focus on the deeply worn, functional details of his loft dance studio. You would see the distinct sheen of the black marley floor, the parallel lines of the ballet barre, the physical therapy tools resting in the corner, and the photographs pinning moments of past movement to the walls.

Dominating the space would be the studio speaker. It’s the physical vessel through which decades of music choices have traveled, sparking the obsessions that eventually become choreography.

For Francisco, this physical architecture is an external hard drive for the spirit, holding the muscle memory of countless creative births.

Sifting through the soundtracks of the past

To stay physically and spiritually tied to both his past and future selves, Francisco practices a form of active, retrospective curation, regularly returning to the physical and digital trail of his life.

He revisits specific music tracks that once became total creative obsessions, using the melody to instantly transport himself to the exact emotional geography of that younger artist. He combines this sonic time travel with a physical geography of reflection, returning to the neighborhoods and cities he used to live in to stand on the old pavement and contrast who he was then with who he has become.

By sifting through old photo galleries and early journals, Francisco maps his own history, treating it as the fecund earth from which past seeds can finally be brought to fruition.

The definitive counter-narrative: The choreographic journals

When asked what single object must survive to tell his story and prevent his legacy from drifting after he is gone, Francisco points to his collection of creative journals.

These notebooks house the raw, messy, unpolished blueprints for nearly every dance piece he has ever staged. They stand as a definitive testament to his growth, his doubts, and his triumphs; they’re the ultimate proof that art is built through slow, deliberate labor rather than instant inspiration.

“I’m not sure if immortality is the right word,” he says. “For me, it’s about legacy. What am I leaving behind that has helped my community to continue to exist and evolve? That is what’s most important to me personally.”

The daily deceleration and the honest review

To bring Francisco’s philosophy of intentional creation and legacy preservation into your own weekly rhythm, try incorporating these two specific practices into your routine:

The Daily Intentional Clearing: Upon waking, resist the immediate urge to reach for your phone or plunge into the logistics of the day. Sit completely silent for a few moments. Dedicate this brief window entirely to intentional, deep breathing exercises. This small act of stillness establishes a grounded baseline, ensuring you meet the day on your own terms rather than reacting to the speed of the world.

The Weekly Debrief of the Difficult: Legacy drifts when we hide our mistakes. Find a person you deeply trust and respect, and hold an unflinchingly honest conversation about a recent challenge. Do not just celebrate what went right. Openly vocalize your fears, your hesitations, and your regrets, alongside the elements that made the project successful. The reassembly of our experiences through transparent dialogue is how we distill raw process into enduring wisdom.

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Dive deeper into the movement

Attend the Live Panel: Join Lili and guest choreographers on July 25 at Zane Bennett Contemporary for a live discussion on movement, memory, and the physical remains of dance.

Experience the Premiere: Celebrate five years of exceptional contemporary dance by catching Zeitgeist Dance Theatre’s 2026 premiere concert following their summer residency. Learn more about performance dates at zeitgeistdancetheatre.org.

Connect with Francisco: Explore educational immersives, mentorship intensives, and archival works via franciscogelladance.com and follow the daily process on Instagram at @franciscogelladance, @dancingwithfrancisco, or @filipinofran73.

This blog was originally published on March 14, 2026. We are sharing it again with updates:

ArtStorming is excited to announce our official partnership with Zeitgeist Dance Theatre and Francisco Gella Dance Works. Like us, they believe in pushing creative boundaries and amplifying vibrant artistic voices. By aligning our platform with visionaries like Zeitgeist, we create a powerful, shared space where art thrives and audiences connect deeply.

On July 25, our host Lili Pierrepont will be moderating an exclusive, live panel discussion with Zeitgeist’s brilliant roster of international choreographers at Zane Bennett Gallery. Together, they’ll pull back the curtain on the creative impulses, the somatic framework, and the deep intentions driving their upcoming summer show.

