Over the summer of last year, I had gotten into a good clip writing a series of nonfiction essays that were both autobiographical and connected to creative practice. At first, my approach was partly about proving to myself that I deserved to be seen as a writer. A few of the essays actually landed in significant publications, something I sincerely never thought would happen.

When I first started writing Nighttime Kingdom, I had already spent years trying to figure out how to make something productive out of the studio fire and the chapters of my personal life that followed. My complicated relationship with my father. His death from cancer. A series of terrible breakups. Eventually, meeting my current partner.

Writing that first novel felt like something channeled directly through my fingers. I wrote it on my phone in Notes. It was scary because I did not think of writing as being in my wheelhouse. As a working artist, writing had always felt like an annoying necessity, something required for artist statements and applications rather than something I could actively embrace.

With Nighttime Kingdom, it took me more than ten years, and therapy, before I could tap into what had happened and articulate it without feeling like I was simply trauma dumping. Writing required me to be specific about things I had spent years avoiding.

I definitely think writer’s block and creative blocks exist. But I also think many of them are rooted in the unsustainable economic conditions artists are expected to endure. We are told to pour our hearts and souls into the work, but when you are up at night worrying about how to pay your bills, screaming into your pillow from fretful insomnia, then spending the next day looking for jobs and gigs, the mythology of the suffering artist feels considerably less romantic.

Recently, I have started to recognize that same pattern again.

As I approached the end of this series of essays, it coincided with several larger changes I had also been avoiding. Namely, that I needed to contend with downsizing my studio. That meant moving, destroying artwork from an archive of more than twenty years, and confronting the possibility that, at some point, I might have to leave Chicago altogether.

In fact, I really do think this writing practice came about coincidentally at the same time I was becoming increasingly aware of how much stuff I had accumulated. Twenty years of artwork. Files. Heavy sculptures. Personal collections. Objects. In truth, a living example that the fire did not break me or my spirit. But maybe made my back sore.

Just last week here in Chicago, I had a studio visit that elicited a similar response about how much work is on display in my studio. And then also the usual conversations that happened afterward.

The visit was with a photographer from NYC who wanted to shoot artists’ portraits in their studios. Upon entering my space, he seemed so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work and visual stimulation that it seemed, on both sides, it would be better to do it another time.

As we rode the elevator, while I escorted him to the next artist’s studio, he was like, “There is so much stuff,” and I was like, “Yeah,” avoiding eye contact, giving my usual response about the monster of production, the truth behind artists’ legacies and estates, and what keeps me up at night.

But it left the same visceral gut reaction: I make so much work.

Is it an avoidance of editing or a lack of sophistication in my process?

I usually eventually arrive at the right place. No. I need to make a lot of bad work to get to the good work.

But in this last chapter, it became clear to me that the volume of production has always been about survival. I need to make this much work to be able to keep going. And although the responsible thing would be to contend with the monster, this world has created this monster. On a pragmatic level, the objects hold value to the viewers.

With my studio fire, good questions were raised about the difference between making art, collecting art, and how that is different from actual hoarding that is a response to some type of trauma.

I think all sides of the art game, makers, curators, and gallerists, end up in art because of a type of pain. And the art is the balm that temporarily soothes it. Like the awkward kid in a record store or comic store, collecting and then returning to privately engage. There is a connection between creative objects and how they offer a bridge to heal.

Even in this battle between the digital and the analog, I refuse to let go of those values. Like my blankets. Or my pillows that offer comfort in the dead of night from my nightmares. Art objects offer the same necessity to soothe. Help us heal.

I am a believer in small steps in all facets that build toward a bigger impact. And I love the analogies of Ganesha and Vishnu. That obstacles can be transcended by using all the disparate parts of us that come together to become bigger. And then also Vishnu, and the idea that we are the creators and destroyers of our worlds.

Destroying the work does not necessarily mean rejecting the life that made it. It may be another part of the same cycle. For artists, I think this is especially relevant on all levels.

In all my earnest and grateful attempts to have work placed in institutional collections, even the best museums have faced closures and the ever-awkward conversation of what we do with all the artwork left in the collections.

Just today, when I was getting my haircut, I had to explain to my barber that the reality is that even if an artist donates their work to an institutional collection, they still cannot deduct the actual retail value of it like a collector can, only how much the materials cost.

So many of the obstacles that I see, both within my own art career and with students, come from this tension of genuinely wanting to claim space in a history where we do not see ourselves. And then there is also the other side of that, about feeling okay with taking up that space with no apology.

Who gets to hold space. Who gets to have a nice, clean, and good-looking archive. Also, the real question of who gets to be a struggling artist.

How can someone who teaches part-time, or lives full-time from their art, afford a house, a studio, and an archive?

Often, the financial stability that makes this kind of sustained practice possible does not come from art sales alone, but from generational wealth or other forms of economic support.

Except most of us must, on a continual basis, deal with the invisibility of objects, materials, and things that, well, nobody wants.

I imagined strangers walking through my own studio after I was gone, deciding what was valuable by what they could carry away.

It can be daunting, and for myself, I think maybe writing is a way to compress that. But more so, I think this is a good question about performance, about how we appreciate what we do versus how others see what we do.

The objects that served as substitutes for so many things. Failed relationships. Regrets. And also the things that form a barrier between the pain of the present and the need to be able to dream of different futures.

Somewhere, somebody told me that when we are adults, we strive toward returning to our pre-sexual creative selves, around age twelve or whatnot. In our awkward journaling. And drawings. And role-playing, there is a profound, unedited innocence that is really where we go when we want to be creatively free.

This theory, of course, does not apply to all of us. Especially if we had something going on at twelve that robbed us of that innocence.

I return to this idea of monotony. Cycles. And that we have cycles creatively.

We sometimes feel like we need to reinvent or realign. Or show something else. But in many ways, the cycles are the work.

Queer failure, for me, may be less about failing at art than refusing the fiction that a creative life should move cleanly upward. More attention. More sales. More institutional approval. A better studio. A clearer legacy.

And with my own resistance to writing, it has been about having to see and read the same things that I return to. My pain points. And feeling a sense of shame about how I have not evolved past them or been able to sit down and happily write and report my progress.

But progress is in this cycling. And the cycling is the work.

It is perhaps funny how every part of the creative process that has to do with commodification and audience is about showing a successful front. An upward, better narrative. Instead of a cycle.

Every cycle has to become a triumph. A return. A rediscovery prepared for the market.

But perhaps the cycle does not need to be redeemed. Perhaps returning to the same questions, making again, editing, destroying, and beginning again is not evidence that the practice has failed.

Perhaps that is the practice.

When your first home is a place that threatens damnation for being anything other, you learn early to hide. You attach shame to the very parts of yourself that are most alive.

This feeling is not new. To go against the mold of what is expected forms an internal exile. You become, in your own country or family, a type of refugee.

To explain the complexities of my autobiography plainly: my family is deeply conservative. My family is religious. And my mother has been a pro-life activist for as long as I can remember.

There is a particular exhaustion that comes from repeatedly explaining your own humanity to people who believe they are already on the side of goodness. There is also a violence in being told you belong, but only if you erase the parts of yourself that matter most.

I felt this most acutely in my early twenties, standing in my parents’ house in rural Ohio, in Geauga County. The conversation was, at its core, about what happens when you begin by seeing someone as broken, on the wrong side of faith, in need of repair. From that starting point, all possibility of understanding collapses.

In the culture where I was raised, confession plays an essential role in redemption.

Only later in my adult life, through awkwardness and stumbles and earnest internal battles, did I realize I could never fully become the person I was meant to be for one simple reason: who my heart was attracted to.

When I formally came out, and really for anyone raised in a conservative family or religious community, it is common to be labeled, either metaphorically or literally, with a Scarlet Letter, or seen as in need of prayers or rehabilitation. The path toward redemption is a model that works well for small sins. But what often happens is that before you realize your truth, you begin internalizing the idea that you are an error in need of correction.

For many of us, that entailed long, painful conversations after church, or conversion therapy VHS tapes, brochures, and prayers. Prayers for healing. A conversion. The eyes on one side of salvation will always see the other as part of the path toward redemption or, really, one of going to hell.

The loneliness required simply to be yourself, and the sacrifice of moving away from the places that formed you, never fully disappears.

In the early nineties in Chicago, I spent long hours alone in my apartment, fighting the quiet, relentless battle of my own attractions, the tension between desire and the desperate wish to belong. I found myself quietly yearning to return to church, trying to connect the pieces of who I was with the child I had been raised to be in rural Ohio.

I was an undergraduate at Loyola University Chicago, living on almost nothing. Some weeks, I had twenty or thirty dollars for food. What I believed was mental illness or anxiety was really my body processing the enormous effort it had taken for the seventeen-year-old version of myself to leave Ohio.

When I finally arrived and began unpacking everything I had carried with me, I retreated to the ceramics lab off Sheridan Road in Rogers Park, housed at the time in an old IHOP. From the outside, it still looked like a diner in its heyday, but inside it became the place where I worked late into the night between classes. In the ache of loneliness and repetition, surrounded by clay dust, kiln heat, and fluorescent lights, I slowly began to understand that who I was mattered more than the versions of myself I had been taught to perform to belong.

On Sunday evenings, I would sit in the same pews in a different place. At that time, it was the Madonna della Strada Chapel on Lake Michigan. As a young, eager kid touring the campus, I was so blown away when the tour guide told us that Flatliners was filmed there. It felt almost like kismet. Perhaps in my own loneliness I could go back deep and change, under a new flatline. But deep down, I knew, fundamentally, I could not change who I was. Even in an earnest effort to date women, pretending only made what was already there retreat further inward.

At night, I listened to the Indigo Girls and Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” connecting the dots between the music I loved and the life I was trying to imagine for myself. I thought about long rides in high school in my Chevy Cavalier listening to Morrissey. Hanging out in abandoned mall parking lots, sitting around campfires, smoking Camel Lights, occasionally playing mailbox baseball down dark roads.

Even after my first real gay encounter, now looking back, pretty young in eighth grade, I laid awake in a heated sweat, my nervous system confused between my primal desires toward my best friend, another punk kid who listened to The Cure in my room after school, and the truth that I needed to make a calculated plan to get out, since staying meant I would never truly become the person I wanted to be.

It was about survival. About escape.

At the time, there were not many public role models of well-adjusted queer people living happily. They were either tortured, dead, or, for me as a young pre-teen, too often the unfortunate faces of young men dying of AIDS. Like me, kids who moved to cities and found freedom only to be brought to the grave. It was a terrifying proposition that intimacy itself could carry that possibility, bigger even than the isolation of a longing heart.

Standing on a side street in the fall of 1994, I finally said out loud the words I had been terrified to admit: that I was gay. Thankfully, my ceramics professor at the time saw through me and casually said, “I know. It is okay. It does not matter to me.” No number of Masses, rosaries, or wishful thinking was going to change the fundamental nature of who I had been born to be.