Engineer Mind, Artist Heart

In the high desert of northern New Mexico, legacy is often viewed through the lens of the ancient: the centuries-old adobe, the traditional acequia, the rhythmic thrum of an eighth-generation loom in Chimayó. But for Francisco Gella, artistic director of Zeitgeist Dance Theatre, legacy is a living, breathing architecture built in real-time through the bodies of his dancers.

Francisco is doing something much larger than choreographing steps. He is acting as a social architect, using the discipline of dance to build the fundamental infrastructure for human integrity and survival.

Recently, Francisco was commissioned by UNESCO to create a work celebrating Santa Fe’s designation as a Creative City. The result was Lineage, a masterpiece inspired by the Trujillo family of weavers. Initially, Francisco struggled to translate a stationary, slow craft into the high-velocity world of contemporary dance.

The breakthrough came when he realized that weaving and dance share the same DNA: rhythm, mathematics, pattern, and design.

To bring this to the stage, Francisco engineered what he calls a “living loom.” Using 15-foot canvases and 44 dancers, he created a visual representation of the warp and weft of human history. In one particularly complex section, the musical timing was so dense that traditional counting failed. His solution was a pivot from the head to the heart:

“Instead of counting, we listened,” Francisco tells ArtStorming Host Lili Pierrepont. “The dancers learned different strategies... they thought ‘us, we, we, we’ instead of ‘me, me, me.’ The work unified us.”

Francisco’s approach is a radical departure from the vicious legacy of traditional dance education—a world often synonymous with body shaming and emotional exhaustion. He is intentionally interrupting that cycle by prioritizing the human being over the human instrument.

Francisco is a vocal advocate for breaking body norms. He believes that if you take a ballet class, you are a ballet dancer, regardless of genetic ideals or skin color. During a dress rehearsal for Lineage, costumes were literally falling off the dancers. Instead of shaming the performers, Gella framed the moment as what he calls “redemption time.”

He taught them to turn that frustration into grit.

Francisco is candid with his young dancers about the fragility of the body. He reminds them that while they have the collagen and flexibility of youth now, the instrument has an expiration date. This awareness isn’t meant to cause fear, but to inspire a radical presence in the moment.

Before he found dance at age 19, Francisco was an engineering student. That analytical foundation still dictates his creative process. While many choreographers work purely from emotion, Francisco’s notebooks look like structural blueprints.

“I work like an engineer,” he says. “I diagram my movement patterns... I rely on my mathematics, I rely on my instinct.”

This balance of the engineer’s mind and the artist’s heart allows him to manage the complexity of a massive company while maintaining a deeply personal, empathetic connection to the work.

It is a reminder that one of the most creatives thing we can do is determine how we are remembered, and that requires both a plan and the courage to let it go.

Francisco’s career reached its most potent phase when he left the noise of Los Angeles for the stillness of Santa Fe. He found that the outside noise of trends and social media curation was a distraction from his inner voice.

“Santa Fe has made me quieter so that I can listen to this energy inside of me,” he says. “I trusted myself, and that’s what Santa Fe has done. It has made me quieter to be able to listen to this voice inside of me so that I could access that more when I create.”

By tapping into his own deeply personal truth—including his Filipino identity and the concept of Kaua (the love and warmth of his island people)—Francisco has discovered a universal language that resonates far beyond the stage.

As Zeitgeist Dance Theatre prepares for its upcoming season at The Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe on August 1, the goal remains the same: to nurture whole human beings who can dance through adversity, hiccups, and life’s inevitable transitions.

Francisco’s work proves that art is not an extra or a luxury. It is the site where we practice being human. It is the bridge we build back when language fails, ensuring that our legacy is a living, breathing act of care. How are you choreographing your own legacy today?

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Explore

• Listen: Catch Francisco’s episode of ArtStorming.

• Support: Every dollar you contribute to ArtBridge helps us keep these vital conversations alive! Donate Here.

• Learn more about Zeitgeist Dance Theatre and franciscogelladance.com

Visit artbridgenm.org to learn more about our nonprofit and its other initiatives. All donations help us spread creativity through courageous conversation throughout our community and beyond. Subscribe now for just $8 or donate directly here.

What would it change if we treated death as part of our creative life instead of a topic we avoid until we have no choice? I sit down with Los Angeles 3D artist and sculptor Daniel Wheeler for a candid, funny, and deeply tender conversation about memorial art, funerary sculpture, and the ways physical objects can help us carry grief without shrinking our lives.

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ArtStorming is thrilled to announce our official partnership with Zeitgeist Dance Theatre and Francisco Gella Dance Works! Like us, they believe in pushing creative boundaries and amplifying vibrant artistic voices. Zeitgeist Dance Theatre and Francisco Gella Dance Works are dedicated to advancing contemporary dance and dance education in New Mexico and beyond. Together, we create a powerful, shared space where art thrives and audiences can connect deeply.

Music for ArtStorming was written and performed by John Cruikshank.

Support the Infrastructure

ArtStorming is powered by ArtBridge, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We believe that art is the fundamental infrastructure for human survival. The labor of curating these stories and hosting these courageous conversations requires collective support.

• Become a paid subscriber: For $8 a month, you sustain the production of ArtStorming, Daily Doses, and our Creativity Toolkits.

• Make a direct donation: Every dollar goes directly toward uplifting vital artistic voices and cultivating creative expression in our community.

Visit artbridgenm.org to learn more.

Have you ever had a moment where the space between the past and the present collapses directly in front of you?

This happened on a recent spring afternoon, just three minutes into a recorded conversation for the ArtStorming podcast. Across the digital line from Host Pierrepont sat , an extraordinary interdisciplinary artist speaking from New Haven, Connecticut. She mentioned she was currently at Yale University, building a permanent monument dedicated to the historical memory of the enslaved people who built the institution.

Lili paused. Her ancestor, Reverend James Pierpont (later generations changed the spelling back to Pierrepont), was one of the original founders of Yale in 1701.

When Lili shared that detail, Nikesha looked at her through the screen. Gently and matter-of-factly, she revealed that her monument directly and specifically honors Jethro and Ruth Luke, the very family whom Reverend James Pierpont had legally owned and enslaved.

Historical records show that Jethro and his son Gad performed the grueling physical labor required to construct Connecticut Hall, the oldest standing structure on Yale’s campus today.

In an instant, the safety of the digital spell evaporated, and centuries vanished. Two strangers who came together to discuss the abstract concept of legacy became two women carrying the heavy, tangled cords of a shared American lineage, sitting face-to-face with the reality of what their ancestors had done to (and with) one another.

What followed was a beautiful exploration and example of how we collectively metabolize human loss, ancestral grief, and planetary trauma into diamonds of art and connection.

To look into our history is a deeply sobering, often uncomfortable task. But as Nikesha’s work reminds us, the goal of confronting the past is to reanimate what has been forgotten so we can finally heal.

Nikesha’s massive Living Histories installation at the Sydney Biennale, titled “Anatomy of Remembrance,” spans over 6,000 square feet of a historic power station. The foundation of the entire work rests on a decade of deep research into the WPA oral history archives from the 1930s—a treasure trove of 2,300 firsthand accounts of formerly enslaved people.

“There are countless books about it, but from the mouths of people who lived it, it’s really different...” Nikesha tells Lili in her ArtStorming interview. “This record became the foundation for the work... The moving space of it was just wooden fabric. There were pieces of wood for the cabin and the fabric, but what made it alive were the stories and the vision and the concept, and that travels.”

Nikesha’s ultimate vision expands far beyond a single art installation. The dream is to construct a living, searchable data archive where all 2,500 histories are reanimated by living voices, offering descendants a direct pathway to their ancestry, medicine, and traditions.

In our hyper-accelerated modern culture, we treat death and grief as structural glitches to be sanitized, commercialized, or solved as quickly as possible.

We are terrified of sadness because we are afraid there is no other side to it.

Nikesha looks at grief through a completely different lens, drawing a stunning parallel from Chinese medicine to explain how our bodies are structurally designed to process heavy emotional environments:

“Grief in Chinese medicine is processed through the lung,” Nikesha says. “And the lung is such an incredible organ, right? Such a phenomenal organ of filtration and of refinement... The lung is pulling in all of this breath, but it’s then filtering that breath... to break apart that breath and pull out the water from it.