It took years, many hours on a meditation cushion, and eventually teaching meditation to the queer community in Chicago to relearn what unconditional love and intimacy could be. I learned that sex was part of love, but more than that, stillness allowed me to see the most intimate parts of myself as valuable, beautiful, and worthy of love without conditions. And also that prayer could still exist, and that a greater relationship to a spiritual world could be on my own terms. I did not have to choose between the person I was born into and the world where I grew up and not fitting that mold.

I still catch myself apologizing unnecessarily in line, or after defending myself. The residue remains. It has taken years to understand, to feel fully in my body, that my love is not wrong, despite the reminders that much of Middle America would prefer I not exist.

In Buddhism, there is the Refuge Vow, a formal declaration that you are willing to go the long way. To take refuge in the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Sangha, and the Dharma. Each offers support in contending with the ever-present background hum of loneliness that is part of being alive on earth.

When I took that vow, I was given a new name: Jigme Chö-nying, Fearless Dharma Heart.

For years, I had felt like a refugee from my own home, my own body, and my own family. The vow did not erase that history. It transformed it. Refuge was no longer exile. It was a choice.

The longer path was not one of conformity. It was one of courage, the willingness to stay with the fundamental nature of who you are, even when external feedback deems that a problem or a threat.

A therapist once told me, in our first session, that to be happy I might need to grieve my parents as if they were dead. I was offended. They are my parents. And yet so many people are asked to tolerate emotional erasure under the guise of family.

Faith can allow who we need to become to emerge. Blind faith prevents acceptance. Some of the most religious people I have known have also been the most accepting, perhaps because they understand the complexity of a real relationship with God, its imperfections, the way darkness becomes part of the conversation with light. Kinship with the holy can only exist if it is embodied. Otherwise, it becomes performance.

There is a loneliness in realizing you were never meant to be legible in the system that raised you. Prayer never changed me, but it led me toward acceptance, toward understanding the limits of my family’s beliefs. I refuse to bow to a religion or a God that does not have eyes for those who are tender, complex, and flawed, especially all of my beloved queer family.

There is a difference between forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness allowed me to move forward. Reconciliation was never promised. I am no longer interested in arguments that require my silence in exchange for belonging.

There is no place like the home I was raised in. Now, home is here, and it has always been here, in the same body of the twelve-year-old who cried after yearning to touch another boy. But it does not require any part of my erasure.

Something I could not see.

A parallel tragedy, detonated somewhere else, had somehow lodged itself as an immovable brick in my chest. It was the first time I considered that the artist’s body might function as a kind of barometer, a creative membrane translating the weather of society and its shifting pressures into meaning. These days, it does not take much to imagine parallel tragedies happening all over the world.

Lately, many artists I know are wondering about the limits of that membrane.

Not the limits of collective grief itself. Grief, like humor and beauty, can expand endlessly with the right care and support. But there are limits to what a single human body can process into meaning. Daily, we live inside an inundation of imagery and world events: the grotesque, the violent, the absurd. A video of someone tragically killed appears beside a clip of a person funneling an unknown substance up their nose.

The nervous system does not always know the difference.

Artists are sensitive creatures. Art becomes a way of generating meaning when conformity fails, when the world cannot be metabolized conventionally. It becomes a transitional object for stress, a touchstone used to measure whether we are still alive and connected to others. For me, that began with things that happened in childhood, and later with events not of my choosing.

The path toward making art became a way to create meaning from what could not be controlled. It transforms pain into form. For me, that transformation becomes literal through art objects.

As a kid, I remember feeling like The Boy in the Plastic Bubble with my asthma inhaler during recess. Constant rashes. Allergic reactions. A broken collarbone from a bully. Creativity emerges not from ease but from difficulty, from unsolvable mental, physical, or spiritual tension. Our bodies are sponges that record what surrounds us. When we cannot release or express what we absorb, the body begins carrying it as illness, tension, fatigue, and knots of the undefined.

The demand placed on artists is immense: to translate, interpret, absorb, and feel. The overload manifests in nightmares, imbalance, insomnia, panic, and exhaustion.

Why am I having a panic attack while riding my bike on Lake Michigan?

Instead of simply feeling the wind or observing the city, I find myself carrying the absurdity of everything I privately write about.

This past year, that pressure has also manifested physically through exhaustion, medical procedures, insomnia, anxiety, and an intensified awareness of mortality. Sitting in waiting rooms, recovering between appointments, and teaching classes while mentally elsewhere, I have found that making art has felt less like expression and more like clarification, a small attempt to metabolize what remains unresolved inside the nervous system.

The gift of that sensitivity is the ability to see beyond the literal. We are trained to notice what lies beneath fences, trees, surfaces, gestures. But there is also an expectation of continual transformation without adequate support for what transformation requires.

Creative transformation now manifests through self-care, cooking a decent meal, going for a walk, or simply resting. I remember a professor in grad school saying the most radical work of art they made that month was the ability to get out of bed and be functional in the world.

There is a precise difference between being a barometer and being a garbage disposal.

Both feel relevant within our current political climate.

In Buddhism, the bodhisattva is often understood as one who vows to work toward the liberation of all beings. But for many of us drawn toward service positions, teaching, caregiving, and art making, the work is not always doing more work.

Sometimes the work is resisting.

Resting.

Refusing.

On one level, we are invisible transformers. On another, our value is constantly questioned by the economic conditions surrounding us. To make space for art takes energy, risk, and support. As much as being an artist can feel like spiritual work, we are not missionaries performing God’s labor for free.

The demands placed upon us cannot exist separately from the conditions in which that work is produced. The question cannot simply be: Why are artists not making more work about the political conditions around them?

There must also be a reciprocal exchange between support and transformation.

Lately, even entering the studio can feel physically heavy, especially during this period of political instability. There are days when the body begins resisting labor altogether: my back hurting before I even begin, the exhaustion accumulating after teaching and meetings, my nervous system unable to distinguish between ordinary stress and larger collective instability.

The cultural climate of recent years does not value our inherent qualities: autonomy, difference, eccentricity, sensitivity. Those traits are framed as flaws requiring correction. We are told to optimize ourselves. Eat better. Exercise more. Get stronger.

The arts must be materially supported in order to perform this work, to turn darkness into meaning. Without support, scarcity spreads outward and becomes a scarcity of beauty, imagination, and collective attention.

We can make art from scraps, but at some point, without investment, what follows is creative uniformity, blandness, a deepening grayness.

Color begins to evaporate.

Recently, while carrying heavy laundry to the laundromat and washing dishes by hand because I do not have a dishwasher, I have reconsidered how meaningful and beautiful the mundane can be.

It is where the best art is made.

Getting dirty, getting in the sink, and dealing with the mess is what makes good art. No amount of programming or prompts from technology will ever erase good patina. In my twenties, when I worked in advertising in New York as a designer on the computer, I would intentionally print out design work, crumple the paper, walk on it, then scan it back in.

Art serves this purpose: to interrupt. To stop a mind mid-scroll and redirect the lens through which we see ourselves and the world around us. When art succeeds, it reveals hidden threads between things we did not realize were connected.

And yet this function comes at a cost. The artist’s body remains permeable, sensitive enough to absorb and interpret what the world itself is experiencing. Collectors will sometimes ask, “Why don’t you describe the pain of this place or that crisis more explicitly?”

In many ways, we already are.

But like a garbage disposal that has not been serviced, many of us are overloaded.

There is a perverse attraction to watching suffering from a distance. To inhabit that suffering is something else entirely. Transformation can emerge from overload, and sometimes meaning is produced through it. But the obsession with the suffering artist is not sustainable.

Scarcity leads to burnout.

Burnout leads to collapse.

But the machine moves on, searching for the next body to consume.

There is a necessity in allowing space to do nothing. There is honesty in refusing to perform toxic positivity. An artist’s body is built to observe, feel, and translate the difficult and painful.

But we are living in a different era now. After the pandemic, the overload is real. We keep asking the mind to explain what the body is already struggling to survive.

Beauty can survive only in a society that recognizes creativity as necessary. Most recently, I have come to understand that although art objects are often seen as temporary or unneeded, I am someone who, on a basic level, makes things. I have fought for most of my life to carve out that space. On some level, the seriousness of that has larger implications. Like a peacock, we need to sit, process, and wring out our creative sponges.

I was raised to be a good worker. To respond. To do a good job. But when labor is no longer valued or materially supported, the options narrow: set firmer boundaries, withhold, or retreat into self-preservation.

For me, this has manifested through artwork remaining unseen publicly or, at times, being destroyed altogether.

Art and artists will always exist. We will change, move, and adapt to the political weather. It just might happen more privately. And that privacy might bring better, deeper, and more meaningful exchanges with art and artists.

I often reference this movie when I talk about my own transition into teaching in art academia and my initiation into the fraternity known as the tenure process. Beneath the pink outfits and punchlines, the film quietly exposes misconceptions about intellectual rigor that are still very much alive. It reveals the scripts we carry about who is allowed to be seen as intelligent and who must perform intelligence differently.

Artists live inside this same script.

We are often perceived as savants, people who can translate feeling into form without words. At the same time, we are viewed as naïve or incapable of engaging in the rhetorical language academics and critics consider evidence of intellect. We are expected to be expressive but not analytical. Intuitive but not rigorous.

For my tenure review, it was mostly the tone and approach to the questions pertaining to my research and practice from the review committee members. The most pointed: Do you consider what you do in the studio to be research?

This separation between the value of the hand and the value of the mind is not new. Physical appearance, tone of voice, and demeanor often dictate how intelligence is interpreted before a person speaks. Sometimes this works in our favor: a free meal, an assumption of harmlessness.

In my twenties, a friend once described my style as “geek chic.” It was meant kindly, but it was also packaging, a way of signaling intelligence before I ever spoke.

I remember a brief period when I switched from my usual thick, hard-rimmed glasses to contact lenses. My glasses had become part of my uniform, an easy visual shorthand for serious, for queer intellectual. When I wore contacts to a dinner during Art Basel Miami Beach, my dealer at the time seemed unsettled. She suggested I wear the glasses. They made it easier, she said, to sell my story along with the work. Quirky. Weird. Legible.

Artists are exceptionally skilled at code-switching. We can wear a catering tuxedo at an event, sit with a patron, then go home, take it all off, and put on coveralls in the studio to get dirty. If you are strategic, you learn that even the stains, the asymmetrical hair, the slightly slurred, wine-soaked storytelling can become part of the brand. The eccentric artist. The one from the gutter. We continually perform roles and occupy a strange and contradictory space, making work in the private, and then interacting with the public. There has always been a tension for me between the magic of the studio and where that meets the performance of what we do publicly.

Economically, the myth of the genius is very useful. A compelling eccentric story, often doused in the gasoline of trauma, helps sell the work.

The problem is not eccentricity or story. The problem is how fixed both sides become inside the performance.