That’s the work, right? We pull grief in this huge way, and then our lungs pull out the gold, the beauty, the preciousness.

So as we move through grief, actually transmute it through the body... …what comes is these little diamonds of what matters, what truly matters, what truly builds our soul, what builds our understanding of love.”

At the center of Nikesha’s Sydney installation stands a towering, 65-foot-tall mystical baobab tree constructed from over 2,000 yards of cotton—the exact amount of material a single enslaved worker was forced to harvest in a day or two.

During construction, fabricators wrapped the naked branches in cotton soaked in cornstarch. Nikesha reflects that the process felt like shrouding, wrapping, and caring for a human body. It serves as a reminder that the natural world is intimately bound up in our human histories.

“I do believe it is true that the trees really are processing our grief on the planet all of the time,” she says. “The trees themselves are some of the most intelligent creatures or beings on the planet... You think in grief, you learn about your separation and your isolation. But you actually learn about your connection and you learn about the way that you are truly inseparable, actually, from everything else.”

Confronting the reality of our shared history can be profoundly uncomfortable. Diving into the Yale and Slavery historical texts to look her own family’s past in the eye is a deeply sobering task for Lili. But as Nikesha reminds us, this work isn’t about maintaining walls of separation or hiding behind individual shame. It is about building containers of high-trust relationality.

When we gather, when we sit across from one another, and when we create spaces to listen to the unscripted truth of who we are, we stop moving at the breakneck speed of modern distraction. We drop into the deep, slow rhythm of the earth. We breathe in the heavy air, we trust the filter, and we find the gold.

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Listen to the full, unscripted conversation with Nikesha Breeze here. You can also find the ArtStorming podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite streaming platform.

If you’re in Northern New Mexico, Nikesha's work, New Editions, can be seen in Albuquerque at the Richard Levy Gallery through Aug. 8, 2026, with a reception on July 11, 6-8 pm.

If you would like to support our ongoing mission to build spaces for deep human storytelling, connection, presence, and ancestral remembrance, consider becoming a paid Substack subscriber or making a tax-deductible contribution to our nonprofit engine, ArtBridge.

More resources mentioned in ’s ArtStorming episode:

nikeshabreeze.com

yaleandslavery.yale.edu

unashayhome.com/home

earthseedblackarts.org

levygallery.com

levygallery.com/artist/nikesha-breeze-new-editions/

nps.gov/places/blackdom-new-mexico.htm

Richard Levy Gallery

On Instagram: @levygallery, @living_histories-project

A chance connection at Yale cracks open a hidden family history and turns legacy into something immediate, unsettling, and real. On this episode, we talk with interdisciplinary artist about building monuments, reclaiming erased stories, and using grief rituals to transform what history leaves in our bodies.

What if grief isn’t something to “get over” but something we metabolize together? Today, we explore grief feasts, death care, and ancestral healing.

Press play, share with a friend, then tell us: what ritual do we need back?

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Resources mentioned in the podcast

nikeshabreeze.com

yaleandslavery.yale.edu

unashayhome.com/home

earthseedblackarts.org

levygallery.com

levygallery.com/artist/nikesha-breeze-new-editions/

nps.gov/places/blackdom-new-mexico.htm

Richard Levy Gallery

On Instagram: @levygallery, @living_histories-project

Support the Infrastructure

ArtStorming is powered by ArtBridge, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We believe that art is the fundamental infrastructure for human survival. The labor of curating these stories and hosting these courageous conversations requires collective support.

• Become a paid subscriber: For $8 a month, you sustain the production of ArtStorming, Daily Doses, and our Creativity Toolkits.

• Make a direct donation: Every dollar goes directly toward uplifting vital artistic voices and cultivating creative expression in our community.

Visit artbridgenm.org to learn more.

Creative people often get framed as fearless. We are praised for diving into the unknown, staring down blank canvases, and mining our private vulnerabilities for public consumption. But what’s happening underneath is actually much quieter, and much more human: we all carry a private list of avoided subjects. We have fragile boundaries where our collective bravery falters.

Most of us spend our lives sprinting away from the one thing that is guaranteed to catch us: the end. Modern society has sanitized it, professionalized it, and tucked it away in hospital wings or behind the closed doors of corporate funeral homes, hoping that if we don’t look at it, it won’t look back at us. But by hiding from death, we inadvertently lose our grip on the vibrant depths of our short, precious lives.

There is a radical crossroads where art, deep grief, and end-of-life planning meet. To step into this space is to ask why the word morbid became a modern insult, how creatives act as the essential custodians of a culture’s shadow, and why developing true death literacy is the ultimate key to making our existence feel impossibly large.

For Joanna Ebenstein—author, photographer, and visionary founder of Morbid Anatomy—a fascination with mortality traces back to an innate childhood curiosity and a profound family history shaped by Holocaust survival.

Joanna’s lineage meant that the weight of mortality was always vibrating right beneath the surface, even when mid-century American neighborhood life tried desperately to pretend otherwise. As a young girl, growing up in suburban California, she would look around at the world and think a quiet, forbidden thought:

Everyone here is going to die, and nobody is talking about it.

A massive turning point arrived for Joanna after college when she stepped inside Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum. Standing before preserved human remains and historical medical models had a visceral, staggering impact on her. Where the mainstream world saw horror, an artistic, historical lens saw an exquisite, forgotten archive of human love, loss, and memory.

Consider objects like the Anatomical Venus—a preternaturally beautiful, life-sized 18th-century wax woman from Italy. She is dissectable and anatomically correct, created to instruct the public, yet she sits in a bizarre, almost sexualized state of repose.

Joanna began building a dignified frame around these artifacts. Shifting the cultural lens entirely, it moves us away from a sensationalized, “Isn’t this creepy?” and guides us toward a deeply empathetic, “What does this teach us about how people lived, loved, mourned, and remembered?”

When framed with elegance and restraint, these objects cease to be grotesque; they reveal themselves as masterpieces of the shared human experience.

Why are we so terrified of the end?

The answer lies in a major cultural shift that occurred over the last century. In the Victorian era, mourning was a highly visible, intimate, and domestic art form. People died at home; families washed and prepared the bodies of their own dead; women spent over a year weaving intricate memorial art out of human hair.

But a perfect storm of historical forces between the late 19th and early 20th centuries abruptly stripped death out of the home. Germ theory introduced a new fear of hygiene and contagion; the mass, overwhelming casualties of World War I paired with the 1918 influenza epidemic forced women into the workforce, leaving no time for elaborate, year-long domestic mourning rituals. Simultaneously, religion began taking a back seat to a hyper-rational modernity, and the care of our dead was professionalized and outsourced to the commercial funeral parlor.

When the dead body—the most natural, inescapable reality of nature—disappeared from our everyday sight, our fear of it grew.

Today, we are finally living through a massive, beautiful pendulum swing back toward openness. Accelerated by the collective, undeniable grief of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new wave of eco-spiritual innovation is emerging: from green burials and artist-designed willow baskets to human composting and burial shrouds treated as fine artistic expression.

This is exactly what creative minds are designed to do through a Jungian lens: they naturally gravitate toward a culture’s denied shadow.

When society casts out a reality because it feels too uncomfortable or too animalistic, artists step into that darkness to bring those hidden realities back into the light, restoring balance to a fractured, overly sterile collective consciousness.

Ultimately, this exploration is an active, urgent blueprint for living a life of true intention. If we spend our lives curating our aesthetic choices, our careers, and our homes, why do we leave our final exit as a thoughtless, gray, bureaucratized afterthought?

In her work, Joanna outlines a 12-week interactive approach to memento mori (remember you must die), modeled in spirit after Julia Cameron’s famous creative handbook, The Artist’s Way. By mixing historical perspectives with fierce journal prompts, we can dismantle intellectualized fears, clarify our core values, and actively design what a good death looks like to us.