This rigidity shows up in how many artists feel about reading and writing. Art is often treated as an elective rather than a core discipline, leaving little time or encouragement to develop deep critical habits. A firm separation forms between reading a script for class and the desire to just work in the studio.

My own re-entry into reading and writing came from a desire to interrupt that reflex. I learn by making work. But I have also learned differently in how I approach the studio by reading and writing. The two do not have to conflict. If anything, they sharpen one another. You can make body-aware work and still cross into analysis without losing credibility. You can also learn to speak in a way that feels articulate without feeling, well, stupid.

Rhetoric and theory can become armor, and sometimes a prison. Just as the maker can avoid language, the conceptual artist can avoid getting their hands dirty and simply making something.

This may help explain the renewed interest in craft-based materials. Craft offers a return to the hand and the body. At the same time, overcomplicated explanation has built an effective gate. Dense language paired with limited access keeps everyday people out of galleries. Less work, paired with more explanation, sustains an economy built on scarcity.

We fear that if more work were made and shown, there would be less opportunity for high sales. But if art were as commonplace as going to the grocery store, economic support would match the level of engagement.

Except the support for artists is drying up.

And now artists are left asking: Who are we making work for? Where does it belong? What is the value of this labor?

I have always been fascinated by playing with the commodity value of my work, moving between high-end spaces and humble forms like zines. But I genuinely do care whether my work ends up at auction or in someone’s hands for free. It is in moments like these that I begin to question the distance between autonomy and the reality of who the art market ultimately serves.

Sometimes I wonder if that is exactly why I am not richer.

When work does not sell, it becomes easy to blame the artist. They are difficult. They do not understand business. They are the problem. Meanwhile, galleries “open doors,” “pay the bills,” and justify taking fifty percent. The narrative is convenient and familiar.

The charade feels increasingly visible in a political and economic crisis. The performance is harder to ignore.

I see the alternative most clearly when I am teaching.

Sometimes, in teaching, I rename my students. I give them temporary names so they can step outside of prescribed narratives. The shift is subtle but powerful. They begin to make different work when they are not performing who they think they are supposed to be.

What I do in the classroom is not accidental. It comes from something older I was taught.

In many spiritual traditions, you find a teacher. If you are trying to occupy another lane of power, you might call that teacher a guru. The guru holds knowledge, and there is a tradition of asking for teachings before they are given.

On the surface, this can resemble hoarding. The difference is in transmission. Knowledge is shared when the student is ready. Often, the student already was. It is less about permission and more about openness, timing, and receptivity.

Learning to make and to look at art feels similar. Before instruction can be offered, observation must happen. How can you teach someone if you do not know who they are, how they learn, or what they need?

This, too, connects to resisting the idea of genius. Artists often teach themselves. We are stubborn and slow to embrace change. Most artists need to feel seen and respected before they can truly learn.

The difficulty is the ego. To learn, even briefly, you must loosen your grip on it. If someone enters a room believing there is nothing for them to learn, the door closes to both teaching and self-education.

I have always wrestled with generosity and the uncomfortable truth about money. There is power in withholding information. How else do we justify charging for access?

I see it often. Struggling artists become successful, frequently by performing trauma for a market that rewards it, and then grow guarded about what they know. Originality begins to matter most once money enters the conversation. Obscurity becomes a mechanism of control.

I once had a curator from a major New York museum visit my studio with no intention of having an intellectual conversation at all. He assumed the visit was an invitation for something else entirely.

In that moment, the myth of the genius collapsed into something painfully clear. Credibility remains tied to who we think artists are allowed to be.

But the pain of being spoken to as if I am of a lower intellectual standard is part of why I am typing these words.

Transmission matters. The way feedback is given shapes how it is received.

Breaking someone down rarely forms a successful artist. Teaching is not dismantling. It is a meeting of two creative spirits sharing knowledge.

I have witnessed cruelty under the guise of genius. The label becomes a permission slip for distance and pretension.

What interests me is not the individual, but the structure that grows around the idea.

A gate forms through credentialing. Society rewards the “skill of the mind” more than the “skill of the hand.” This hierarchy feels fragile. It works until your electricity goes out. Until you need a plumbing leak fixed.

Even in art, we name our programs Masters of Fine Arts. The language itself implies rank.

The problem is not learning. The problem is posturing. Posturing is the enemy of connection.

Over the years, I have replaced the categories of good and bad with meaningful.

My mom and I made peanut butter cookies in preschool. It felt special. But if I tried to sell those cookies at an art fair, they would not land without a story of trauma attached.

I do not want to win the Trauma Olympics anymore.

There is quiet pressure to be in the right place at the right time, hoping the right conversation sparks the right opportunity.

It is exhausting.

I have watched students make braver work simply because they were allowed to stop performing who they thought they were supposed to be.

What if we stopped worshipping the myth of the genius? What if we stopped believing art requires a special kind of person or credentialed mind?

What if art were about the dignity of making, the equality of intelligence, and the meaning found in labor itself?

What we lose when art is not accessible is not quality.

What we lose is participation and response—and with them, also the possibility of better models of sustainability.

Not just ones that favor the flash in the pan, but those that favor connection over performance.

Models that might even allow more artists to stand together, rather than fight for fewer and fewer opportunities.

We each come into the world with unique capacities, our own particular ways of seeing, feeling, moving, and improvising. The long work of becoming an artist is often the work of learning to recognize what is already ours, to trust the strange, specific instruments we have been given. The magic, in the end, is not in becoming someone else, but in becoming more fully oneself, a simple and endlessly difficult proposition.

Artists see between the lines and work toward editing and exposing the veils of what is already luminous in the living, even as they brush against the blinds of the dying. Miró spoke beautifully about this approach, about tending a garden as a metaphor for how we approach making art and living a life.

The act of listening, pruning, and tending to a garden mirrors the same practice of changing states in the studio. We plant seeds. A new project. A line. We stop midway on other projects. We allow seeds to sprout and grow. We develop something more in depth. Pause. Trim. And then also accept that some things do not flourish and pass. Art, and the creation of anything in our lives, is a practice of listening to the right senses and allowing the right seeds to flourish, while also giving ourselves the grace to let things fail and, in time, be recycled into our creative soil to give birth, at a different moment, to new work.

Perception has become mediated between our eyes and fingers with our gazes on our phones. We have become sensitized to the digital, and paranoid about what is real or fake, what is made by human hands. Any creative action outside that space can break the pattern and allow for magic to happen. Simply closing your eyes and shifting to another sense can break the pattern. Or even going to the window and looking toward the sky.

A few weeks ago, my partner and I went to see the French pop duo Air. It felt like a privilege to hear music live again, and as I closed my eyes, I could suddenly smell the interior of the first car I owned in Chicago—a Volvo 240 station wagon I had bought off eBay. As I slid Talkie Walkie into the CD deck, just remembering the click made me realize how much intention is now required for presence. I also became aware of the irony that like so many people around me, I kept lifting my phone to record the concert, to capture the moment for later, to prove it had happened. And then the funniest thing occurred. Afterward, fumbling with my new phone, I realized all the videos were useless. They were gone, or blurred, or poorly framed. But it didn’t matter. What stayed was the old adage: you had to be there. The experience could not be reproduced. This felt suddenly aligned with what Benjamin was circling, and with this larger question of intention and ritual as the twin hands that shape any magical encounter with art.

Art is the transformation of the things that happen to us. We get to decide how we want to process and make meaning from them, the events, the people, the pain. A great deal of it is out of our control, but we do have agency over how we approach that processing and transformation.

It is also the personal alchemy we have stewardship over. It is the thing that helps form meaning when other events and obstacles feel stuck and immovable. Simply shifting intention toward any ritual can create meaning. It does not have to be grand, performative, or dramatic. It can be as simple as deciding to take the time to make a cup of tea.

Alchemy is also us. We are malleable. We change. And when we are stuck, or feel uninspired, or fixated on what is not happening or going wrong, it can be helpful to remember that our job as artists is to be transformers. We are the rocks in the stream that face unexpected turbulence, but over time the weathering produces the wisdom of the right steps, transforming whatever is happening into a form of gold.

It often does not look shiny, pretty, or resolved at first. But eventually we begin to see the beauty, most often in the cracks, when we draw attention there, clear away a small section, and make room for what is already luminous. Beauty so often resides in unexpected places of discovery.

Alchemy is being receptive to surprise, to the changing nature of life. And when we are at our lowest, it is allowing even a second of openness, just enough space to be surprised, and to try again.

There are moments when language loosens its grip and something older and more somatic takes over. The body knows before the mind. The hands move before the sentence forms. Vision blurs and another kind of clarity appears. Felt sense precedes explanation. It is the way a dancer remembers a sequence without naming it, or how breath finds its rhythm when thought falls away. In these states, transmission matters more than polish. Presence matters more than legibility.

When I was young, in my twenties, I was living all over the place. First Chicago, then San Francisco in a residential hotel in Hayes Valley, then back to Cleveland, where I shared a small apartment in Ohio City with my first love, an aspiring opera singer. We had only the furniture we found in alleys, but we had a VHS player and watched films filled with characters on the edge of becoming themselves: Midnight Cowboy, Paris Is Burning, Stonewall.

When I made my first trip to New York, I felt as if I had stepped inside one of those films. We boarded a Greyhound in Cleveland and rode overnight. At dawn, the sunlight hit my forehead as the skyline came into view. It felt like a kind of initiation, a transmission. Later that day at the Museum of Modern Art, I stood in front of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and felt something in my body click into place. It was not intellectual. It was somatic.

I felt the same years later in Paris, on a recovery trip after my studio fire, when I had lost all hope in the magic and power of art. I stood in the Musée de l’Orangerie, surrounded by Monet’s water lilies. The paintings curved around me, light and atmosphere becoming almost physical. I understood, without words, what it must have felt like to stand in those landscapes and try to translate that luminosity into color and gesture. To try to capture magic is like trying to explain a sensation, or the moment of being surprised. It is less about naming than about being struck awake.

We live inside layers of ritual, whether we name them or not. The minimal and the ceremonial, the unconscious and the deliberate, shape how we enter and leave our work, how we begin again, how we stay when we want to disappear. Creativity is not separate from survival. It is braided into it, like eating, like breathing, like washing our hands, like turning our faces toward the weather and letting it remind us that time is moving and so are we.

There is wisdom in surrender, in the softening that comes when we stop forcing and allow what needs to happen to unfold. There is also a fierce tenderness in continuing, in showing up even when the outcome is uncertain, even when the ground feels unstable. Transformation lives in that tension, between letting go and staying present, between weathering and becoming.

And on another side of this, it does not always have to be pleasurable. Conflict and tension also have the power to wake us. They are part of the larger garden we are tending. Some things are simply harder to compost. Some transformations take longer to move from ruin into workable soil.

Happy spring, everybody!

In Chicago, at least, the weather has been warmer. But as someone who has lived here and grew up in the Midwest, I can say we may still be in for another round of snow. I have seen it happen even in late April or May, and then suddenly it turns warm overnight.