This broadens the lens to the vital concept of legacy planning. Yes, there is the hard legacy—the wills, the assets, the physical boxes left behind—but the real magic lies in what we call the soft legacy. This is the invisible, lasting frequency we leave behind inside the people we love: the everyday choices we make, the stories we take the time to archive, and the quality of care and presence we embody while we are still here.

There is a vital toolkit of practical, earthy exercises that anyone can start today to ground this philosophy:

• Swedish Death Cleaning: Gently sorting through your physical belongings so your loved ones aren’t left holding a logistical burden.

• Writing Your Own Obituary: A jarring, beautiful mirror that instantly reveals the gap between how you are living today and the legacy you actually desire to leave behind.

• The Blueprint Box: Gathering your passwords, practical intentions, and final wishes into one accessible space to spare your grieving inner circle needless, exhausting bureaucracy.

The takeaway is both simple and deeply radical: when we stop running from the finish line, we get infinitely better at designing a life—and an archive—we are proud to leave in our wake.

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We want to hear from you

Have you ever experimented with memento mori practices, or thought about what your own soft legacy looks like? How can we bring more artistic dignity back to the bone? Let’s start a courageous conversation in the comments below.

• Learn more about Joanna and Morbid Academy: Explore their upcoming online classes, international pilgrimages, and boutique Brooklyn library space at morbidanatomy.org.

• Listen to Joanna’s full ArtStorming interview: Tune into the complete, unpolished conversation—complete with barking dogs and squawking birds live from Mexico.

• Stay in the loop: Follow the visual archive on Instagram @artstormingpodcast and @morbidanatomy.

ArtStorming is powered by ArtBridgeNM (501c3), a nonprofit organization operating on the radical belief that art, memory, and storytelling are essential tools to cultivate deep community connection and social resilience. Our work is entirely funded by community stakeholders like you. To help us keep our creative initiatives rolling and our courageous conversations broadcasting, consider making a tax-deductible contribution at artbridgenm.org/donate.

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Support the Infrastructure

ArtStorming is powered by ArtBridge, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We believe that art is the fundamental infrastructure for human survival. The labor of curating these stories and hosting these courageous conversations requires collective support.

• Become a paid subscriber: For $8 a month, you sustain the production of ArtStorming, Daily Doses, and our Creativity Toolkits.

• Make a direct donation: Every dollar goes directly toward uplifting vital artistic voices and cultivating creative expression in our community.

Visit artbridgenm.org to learn more.

If you missed our live gathering last week, the replay of our June Sanctuary is now available to watch above.

Our live sessions are a radical invitation to step out of the daily, frantic autopilot and drop into a shared hour of intentional silence and active creative practice. In this month’s session, we lean into the stillness required to navigate life’s inevitable transitions, exploring the deep connection between the presence we practice today and the legacy we leave in our wake tomorrow.

Leaning into the imperfect landscape

You might hear a little real-world texture in the background of this recording, including the sounds of children playing. Lindsay reminds us what it actually means to claim space for ourselves in a loud world:

“Children are also welcome to this space... Creating space for yourself and for creativity can be really, really challenging. So this can also be an accountability either to make the space for yourself if you have children in your lives, or invite them in a very messy, loud, imperfect way. If that’s what’s present in your life at the moment, lean into it however you can.”

This hour is an open-ended invitation to slow down and create space, no matter the wildness of the energy in the world around us, and especially when our bodies and voices (like Lindsay’s) are demanding it.

Space for our whole, weird selves

During our mid-hour check-in, Seb shares about finding new “nooks and crannies” for presence in the body, which sparked a beautiful conversation about why true presence requires us to stop masking.

If we are being our whole, authentic selves, we have to be open to the full spectrum of whatever comes into the space. As we discuss:

“We’re all so unique and weird and wonderful, and letting that be... that’s presence, and that’s leaving that air of legacy when you go…those special weirdnesses that we all have.

We wrapped up the session with an exciting piece of evolution that brings this digital community onto the physical pavement of our hometown. We are officially evolving the Santa Fe Arts Club into a collaborative, active local movement: ArtStorming: Santa Fe.

While we will continue to hold this digital sanctuary space on the first Monday of every month, starting July 20, we are dropping a physical anchor. On the third Monday of every month, we will gather in person in Santa Fe at Vital Spaces (Cerrillos Road location) from 6 to 7:30 pm.

It’s going to be experimental, collaborative, and deeply communal. If you are a local here in town, we would absolutely love to see you in the room. As Mia puts it at the close of our hour:

“I feel so nourished by these hours and I hope all of you do, too. It’ll be so wonderful to see people live... It’s just a joy, whether in person or digitally, to share a space of presence.”

Your practice for the replay:

Allow yourself to use this recording as a boundary. Let our opening conversation ground you, and then when our cameras and mics go dark, dive deeply into your own world.

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Are you a Santa Fe local? Drop a comment below to let us know if we’ll see you in July at Vital Spaces, or share your own reflections on presence and your own special weirdnesses from wherever you are tuning in!

Want to Co-Lead? If you are watching this replay and feel inspired to co-lead a future digital session with a creative exercise or energy you want to bring, email us at hello@artbridgenm.org. We’d love to have a conversation with you.

Next Digital Session: Monday, July 6, 2026, at 12 pm MST on the Substack App.

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Support the Infrastructure: ArtBridgeNM is a listener-supported 501(c)(3) nonprofit. If you believe that preserving these human stories is essential for our collective survival, consider upgrading to a paid Substack membership or making a direct donation at artbridgenm.org. Every dollar helps us keep the canvas alive.

Visit artbridgenm.org to learn more.

Art is a form of survival. To reach into the void and paint a canvas, carve a stone, write a story is a revolutionary act of presence; it is a way of anchoring the soul to the exact bedrock where we stand.

But what happens when the artist leaves the room for the last time?

There is a quiet, heavy reality that exists behind the doors of thousands of studios across the country, particularly in places dense with creative spirits like Santa Fe. It is the physical weight of a lifetime of work. Shelves bowing under the weight of stretched canvases. Flat files bursting with decades of sketches. Sculptures tucked away into corners, collecting dust while the world moves on outside.

Left alone, a studio full of work does not automatically become a legacy. Without intervention, it becomes something else entirely: a private burden.

“A studio full of work can be a treasure or a ticking time bomb, depending on what happens next,” curator, appraiser, and legacy advisor Patricia Watts says in an ArtStorming interview.

Patricia illuminates a sobering truth about the material reality of an artistic life. Without a deliberate bridge built from studio practice to long-term stewardship, a life’s work can quietly vanish into dark basements, be fractured and dispersed among well-meaning relatives, or be sold at estate sales entirely stripped of its context.

She knows this tension intimately. For over 25 years, Patricia has been a pioneering force in the art world. As the founder of ecoartspace, she has spent decades working on the radical fringes of art and ecology, helping creators map their relationship to the natural world and the shifting baselines of our environments. But she also holds a certificate in art appraisal from New York University. She understands that the ethereal, boundary-pushing world of creative practice must eventually reckon with a cold, material reality: inventory, estate management, and family psychology.

Legacy planning, it turns out, is its own difficult art. It sits at a messy, delicate intersection of art history, market economics, legal paperwork, and psychology. And if we want to save our communities from losing their unique human texture, we have to look at the practical framework needed to keep these stories alive.

One of the most profound lessons Patricia shares is a rule that many families and heirs learn too late:

Do not move the art away from the artist’s market.

Artistic value is deeply rooted in place. If an artist spent 30 or 40 years breathing the air of New Mexico, cultivating relationships with local galleries, whispering with local curators, and selling to local collectors, that is where their story lives.

When an artist passes away, well-meaning heirs often pack up the remaining inventory and ship it off to New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles simply because that is where the children happen to live. But away from its native soil, the work loses its advocates. The local memory fades. Posthumous price spikes are never guaranteed, especially for under-recognized or marginalized artists who never entered a massive global market.