It feels strange to write about the state of the world. In much of my private writing, I find myself circling the same questions: sustainability, survivability, and how to keep taking care of yourself when even doing the minimum in the world can feel exhausting.

At times I feel overwhelmingly grateful and inspired. But recently I have also felt another set of emotions arise as we move into more complex territory with unfolding events around us. Despite the occasional sleepless night and the unpredictability of life, I have found myself growing more grateful for the small things that give me hope between the doubts and transitions.

Thank you to everyone for your feedback and support around the creative work, and especially this recent chapter of writing. Although I have always thought of myself as a rather private person, the essays have become a bridge for me. They allow me to speak about things I want to understand more clearly and help connect the distance between where my mind is and where my heart is.

I wish everyone a peaceful transition into spring. I plan to continue releasing this series of essays I wrote over the past year that reflect on sustainability, creativity, and the ongoing question of where artists and the act of making art fit within an ever-changing world.

Lately I have been thinking that artists are entrepreneurs in collapsed spaces, and that our role is to rebuild and find unexpected light where nothing seems possible anymore.

All best,

Bill

Exhibitions

Ceremony of Faces

KMAC Contemporary Art Museum

Louisville, KY

February 13 – May 22

Ceremony of Faces curated by Joey Yates, is a site-responsive installation in the lobby of KMAC Contemporary Art Museum made up of large-scale felt and multimedia heads. For many years heads and faces have appear in drawings, sculptures, and textiles, often shifting somewhere between portrait and mask.

This project continues that line of work at a larger scale and marks my return to KMAC following the 2017 exhibition Oscillates Wildly.

The Heresy of Legacy

Volume Gallery

Chicago

February 13 - March 28

I am participating in The Heresy of Legacy, the first exhibition in Volume Gallery’s expanded space. The show considers the cyclical nature of art movements: how innovation pushes against tradition, and how rebellion eventually becomes its own canon.

For this exhibition I am showing a selection of functional ceramics, including bowls, trays, and urns.

INSIDE/OUT

mepaintsme

March 19 - April 22

A selection of drawings will be featured alongside the work of Max Freund, Sarah Gamble, Geran Knol and Michael Swaney on the virtual contemporary art platform mepaintsme.

The Drawing Stall Vol. 2

Stellarhighway

Brooklyn, NYC

June 20 - August 9

Volume 2 of The Drawing Stall focuses on 70 living artists that use color pencil as a primary or integral medium in their studio practice. The exhibition will be accompanied by a book which is available for preorder.

Writing

My essay, “Clay is the medium. Slow revolution is the goal.”, appears in the February issue of Ceramics Now Magazine. The article is behind a paywall, but you can subscribe or preview parts of the issue on their website. The text considers ceramics as a material practice—its unpredictability, physicality, and the ways working with clay can foster patience, humility, and shared experience in the studio.

“A Power Outage Made Us Possible,” was just published in the March 8th issue of The New York Times. It appears in the Modern Love column of the Style section. The piece reflects on dating while living in a converted garage and the fear that if someone saw the full mess of my life, they might not stay.

Merch

We have produced four new 1,000-piece puzzles featuring colored-pencil works from over the years.

The finished puzzles measure 20 × 28 inches and reproduce four drawings that range from large-scale works (up to 60 × 80 inches) to smaller pieces made at actual size.

They are available in our online shop as of this newsletter release and will also be for group show at Gallery 1882 in Hammond, Indiana and at KMAC Contemporary Art Museum in Louisville.

I remember vividly a few things from that day. It was a pretty nondescript Sunday in September of 2012. I was relaxed, coming home from visiting family in Ohio. A man next to me on the flight grabbed my hand in a peculiar way and said, “You can’t control the things that happen to you in this life, but you can control what you do with them.” Only now, years later, can I see how that moment fit into the puzzle: the fire, my dad and my complicated relationship, his decline. All of it was there as a vehicle to propel what needed to be healed for both of us.

The text messages and calls were nonstop when I turned my phone back on. I had just landed at Chicago O’Hare. Then came the red flashes, the sirens, the yellow tape, and the water. The air that had smelled like autumn leaves and cider now reeked of burnt plastic and gasoline. As I stood and looked at the wreckage, numbness was the only thing I could feel. Days later, my hands began to shake uncontrollably in the car on the way to yoga.

I called my dad. “I need you,” I said. “I need your help. Just be my father.” It was the first time in years I had asked. For that moment, we both pretended to be the version of father and son who knew how to play nice. After I hung up, I cried alone, wishing for the kind of simple parent relationship I had always wanted. This battle of silences, and how men show affection to one another, is not new.

Every child seeks affirmation and acceptance from their parents, even when both sides know there are problems. But when love is conditional, when affection depends on who you are or what you hide, it leaves a wound that never fully closes. For me, that wound was my father’s disapproval of my sexuality, which he called “my lifestyle.” It was the thing that drove me away, and the thing that drove me to start making art in the first place.

These battles of silence still live between many daughters and sons and the parents they’re trying to reach long after a parent passes away. For many of us, we are forced in the silence to make our own work to make peace with sides that refuse to communicate, whether they are alive or dead.

For the following weeks after the studio fire I searched the wreckage hoping to find one object that had survived. Nothing did. Hundreds of works, years of my life, were gone.

It took many years after that destruction to understand the fire was not only about art. It was about letting go and relearning how to love both myself and my father—all faults and quirks included. It forced me to confront what I had been holding onto: pain, pride, and the impossible desire to make my father see me. When both our egos were forced to let go, it opened up space for acceptance, and at times, something like unconditional love.

The tension between us had not always been there. It started when he put me in football as a preteen. I met the expectation with earnestness, but his expression faded when my performance did not yield what he wanted. My preference for spending time with my sisters’ friends, all girls, did not help. And although he was color blind and couldn’t see when I dyed my pink hair, he could see clearly who I was—probably before I knew.

As adolescence led into adulthood and my dating life shifted from what he expected publicly to me being chronically single, it became clear that who I was had created a wedge between us.

I sometimes think about the tools and objects we pass down through generations, and now, especially, the odor they carry—the ones we use to build, fix, and destroy. My grandfather’s paint-chipped stool sits beside my bed now, a makeshift nightstand. My dad’s robe hangs on the hook beside mine. Both men worked with their hands: carving wood, wiring houses, fixing what was broken. They did not talk much, but they built things that lasted. Maybe that was how they showed love, quietly, through labor.

Over time, those objects became my altar, my form of church. When I cannot sleep, I find myself resting my hand on the stool’s chipped edge, tracing the grooves left by their palms. It is a way to communicate with them now, a silent Ouija board for the living and the dead. I can still hear my father’s voice: “Take better care of yourself.” “Go back to church.” “Get back on track.” In their silence, those objects revealed a quiet form of unconditional love.

When he got sick just a few years after my fire, I thought about those moments differently. The fire had erased years of art, but it also stripped away my defenses. I was forced to reach for him—not as the man who judged me, but as the one who had once carried me on his shoulders.

It took me losing everything, and his ego being weakened by chemotherapy, for us to finally find common ground, to simply sit in the same room without judgment. There was a different kind of silence then—more peaceful, less tense. Looking back, I do not know if either of us would have chosen those events. But what I gained outweighed what I lost. Losing hundreds of works gave me something I never expected: time with my dad, even if only for a few years.

Anger has a sneaky way of both helping and preventing healing.

Healing required us both to expose old wounds. In that messy space, something like acceptance appeared—not perfect, not unconditional, but real.

Even after everything was gone, something remained: the smells of both the fire and my father. They became triggers that, over time, turned into guides, reminders of what was lost and what could still be remembered.

Sorting through my own emotional wreckage, I began to see that the things we make and keep—our objects, our art, our rituals—can serve as bridges. They help us remember, but they also hold the possibility of repair.

After his death, my mother sent a care package: a few of his clothes, including the robe he wore through his illness. At first, I could not bear to touch it. Months later, I slipped it on. It fit loosely, but it held his shape. It smelled faintly of him, a bit of stale coffee and cologne, and the scent of his car from years of construction jobs and early commutes. The smell of him lingered longer than grief. It was how love stayed, the only language we had ever fully shared.

Sometimes I think healing works the same way as balance. You lean, you fall, you readjust. You try again. Whether it is picking up a chisel or holding your father’s robe close enough to smell the ghost of him, it is all practice.

I started talking to him more often, at night, in silence. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I could almost hear him. Once, I heard him say, “It would have been wrong for you to get married; it is not who you are.” Not perfect, but honest. True to him.

And maybe that’s another way men show love—not through certainty or dominance, but contradiction, the courage to say something hard, even if it comes too late.

Through my father’s illness and my fire, I realized that love does not have to look perfect to be true. It is connection in fleeting moments: the touch of a hand, a shared silence, an unspoken acknowledgment. In his final days, I felt that between us.

Even though I lost everything in the fire, what I gained was peace—peace with him and peace with myself. I wear his robe now and work with his tools. They are enough to help me move forward, even knowing things were never perfect. I have love on my own terms.

Sometimes love reveals itself only after the flames die out, when all that is left is the quiet that follows. We get a whiff from a recipe we are cooking, or we notice someone’s body odor. They remind us—in the most peculiar ways—of our love for the relationships we once had, but that are now past.

That day of my fire, and the day of my father’s death, both had distinct smells and sensations: the warmth emanating off the crushed wreckage of the building, the unusual warmth of his hands, and the small tear that slid down his cheek. There was a beautiful snowstorm that day in Cleveland as I sat outside in the parking lot, knowing deep down it would be the last time I said goodbye.

Now, when I cannot sleep, I still talk to him out loud. I tell him what I am working on. I ask questions. The smoke has finally faded, but occasionally, I catch a trace of it—not the acrid kind, but something warmer, like wood after rain. Maybe love has its own smoke, just the same as birthday candle wishes, invisible but lingering. It changes form. And sometimes, that’s enough.

Yes, the grossness and utterly acrid smells of the art world’s bowels. More so: how can we allow ourselves to get wet more, even the stains in your tighty-whities as a form of mark-making? How do we embrace wetness as a form of discourse to offset dryness, the dryness that resists the emotional in the academic. The wetness that hides inside and is released, cruising in private cubicles in libraries. This is not a case against dryness so much as a case for transgression. A bit of a dance of sublimation disguised through epoxy, like Hesse. Or even more literal, like the original art gangsters of the nineties: Mapplethorpe. Serrano. The dame of the body, Kiki Smith. And we cannot forget the ultimate queen of wetness, Peaches. Fuck the Pain Away. Body fluids as material. Collective blood, sweat, and tears as political matter. Forced wetness as discourse for the repressed.

An easy material entry point for me: I’ll start with ceramics. Clay. It is, well, very scatological if you just think about it. Not as smelly. Smells more like gardening. More transcendent dirtiness. But the nature of forming clay, at first sight, is, well, it looks like poop. Have you giggled yet? There is also urine as material. Lovingly thinking of Warhol here and the Piss Paintings as a conceptual retaliation against Expressionism. But now the body is in everything. And the marks are, in some ways, a way to tell us we are still here. Sort of like running subway tunnels and tagging your crew’s name, like Lady Pink, or more politely engaged muraling, like McGee.

A move into wetness is permission for good old transgressive ugliness. Scatter art, a bit of wool and wet glittery broken glass like Robert Morris. Or even Gober as a guise for poetic social minimalism. All the dumpster-diving from the gutter to the gallery. Force the powers that be to have to sit through it, like the figures in hallways à la Abramović. A collective mirror to our smelliness. An embrace of moving all the shameful potty talk from the private into the public. And, well, pretty much all the natures of the human body.

Putting all jokes aside, and all the potty language, wetness as a prescription to push out of repression. As in, we withhold and hold on to things internally, potential expressions, viewed as accidents or quick trips to the bathroom, instead of sitting in shame. Maybe the release is a strategy for permission, to let out all this built-up, stomach-acid crude toward a place that forces a form of psychic reckoning.

But like most of us, we needed to warm up. A bit of foreplay before we can get into the nitty-gritty of the down and dirty.

When I have been triggered, my boyfriend will say that my Spidey senses are heightened. On one hand, it makes me feel better about the truly abject nature of what my body is feeling, as well as, at times, the uncontrollable gagging that might transpire from those Spiderman senses as a trigger response. And oftentimes, as much as my ego wants to say, This was the event. This was the thing that triggered my response, all I really notice is that my eyes are darting, my chest is tightening, my bowels are expunging, and my sense of smell and what I hear become exaggerated and start to build.

Last time, it was at the advent of another innocent citizen killed by an ill-trained enforcer of the law. And when my senses are heightened, it is primal, a protection against who my attacker was previously. In the past, it was usually someone close to me, as a child, when I had no will or power to shield myself or fight back.

On occasion, my heightened sense of smell will translate to match the disgustingness my body is holding. As it turns out, I live next to an alley, so just a few steps into my morning routine of getting some tea, I will smell rotten vomit, dog feces, and a range of rotting milk and meat that the rats have usually ripped open to feast on in the middle of the night. Sounds appetizing, doesn’t it?

But beauty, and the will toward stifling it, will usually be my first inclination. Despite all my Buddhist training and how Pema Chödrön so eloquently talks about moving closer to the pain, the disgusting, as a form of training, I guess the question of wetness with art arrives from this place.

As someone averse to smells, despite coming from a medical family, who must on some level have a high tolerance for the unseen phenomena of the body where control is not allowed, I must say that this is really a jumping-off point. But isn’t all good conversation about art, and well, art a conversation of some sort? Wetness is a good jumping-off point. Just saying that next to the word dryness sounds a bit Anglo-Saxon, doesn’t it? And is this a critique of historical notions of withholding, perhaps? Just traveling anywhere outside of a place that has institutionalized bathrooms will force you to reckon with the freedom, but also the complexities, of what the human body needs to do when it needs to do it.

As we step over the grossness on the sidewalk into the galleries, we leave all the residue of accumulation behind to meet, most often now, a simple clean, clear wall, with work usually framed by glass or paper. Or, on occasion, an installation that, based on all practicality, is dry, because how else would paint be suspended indefinitely?

The question of wetness is also one of expression. The residue of the work of art is irrelevant in this discussion. If anything, circling back to the Spidey-sense trigger, it is this: as we are all triggered and our bodies respond, through colds, fevers, and flus, some carrying copious amounts of mucus; and for me, someone with a deviated septum, blood in the nostrils; and for those who menstruate or have bleeding hemorrhoids, the fluids and tears respond to the monstrous expression of the political weather.

But we often hold them in, and then when we can reach the studio or the bathroom, we can hopefully expel them. And perhaps this moistness becomes the signifier, the residue, to force those who refuse to see us, or who want us to be invisible, to be confronted. Perhaps it is the evidence that something has passed through us and refuses to disappear.

One of my best critics was my father. He was a union trade electrician and spent most of his life rewiring old buildings and turning dark spaces into forms of light. When he would enter my studio, despite having no knowledge of contemporary art, he would read the exact visual representation of what was presented: “You placed black cut pieces of wood on the ground. Then you applied and collaged glitter on top. There is a sculpture placed in the corner.”

Looking back, those exchanges, and the one when I had one of my first exhibitions in a museum that just so happened to be alongside a Flavin exhibition, are wonderful memories. At the opening of the Flavin show, my father was talking to the Flavin expert about the difference in wattage in electricity and how that affected the luminosity of different colors in the installations. The Flavin expert, who most likely had a PhD, had not studied the practical or material components of the work and was excited and inspired by my father’s basic, embodied knowledge of wattage and light.

And I think of my wonderful aunt who was born with cerebral palsy. Her ability to communicate sophisticatedly with my grandmother, who carried her up the stairs, was not linguistic but somatic. Their physical connection and attunement were deeper than any coherent language. Despite an institutional insistence on clean communication, realness is messiness. It is wet with deep emotional residue.

And then my own relationship to wetness. Did I mention my initials are B.O.? It sounds smelly, but I also recognize that vulnerability, showing the wetness, risks a different form of isolation. If you smell bad, people will either tell you or talk about it behind your back. But all definitions and questions aside, I want to aspire to be more wet. To live longer in my wet clothes and brushes. To use all the wet slip instead of discarding it. The dregs as the last icing on a wonderful cake. To force myself to show that edge that does not always end nicely, and still tastes delicious because it lived, baked, and was released through my own clenching barometer.

On a very pragmatic level, if creative practice is understood as a question of time, then any time or space devoted to intention becomes a form of political discourse. Simply stopping. Doing nothing in a period marked by violence, destruction, and aggression can be an act of resistance. Sitting on your hands may feel complacent, but sometimes allowing our collective unconscious experience to settle into the ground is a form of ecological activism.

No special gym clothes required. And if you’re lucky, maybe you get to a flow state. Perhaps even reconfigure the patterns set by others, just by going down a different route to school. Or to run errands. A refusal to do the same thing twice. Refigure direction. Open a one-way sign toward creative autonomy.

But yes, just stopping, in any manner, or even slowing down, subverts who holds power. We redirect the conversation away from the news and back toward where we are sitting, standing, walking, running, or dancing. Even staring off into space at a peculiar piece of discarded bubble wrap in the sidewalk, or the beautiful contour of a stranger’s profile, can become a quiet refusal. By shifting our gaze, inward or upward, we reclaim who determines what we feel, gaining a small measure of autonomy over our temporary angst, or for most artists, our neurosis. In many cases, these eccentricities become the very texture we learn to observe and carry through the world.

Just as yoga, exercise, and meditation function as structured frameworks of self-care, space offers similar ways of wringing out our unconscious and karmic sponges. The practice of art and the making of art perform a similar function on a collective level. The difficulty is that artists often struggle to wring themselves out, not because of the political nature of the moment we are living in, but because of the political nature of art training itself. Self-censorship enters early and often, shaping what feels permissible long before anything is made.

Artists are sponges. Our task is to absorb sadness, complacency, boredom, and then wring it back out. Space, in this sense, is both literal and metaphorical. It is a condition that allows dreams and change to emerge. Sitting and daydreaming is political because it interrupts the barrage of subliminal messaging that insists, we are not enough, not deserving of love, creativity, or peace.

Intention becomes the vehicle that allows newness to unfold. In the studio, this may look like a blank sheet of paper or a block of marble. Without some structure, productive space can collapse inward into existential drift. Parsing through the meaning of mortality can be generative, but for most creative purposes, structure matters. Artists practice a form of structured zoning out. We call it studio time. Athletes mid-game or dancers’ mid-performance call it flow.

Flow states share similarities with zoning out, but not all forms of dissociation carry the same political weight. Getting stoned or self-medicating may open imaginative space, but these states often bypass agency. By contrast, deliberately structured space, the physical studio, the act of making, the pause from intake, becomes a political gesture because it refuses constant intrusion. It denies the regime’s garbage disposal access to our psyches, even briefly.

When I’ve had the privilege to participate in longer meditation retreats, a familiar pattern emerges after days of restlessness. You sit for hours and eventually start fantasizing about leaving your partner for the stranger next to you, who you believe is crying for the connection of your unrequited love, only to realize, when the gong rings, that they simply have a terrible cold brewing. Thankfully, the lead meditation teacher will eventually suggest leaving the room to engage in what is called aimless wandering.

Aimless wandering sounds unstructured, but it isn’t. It creates a container, a different form of deliberate space, in which intuition and wisdom can arise. When intuition becomes the compass, movement follows differently. Sometimes that means walking. Other times, it means sitting still and doing nothing at all.

When space is created to allow intuition, even within the tightly scheduled, chaotic conditions many of us now inhabit, disruption becomes possible. And disruption is political. It also offers something more economical than gorging oneself on pastries from a high-end patisserie. Dreams and magic start forming. Not spending money for fifteen minutes staring at a display of toys can be better than opting for the real thing. It opens space for change, even if we ultimately do nothing with that space.

And the best part of space, or art, if you want to insert that word here, is that everyone is invited when you set the rules of where it occurs. Sure, galleries and the BoBos will tell you what the right style or place for its occurrence should be. But the fact that anyone can determine where art happens, and how it functions, is more like planning an impromptu picnic. It allows autonomy, and that, to me, sounds political. Lying on a blanket. Not reading the news. Talking about the shapes of clouds that look like centaurs.

There is a difference between staring off into space from overstimulation and sitting on a park bench, watching your friends play volleyball awkwardly. That difference is time.

Time is the thing most aggressively taken from us.

Creating even a small gap of it, five minutes, fifteen even, interrupts the systems that rely on our generosity. Art often exists in these gaps. Forced gaps are what artists do well. Which can also be a place for rest and recovery.

Sitting in a bathroom stall during work can be an act of resistance. Not answering. Not consuming. Not performing urgency. Admiring the graffiti from the latrine. Who is this anonymous number? Except if you are holding up the line. Then it is time to transition to a park bench.

Zoning out. Zoning in. Focus. Dissociation. The distinction matters less than the noticing. Awareness alone is already a refusal.

As the space and expression change, so too does the person creating it.

Space is political not because it is grand, but because it is inefficient.
It does not optimize.
It does not scale.
It does not produce metrics.

It simply allows something else to happen.

The last major one was my recent entrance into writing. Or more accurately, how long it took me to even begin to feel that I could occupy space to write. And then share it more publicly.

As a kid, I struggled with holding a pencil, with learning how to write the correct way. Only much later, as an adult when I tried earnestly to write, did I understand how deeply this imprint had shaped my ability to express myself at all.

Maybe it was an early learning disability or a neuromuscular issue. What I know is that I developed intense performance anxiety around how to hold the pencil correctly. I could not hold it “properly” long enough to form cursive letters, let alone spell full words. Eventually, I started holding it incorrectly just so I could write something at all.