Legacy requires a physical anchor. It demands that we respect the geography where the work was born, leaning on local institutions and collectors to keep the narrative intact.

How do you tackle a legacy that consists of 1,500 individual pieces of art?

You do it through the unglamorous, revolutionary act of organization. Patricia notes that triage is almost always the first and most vital step. The ultimate unlock for an estate is a consistent inventory system, a clean digital archive, or a catalog raisonné.

Museums and registrars do not respond to a chaotic, emotional pile of canvases stacked in a garage. They respond to data they can actually use: clear dimensions, high-resolution images, clean lists of materials, and verified exhibition histories.

More than that, curation requires the courage to choose. Confronted with thousands of works, an estate manager must often do the hard work of identifying “the top 500”—the essential core that tells the truest version of the artist’s creative journey. This digital and physical boundary is what turns an overwhelming mountain of objects into a realistic conversation with a museum or a public collection.

Perhaps the heaviest part of legacy planning has nothing to do with art at all. It is the emotional labor borne by those left behind.

An artist’s estate is a mirror.

For families, a studio full of unsold work can evoke complicated emotions. It can represent the hours of absence, the financial sacrifices, or the times an artist chose the canvas over the kitchen table. When you mix those raw human feelings with the coldness of an estate trust, asset evaluations, and family disagreements over control, the preservation process can easily stall out.

This is why Patricia often recommends bringing an objective, trusted guide into the room, a qualified curator or art advisor who can act as an emotional circuit breaker, transforming a family dilemma into an institutional bridge.

Because ultimately, legacy is built through the deliberate cultivation of context.

It is the accurate research, the truthful biography, the documentation of peer relationships, and the celebration of the specific cultural moments the artist inhabited.

When that context is missing, misinformation fills the vacuum. The artist’s true voice is quieted, left to be rewritten by the guesses of strangers.

To look at our cities and our artists as living relationships means refusing to let their texture slip into oblivion. By building the infrastructure of remembrance—one digital file, one organized studio, one honest story at a time—we ensure that when an artist reaches into the void, the bridge they built remains standing for generations to come.

The Legacy Prompt: The Residue of Presence

Pulling up a chair to our Art of Legacy Tool Kit, we invite you to sit with this week’s reflection:

If someone were to step into your studio—whether that is a room full of canvases, a laptop full of drafts, a kitchen where you feed your family, or the garden you tend—what is the physical or digital footprint you are leaving behind? If your loved ones had to choose just five things to tell the truest story of who you were, what would they be?

Drop your thoughts in the comments below—let’s build this bridge together.

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Continue the Conversation

• Listen to the full episode: Hear curator and advisor Patricia Watts pull back the curtain on the behind-the-scenes reality of art estate management on the ArtStorming podcast.

• Learn about ecoastspace: A platform where members include artists, scientists, professionals, students, and advocates who share resources and support each other's work.

• Support the Infrastructure: ArtBridgeNM is a listener-supported 501(c)(3) nonprofit. If you believe that preserving these human stories is essential for our collective survival, consider upgrading to a paid Substack membership or making a direct donation at artbridgenm.org. Every dollar helps us keep the canvas alive.

Visit artbridgenm.org to learn more.

She discusses practical guidance for families and living artists: don’t move work away from its market, organize with inventories or catalogues raisonnés, plan digital archives and trusteeship, and consider museum donations strategically. Host Lili Pierrepont and Patricia also discuss emotional family dynamics, challenges when work is widely sold, and Patricia’s Eco Art Space and its planned Legacy Project.

Subscribe now

Support the Infrastructure

ArtBridge is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We believe that art is not a luxury, but the fundamental infrastructure for human survival. The labor of curating these stories and hosting these courageous conversations requires collective support.

• Become a paid subscriber: For $8 a month, you sustain the production of ArtStorming, Daily Doses, and our Creativity Toolkits.

• Make a direct donation: Every dollar goes directly toward uplifting vital artistic voices and cultivating creative expression in our community.

Visit artbridgenm.org to learn more.