Teachers added triangular grips to help build muscle memory. At the time, it was called a Laddie pencil, absurdly large for small fingers. None of it worked.

I still remember my second-grade teacher, Sister Janelle, in the rural Ohio school I attended, shouting across the room, “You’re not holding your pencil right. You’re doing it wrong.”

But the shame around writing lingered. It surfaced unexpectedly, often through small moments: a comment from a friend about a misspelled word, or a misplaced colon or semicolon. Each time, it pulled me backward. Before I ever put words down, there was judgment. Grammar. Diction. Punctuation. All of it hovering in the room before I had begun. There was already a history. A gate. A tension that took years of space and self-permission before I could speak about it at all.

Before content even arose to say or express something concrete, I was already shielding for fear of more criticism. I learned early how to read a room before I learned how to trust myself. This happened before I had written anything.

Shame arrived early, and it arrived loudly.

At that time, the early struggle carried over into other things. Scissors. Art class. Following directions. I remember crying while trying to make the assigned paper ghost or Thanksgiving turkey, my hands unable to do what the teacher demonstrated.

One afternoon, after the class had misbehaved, we were instructed to sit quietly and write letters explaining why our behavior was wrong. Bryan, the boy who sat in front of me, had mastered his penmanship. I leaned forward and asked him how to spell because. B-E-C-A-U-S-E. I asked him again. And again. Three times.

It is peculiar to think about that now, especially considering that I am quite skilled at drawing and at handling different tools. If anything, the way I learned to work outside instruction is what gave my work patina.

Looking back now, I can see that many of the obstacles I faced had less to do with language itself and more to do with permission, performance, and the early feedback I received while trying to learn something new. There is something about learning the technical skills correctly to get you started, in this case grammar, phonetics, and how to properly hold a pencil. But the seed was planted before I had even started. Any attempt at writing carried a heaviness, a quiet conviction that I was not smart enough or qualified enough to put words down on paper.

As artists shame has a sneaky way of creeping in just when we start feeling secure about ourselves and our creative abilities. It appears just when we are about to grow.

Shame is also a form of a closet. Like wearing a twenty-year-old coat stitched together from all reminders of the past. Being an artist is a nice hobby not a job. You chose the wrong path. You said the wrong thing. Wait let me interrupt to stop you to let you know you’re doing it wrong. The point I am trying to make here is that good, earnest people think they are training us in the right or wrong way to do things. The difficult part is that each of us needs to figure out, after that training, the best way we do it.

This also comes up frequently with feedback or critique. A casual word that is dismissive about knowing historical context or influences. Or worse, someone in a respectable field of authority just plainly stating, “This is bad. And you do not know what you’re doing. Maybe rethink this thing you love doing as a viable thing.”

Only after many years of working alone in my studio on colored pencil drawings that required long hours and deep pressure into the page, I noticed the callus that had formed on my finger from learning to write the wrong way as a kid. It formed from learning to work in my own way. That was when I began thinking seriously about early imprints, and about how correction and performance shape what we continue, what we avoid, and what we abandon entirely.

Shame interrupts becoming. It convinces us to abandon parts of ourselves before they have time to develop. It insists that we must already be competent to begin. But you must trust that something meaningful is possible before there is proof.

Within any new endeavor, there is always the pull of inspiration. The excitement of being a beginner. But over time, awareness creeps in. Audience. Feedback. Critique. This is often where people decide whether they belong to the club they long to enter or whether they are meant to remain outside the gates.

That pattern did not stay in childhood. I grew up without much formal exposure to the art world. I was rarely taken to art classes, never to art camp. Museums and galleries felt like unfamiliar landscapes. I came to art indirectly, joking now that I was not particularly good at anything else. Only later did I realize how much of an outsider I had felt all along.

Years later, I was at the Art Institute of Chicago installing my work in the restaurant. It was a pivotal moment. The museum had acquired my work for the collection. It genuinely felt like a moment that said, “I made it. I belong here.” The restaurant manager, when I arrived to install my work, said, “Oh good. The cleaning crew arrived. If you could get inside these vitrines and clean them out before the artist arrives, we would really appreciate it.” I got in and started to pretend to clean when the curator arrived and asked what I was doing inside the cases. The restaurant manager looked mortified, but it was also another indicator of the very real dynamics artists face all the time. Our work is hung in the places that maybe we would never be invited over for dinner. And similar to the Julia Roberts scene in Pretty Woman when she enters the store and is asked to leave, I still wonder if some of my galleries would speak to me in a similar manner if they did not know who I was.

Shame is effective because it sounds and feels familiar. It is a sneaky thing that creeps in because we have lived with it our whole lives. I see it now even in small, ordinary moments, the days when I post something and delete it quickly or spend hours weighing how or why to share anything at all.

This is why I keep returning to it. Not as a personal flaw, but as a force. One that interrupts becoming. One that convinces us to leave parts of ourselves undeveloped. To stop before we realize that our quirks, our texture, our patina are what make the best creative works. I will sometimes say this when I talk to artists: it is important to speak about your work in whatever form is yours first. Then the refinement can happen. But the most important thing is to create without performance.

With the advent of the performing artist on social media, this has become quite an interesting and challenging piece of the puzzle. I am at fault myself, thinking about the appearance of something before allowing myself the permission to let the work be made. Documenting and showing what you are doing as if a camera is already in place as you perform creating. This can create a dryness that erases good patina.

Patina is what makes artists legible to one another. It is not the tool itself, but how we use it. It is the trace of the hand, the imperfection left behind by process. Long before technology, people communicated by holding something. A piece of charcoal. A stone. A pencil.

What I do now with writing is not separate from how I make art. I do not try to fix mistakes immediately. I write by hand or type, legible or not. I sit and listen to my body first. Later, I return. I edit. I adjust. The same way I do in the studio.

I no longer try to hold the pencil the right way.

You have to let yourself be messy before anything can become clear.

More than anything, stopping the performance was what finally allowed me to begin.

The notion of a return to opacity, to illegibility, or to a refusal to make sense can only exist without an absolute devotion to crisp representation or clear seeing. To argue for the subversive nature of abstraction is to argue for a kinship that exists in otherness. As artists, we know what that feels like. Otherness is a form of rebellion. It offers insight into where somatic communication can still exist when power attempts to erase our legibility, our visibility, our bodies.

We are in a time of chaos and subjective truth, where trust feels fragile and constantly tested. Paranoia becomes a form of control. It breeds fear. It obscures unproductively—an abstraction that does not help us survive. Sometimes we can see clearly. Sometimes we are lost. What I am proposing here is that there is strength, and even a path, in obtuseness. No answer is the right answer. That space, although terrifying, can offer a hidden form of creative autonomy that precise articulation cannot when power refuses to see or acknowledge our words, our images, our bodies.

We hope that maybe our dreams, aspirations, and world-building, which we toil away at in our studios, might take root in real time. We do this with low expectations. A seed is planted. Nothingness offers a ground for newness. A hundred years later, a tree is born in a sea of cracked randomness.

In total darkness, obscurity forces the viewer to feel something—anything. That openness can be interpreted as a form of spiritual growth or enlightenment. Circles and squares have a direct line to the universal coven. The cliques of contemporary art and minimalism find real traction here, in the best possible way. An inexperienced art viewer sees large circles, lines, or squares and says out loud, a kid could do that or I don’t understand. This reaction becomes a prompt that forces reflection, regardless of whether the feedback is deemed valuable or not. There is generosity on the part of the creator in allowing space for the viewer to have a somatic experience with a work of art.

Agnes Martin’s grids did this extraordinarily well. Her monastic practice was a form of abstract subversion rooted in discipline and restraint. She allowed the work to exist without justification. The paintings ask the viewer to slow down, to feel rather than decipher, to sit with quiet rather than mastery. They offer no answers, only conditions for attention. In this way, abstraction becomes an ethical position rather than a visual one.

This way of communicating is not theoretical. It has been practiced.

Subtle designs on colored cloth. Simple tones. Easily accessible. In the 1970s, queer artists used these materials to communicate what kinds of intimacy they were seeking, all in public, in the open. The same handkerchiefs used to blow noses or wipe sweat from a construction worker’s forehead were repurposed as a language when language itself was dangerous. Ordinary objects were rebanded as signals. Sexual freedom and desire were communicated through color, placement, and recognition rather than declaration.

The power of the hanky code was not in its clarity but in its ambiguity. It relied on being seen by those who knew how to look, while remaining invisible or dismissible to everyone else. It could be folded away, denied, or misread on purpose. Meaning lived in proximity to the body—in a back pocket, in motion, in public space. This was not abstraction as retreat. It was abstraction as survival. Codes and symbols communicate to the extraterrestrial. A way to communicate desire, safety, and possibility when the world refused to acknowledge queer lives at all.

This is what it looks like when abstraction carries consequence.

Codes and symbols precede language. They live in the body before they live in words. From earthworks to pyramids, to marks etched long before formal systems of writing, abstraction has always come first. It transcends language. It moves boundaries, loosens fixed territories, and expands what can be understood without being named. Long before abstraction was granted legitimacy, Hilma af Klint used circles, spirals, and geometry as a form of transmission—work meant to be felt, not explained, and often kept hidden from public view.

Cracks and edges, disconnections and tensions, starts and stops—all make traditionalists uncomfortable. These qualities are invitations to lean into peculiarity, exaggeration, and humor as creative strategies. In a world where others refuse to see our existence, the freedom to be a freak—in the best possible way—becomes a method of subverting shame and transforming it into beauty. Making it hard to label what it is forces new labels to have to be written. This is precisely why queer happiness, and forms of drag, are so threatening to conservatism. They refuse containment. They insist on visibility without explanation.

The cracks, and the resulting retraction, are visible to us every day. Political policies are enacted that seek to erase, and in some instances punish, what we need to say. Even in the severe, there is power in the wedge. To hold open space for change requires imagination. While legibility offers concise language for what needs to be said, fracture creates room for seeds to take hold and blossom.

Camouflaging creates hidden self-care walls. Private inner intimacy on display enables permission for public intimacy to exist.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres understood this deeply. His work bridged institutional critique with the intimacy of the body through abstraction. The piles of candy appear innocent at first glance—bright, shimmering, inviting. They look celebratory, even joyful. The form is simple. The gesture seems generous.

But the weight matters.

The candy is measured. Its total weight corresponds to the body of his lover, dying of AIDS. As viewers take a piece, the pile slowly diminishes. Loss is enacted through participation. The institution replenishes the work, but the absence never disappears. Body movement and gestural expression create transmutation. The viewer carries that weight away, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. The sweetness dissolves. What lingers is the aftertaste.

This is abstraction as subversion. You may refuse to see my body as valuable. You may refuse to name the epidemic. You may erase the lives being lost. But you will take this offering. You will put it in your mouth. You will participate. You will carry the bitterness with you.

This gesture mirrors the private labor many artists have been forced to perform—serving systems that do not recognize us, while quietly carrying the weight of grief, desire, and survival back into our bedrooms, our kitchens, our inner lives. Gonzalez-Torres did not demand recognition. He built a wedge. He held the crack open and invited the world to step inside it, whether they understood what they were taking or not.

Zines operate as wedges that expect to be destroyed. Cheap paper. Photocopied ink. Stapled spines. They are made quickly, passed hand to hand, left on bathroom sinks or coffee shop counters, folded into coat pockets and backpacks. They do not ask for permission. They do not wait to be archived. Their power lies in their speed and their refusal to last.

Like the hanky code, zines rely on selective visibility. They are meant to be found by those who are already looking, while remaining illegible or insignificant to those who are not. Their language is often fragmented, collaged, messy, misspelled. This is not a failure of clarity but a strategy of survival. Zines do not aim to convince everyone. They aim to reach someone.

Groups like the Guerrilla Girls understood anonymity as power. Their posters and printed materials functioned like zines—cheap, direct, unsigned, and impossible to ignore. By masking identity and refusing authorship, attention was redirected away from the individual body and toward systemic critique. Anonymity became both shield and amplifier.

In moments when artistic voices are surveilled, censored, or flattened into acceptable narratives, zines create temporary shelters for truth. They allow private thoughts to circulate publicly without becoming fixed or owned. They can disappear as easily as they appear, leaving behind only the feeling that something passed through.

What ties these forms together is not aesthetics but strategy. The hanky code. The disappearing candy. The photocopied page. Each is a wedge placed deliberately into a crack, holding space open just long enough for recognition, intimacy, or survival to occur.

Abstraction, in this sense, is not withdrawal. It is presence without exposure. It is communication that refuses capture. When clarity is weaponized, obtuseness becomes protection. When visibility becomes dangerous, codes keep us alive.

The metaphor of the crack and the wedge becomes a way of thinking about how expression survives under pressure.

Obscurity forces the viewer to feel something, anything.

A reminder that we still communicate through our bodies. Our eyes, between one another, become windows for saying what must be said when words have been silenced by policy, or by fear of harm.

Almost joking, I said I had been thinking about remaking them.

The response surprised me. Enthusiasm. Curiosity. Interest. It caught me off guard, not because the work was suddenly good again, but because I realized how much judgment I had already placed on it before it even re-entered the room. Before making anything, I had already decided how it might be received. Whether it felt relevant. Whether it seemed embarrassing. Whether it was cool enough to matter. Or cringey.

I thought back to my first artist residency in Vermont, which I had applied to largely because I admired the visiting artist. When they arrived, they did a quick bird’s-eye scan of my studio and said, almost casually, that the autobiographical content was strong, but that collectors often have a hard time with religion when buying work. I remember realizing, in that moment, that I had already internalized what I was doing as wrong. Because I respected this artist and their success, I absorbed the comment without much resistance. Subconsciously, I began removing Catholic content from my work. Not all at once, but decisively.

I see versions of this play out in several contexts. When students arrive at the art school where I teach, their work is often rooted in strong autobiographical content. Two years later, by graduation, that work frequently appears smoother, more reductive, and more guarded. There is less texture, less patina. Half-jokingly, I refer to this shift as a kind of art school brainwashing. By the end, the work can become minimal to the point of erasure, a pale photocopy of a photocopy of the original. In the most clichéd version, it becomes a line on a wall with no story attached.

This pattern also appears when artists gain early traction and success. Once work begins to sell or is written about as viable, it is natural to assume that what is being purchased or validated must be better than what came before. But the issue is not the work itself. It is permission. Permission to remain vulnerable. Permission to continue experimenting. Permission to make bad work after work has been christened as good. What often follows instead is a plateau. The work stabilizes, then stagnates, unless the artist is willing to risk experimentation even at the cost of comfort or sale.

These moments clarified something I have been thinking about for a long time. We often believe we are responding to the work itself, but more often we are responding to an imagined audience. To trends. To the quiet pressure of relevance. To the fear of looking foolish. To not looking cool.

There may be some truth to the idea that early-career artists need to be timely or legible to gain traction. But I am more interested in what coolness performs in a creative context, and what it quietly prevents from happening.

To even attempt to write something concise for or against coolness is probably not that cool. But I want to propose this: fear and embarrassment are an essential, tangled love affair in the making of good work. Making meaningful, lasting art requires getting messy. Inside and outside of ourselves. Literally, metaphorically, and practically.

If you are always guarded, overly self-conscious about how you or your work appears, you censor yourself from the start. You prevent what needs to happen. This is not an easy ask. For most of us, it requires going directly into the places that scare us most.

If you have ever decided to connect with someone, to risk intimacy, or to fall in love, you already understand this. You must swallow pride. You must allow vulnerability. You have to accept the possibility of embarrassment.

For many of us, creative work is our first attempt at falling in love, first with ourselves. If we can learn to care for what we are making, even when it is uncertain or incomplete, it becomes easier to be brave and more graceful when we approach the razor’s edge of trying something new and then showing it to others. The good news is that we get to do this first in private, in the studio or wherever our practice takes form.

For me, that place is writing. Something I did not believe was in my wheelhouse. I am learning to allow myself the grace to try anyway. That, to me, is the first step. Just trying.

Most of us want to avoid feeling foolish. We resist the tightening of the chest and the upper lip that arrives when we deeply care about something. But that tension is exactly what makes work interesting and worthwhile. It would be easy to make work that stays relaxed and detached. Lasting work requires a continual willingness to make ourselves uncomfortable in the right ways. This usually means confronting what we are most afraid of.

Without that willingness, we develop a guardedness that shapes how people relate to what we do. In my experience, especially with students, there is often a desire to be vulnerable that is met with fear. Fear of judgment. Fear of shame. Fear of embarrassment. That fear prevents good work from fully manifesting.

No one wants to be embarrassed or shamed. But the kind of work that lasts requires vulnerability and a willingness to not look perfect. Over time, something else emerges from that vulnerable space. The right kind of confidence.

Withholding ourselves behind a guarded stance may seem cool at first impression, but it produces a similar response in the audience. Coolness begets distance. Guardedness begets detachment. Vulnerability invites connection. Risk and experimentation open the possibility for inspiration, recognition, and trust.

This question of vulnerability becomes more complicated because there is now a profitable model for performing it. Vulnerability, as an idea, sells. But true vulnerability is rarely polished. It is awkward, inconvenient, and unresolved. That messiness is not a flaw. It is the substance. It is what gives artistic expression its texture, its heat, its life.

If this already sounds cringey, that may be the point. A sign of real confidence is not caring in the performative sense, but caring deeply enough to risk looking foolish. That is what opens the door to improvisation, surprise, and the kind of patina we associate with work that endures. Many of the artists we remember were likely seen, in their time, as peculiar, obsessive, or uncool.

The paradox is this: being yourself is often described as cool, but people will regularly tell you that you are being uncool or embarrassing or trying too hard. The posturing of coolness is probably not cool. And the point here is not to tell anyone what is or is not cool, which is, admittedly, also probably uncool. But my case against coolness is not about style. It is about distance. And distance is the enemy of meaningful work.

At the top of a staircase at the Art Institute of Chicago stands one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s largest paintings, Sky Above Clouds IV. If you know O’Keeffe’s work, you would be struck by the sheer scale and how it envelops your senses upon arrival. It spans nearly eight feet high and twenty-four feet wide, a precise and beautiful arrangement of a cloudscape inspired by her flights across the United States.

What stands out more to me than the awe factor is the description of her process — the simple note on the placard explaining that she made it at age 77, in her New Mexico garage, with no heat, working from morning to evening until it was finished. As she recalled:

“I painted a painting eight feet high and twenty-four feet wide—it kept me working every minute from six a.m. till eight or nine at night as I had to be finished before it was cold. I worked in the garage and it had no heat. Such a size is of course ridiculous but I had it in my head as something I wanted to do for a couple of years.”

The painting exemplifies the restraint and beauty of her earlier work, but this description offers something more: a proposition about how we approach our own work. Regardless of whether you consider yourself a creative person or not, work is still work. We place enormous pressure on ourselves to know whether something is good or bad in the moment — whether it is worthwhile or “on the right track.” Yet O’Keeffe’s garage-bound routine suggests something far simpler: meaningful work often happens not through certainty or inspiration but through presence and discipline, through putting in the work step-by-step. Showing up every day despite whatever temporary emotional clouds or news we are experiencing. Being in the moment is enough. Whether it becomes a masterpiece is something time, and others, will decide.

This resonates strongly now, in a moment when the world feels politically unstable and so many of us are exhausted. In the darkest stretch of December — when the light of the day is dim and the emotional weather of life is heavy and unclear — O’Keeffe’s process offers a reminder that stepping forward one moment at a time is still enough to make meaningful work. Our perspective in the moment is rarely the one that lasts. I for one need to readjust my expectation that feeling good is the only way to experience meaningful moments in life.

Over the past fifteen years at the art school where I teach, attached to the museum, I have visited this painting almost weekly. What made me fall in love with it wasn’t only its scale or the meticulous simplicity of its forms, but the candid acknowledgment of how it was made — through the quiet repetition of daily work, without forcing meaning or mastery.

There are two components to art: the makers and the viewers. Both require active looking and engagement. For the maker, giving form to an idea — translating hopes, fears, and dreams into something tangible — is its own kind of work. Artists translate worlds to offer hope. For the viewer, meaning emerges through attention and participation. Intention shapes both. O’Keeffe shows us, in the most literal way, how clouds can dance individually and collectively — how something as ordinary as the sky becomes an awe-inspiring connection.

Our relationship to any form of work is similar. A shift in intention, a willingness to be present, and the small act of doing the next step can bring meaning forward. On a practical level, just doing the work — without anticipating the result — becomes its own lesson. Even the most mundane tasks can carry beauty when approached without the demand to know what they will become.

I’ve found this helpful in my own practice and life, especially since my studio also happens to be unheated, next to a dirty, rat-infested alley in Chicago. As so many of us ask the “why” questions about our work and our place in the world, I’ve started to approach what I’m doing in small steps, then look at the evidence over time. If you think about something you made or accomplished ten years ago — the thing you were certain was a masterpiece — it is a reminder of how subjective our judgment is in the moment, and how time is often a better evaluator than we are. The true meaning of our work is connection — the relationship between ourselves and the world. The objects are just the place cards through which that meaning travels.

Perhaps this perspective is useful as we navigate the year’s end and the year ahead. Keeping perspective, finding meaning in the work directly in front of us — washing dishes, teaching a class, sitting alone in a studio — is enough. Treating any free space as an opportunity to realign our mindset matters. Instead of deciding whether something is good or bad, I’m trying to consider whether it is meaningful. Even if it’s simply sitting on an airplane, like O’Keeffe, letting yourself look out the window and have a small, playful moment with the sky and clouds.

These days, when I walk into my own chilly studio in Chicago, I think of O’Keeffe working through the cold in her garage, painting clouds she once saw from an airplane window. She wasn’t trying to make a masterpiece. She was simply doing the next stroke, the next gesture, each hour, the next day, until the work was done. And maybe that is the quiet gift of her work: the reminder that even in difficult seasons, even when the world feels unsteady, we can still look up, take one small step forward, and trust that meaning will come in its own time.

The past couple of months have been tumultuous—to say the least—both in my own life and in the world at large. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about evidence—especially when creative doubts creep in and productivity feels distant. Sometimes it helps to pause and take stock of what’s actually happening, rather than what fear tells us.

Turning fifty was both challenging and deeply meaningful. It’s brought me back to thinking about the past, about support systems, and about sustainability—how we keep going, creatively and personally. I don’t have any big answers, but after looking at my own creative evidence—especially while assembling this newsletter—I can say that I am still doing a lot, and that the time I’ve been making for myself and others truly matters, even amidst the chaos of the news and the state of the world.

Ed and I went to Ireland for my birthday in August—an emotional but profoundly grounding trip. I hope everyone is finding small ways to stay centered and connected during this ongoing uncertain time. More than ever, I believe that art bridges the space between self and others. The objects are just the residue of that connection.

I’m grateful for all of you and the conversations, support, and creative energy we share.

Stay safe out there,
Bill

Exhibitions

On October 1, the exhibition William J. O’Brien: From Here to There opened at Governor’s State University Visual Arts Gallery. The show features work spanning the last 15 years of studio production in drawing, painting and sculpture. An artists’ reception is planned for this Sunday, October 12 from 1 to 4 pm which features a Tea Dance for National Coming Out Day. The Visual Arts Gallery is located within the Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park, a collection of 30 master works of large-scale sculpture situated within 100 acres of prairie landscape. Several bronze works in From Here to There will be installed outdoors on the Sculpture Park grounds for three years after the exhibition closes on November 14.

City In A Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago is an intergenerational group exhibition at the MCA that highlights Chicago’s essential, yet often underacknowledged, role in the story of queer art and activism. Cinaedus Table MDCCLXXV, 2008 is featured in this exhibition with many of my Chicago peeps.

Press

This week, Contemporary Art Issue included the studio in its feature, “Top 30 Most Important Ceramic Artists Today,” The article brings together an inspiring roster of artists.

Merch!

The studio will be participating in Staple + Stitch Art Book + Print Fair November 14-16 at 21c Museum Hotel, 55 E Ontario, Chicago. Our table will have books, zines, cards, t-shirts and more for sale, including copies of We Become Silhouettes hot off the press.

We Become Silhouettes, a new zine from Shadow Work Press is being released on October 15th. A curated archive of Illustrator drawings made between 2003 and 2008, this zine captures the emotional residue of a queer artist navigating pop culture, internet image searches, and desire in the early 2000s. Available in hardcover and paperback, this full color artist book/zine is a time capsule of longing, disconnection, and fleeting visibility. A few t-shirts based on the book will be available before Halloween.

Ghosts Walk Differently is available in hard and soft cover from Shadow Work Press.  This 80 page, full color artist book is a lyrical apocalypse rendered in 100 questions. What survives and who is left to witness? Dust, blood, cruelty, art? Perhaps we all become vampires by  necessity— a final evolution born of hunger, memory, and smoke.

Writing

Two pieces of writing have been featured in the New York Times’ flash memoir series Tiny Love Stories. The first, about being gay and broke in NYC the summer before 9/11 was published on July 30. The second came out about a month ago and features a picture of me in my football gear from 5th grade.

I wrote an essay for the newest edition of Fruitslice, a Queer, quarterly digital magazine. The issue is called Repair and I’ll add the text of the piece below.

Flying Your Own Freak Flag
How a Unicycle Drill Team Taught Me to Stay Upright, Stand Out, and Become Myself
By William J. O’Brien

There’s no casual way to bring up that I was part of a traveling unicycle drill team as a kid in the 1980s in rural Northeast Ohio. To make it sound even more like a tall tale, the St. Helen’s Unicycle Drill Team is based in Newbury, close to Novelty, a small town just east of Cleveland.

It’s one of my back-pocket party tricks. It always lands like a punchline, usually followed by awkward silence, disbelief, fascination, and then me fumbling through my phone for photographic evidence.

Fiction or not, the St. Helen’s Unicycle Drill Team was, and still is, very real. But as a young pre-teen Queer kid growing up in a conservative place, it was deadly serious: yellow-and-black V-neck uniforms, choreographed routines set to Neil Diamond’s “America,” and long road trips with minimal adult supervision, stopping at rest areas across Pennsylvania and Ohio.

It was the perfect marriage of my athletic side—dying to be the next Mary Lou Retton, doing backflips off homemade jungle gyms—and my less permissible feminine side that danced and listened to Neneh Cherry, quietly rapping to “Buffalo Stance” in the back of bedroom closets. While most parents signed their kids up for sports, mine enrolled us in the intricate, demanding art of balancing on a single wheel. Or, as I like to say: I was raised to be a circus freak in the most empowering way

Early imprints shape us. The difference between embracing or shaming a child for something eccentric can leave a lasting mark. I did not even realize I was different until the world around me, as it does for so many of us, felt entitled to give constant feedback on the “right” and “wrong” ways to express a Queer spirit. If you grew up anywhere outside a city and had the courage to leave, chances are you left because you didn’t want to meet the expectations of that place—or couldn’t.

Queer joy is a public battlefield right now. Our individual expression and joy come from the bravery to listen to ourselves and resist the rules of the binary. The tension between expectation and survival for any young Femme Queer kid in rural America is very real. Most of us learned to hide our hand gestures or secret hobbies just to stay safe. And if we were lucky enough to make it out, we were only allowed to let those parts of ourselves flourish later. Now the culture is shifting again, and I find myself thinking about—and frankly worrying about—those rural alterna-kids. Especially the ones hiding in terror, afraid of being found out. Or worse: playing the role of the straight guy or girl getting married, then later sneaking off to Queer bars during business trips to the city.

Performing on a unicycle was an early form of living drag. It was an analogy for resilience. To keep going after being knocked down again and again, you had to try and dust yourself off and keep riding, no matter the feedback from the crowd.

Most often, it was shock, praise, or taunts. But sometimes, it was genuine fear.

Learning to balance on one wheel, then ride with confidence, is no small feat. It requires dedication, a little delusion, and the kind of weird hilarity all of us need right now to offset the darkness unfolding around us. The first steps require the courage to look both ridiculous and radiant. As a pre-teen, it meant leaning against the Kelly Irish green cement walls of St. Helen’s gym for support. To lean into my fear, to take small steps, to fall down, and to try again were all strong similarities to what I now understand as Queer empowerment. It was a determination to be tested, to fall repeatedly, to skin our knees on gym floors, and to later carry those same knees as an adult, sliding across Queer club dance floors with defiance and joy

My rekindled love affair with the unicycle began over a decade ago on my fortieth birthday, when my boyfriend—an unapologetic fan of the absurd—surprised me with one. It was the perfect gift: a ridiculous object that made space for me to reconnect with parts of myself I had forgotten or thought I’d lost. Of course, now that I’m nearing fifty, my body can still ride, but my crotch doesn’t fare as well in the saddle as it did when I was twelve, sporting an asymmetrical skater haircut.

As I look at the person staring back at me in the mirror, and count the gray hairs, I’ve been trying to stitch together the version of myself I used to be with who I am now. Deep down, I still feel like that kid in the New Order Substance T-shirt, riding a ten-foot-high unicycle through town with a crooked bowl cut.

Some would say I ran from the place I grew up. Maybe I did. But I also miss certain parts of it—namely, the innate comfort I once felt being myself without the constant pressure to conform.

That sensibility has come in handy lately, as we face a wave of so-called normalcy and a return to conservatism. A culture that thrives on the belief that anything different is wrong and should be erased from view, especially Queer joy and happiness.

As I get older, l’ve returned to the activities of my childhood that once made me feel free. Maybe out of desperation to avoid confronting my own mortality, or the limitations of my body. I know that it’s not just out of nostalgia; a series of traumatic life events left me needing something to bridge the darkness with joy.

It’s also a form of rebellion. A refusal to quietly bow out, fold up my mat, and start aging “gracefully.” Instead, I’m chasing the feeling of freedom again. I’m trying to reclaim the version of myself that once felt most like me, refusing to let him disappear. The same freedoms that people keep trying to reclaim or rebrand are not what they appear. Our basic civil rights and liberties have been stripped into a limited, stale, and bland version of Americana. I believe it is time to recover that sense of freedom for ourselves again, the kind that is lived in the body and not borrowed from anyone else’s definition.

Sometimes healing shows up in unexpected forms. Sometimes you take tap dancing lessons to become a better painter. Sometimes riding a unicycle—or relearning how to—can help bridge childhood trauma. It can reconnect you to what once felt safe and joyful.

Whether it’s nostalgia or a textbook midlife crisis, I believe there’s value in mining the past. It can help you link the brighter threads of where you came from with who you’ve become.

What I’ve discovered, revisiting the painful parts of my childhood with a genuine desire to heal, is that I needed something somatic and positive to bridge the past and the future. The unicycle became that bridge: a playful, physical memory I could reclaim as safe. Something to help me move forward.

There remains a deep well of pain and complication from my childhood in Ohio. Much of it centers on my relationship with my father, the expectations of conservatism and religion, and the weight of being the firstborn son in a working-class family who happened to grow into a Queer identity. But I’m trying to lean into the good memories, especially now, as a way to ground myself and regain the confidence to stand on my own. Looking back, I think being part of a renegade group of teenage misfits gave me something rare in rural, conservative Ohio: permission to be myself as a Queer kid.

Yes, I learned movement from unicycling. But more than that, I learned how to give myself permission to be a confident, unapologetic weirdo. That training would become foundational to my life as an artist, the early pairing of body awareness and theatrical risk teaching me to break the rules, trust my instincts, and take up space, even when I didn’t feel welcome.

Sometimes we have to lean into the things we were once told to hide. We pretend, we exaggerate, and we revive the parts of ourselves that feel dormant in order to regain and relearn the parts of our past that were viewed as negative. The things we were told were shameful. The clothes we liked to wear. The hobbies we genuinely cared about but were told weren’t meant for our gender

.The camaraderie and teamwork of the Unicycle Drill Team became training for what resilience looks like now. The high school kids at the back of our traveling seventies bus played Joan Jett on mixed cassette tapes as we dozed against one another’s shoulders, riding through the night from venue to venue, sleeping on church gym floors. Those same shoulders linked together on parade routes, steadying us through summer heat and keeping us upright as a single unit. I now see that same need for support in our Queer households, where we need to lean into one another when we no longer feel strong enough to stand alone.

Muscle memory becomes our magical Queer strength. For me, it was embedded early on as I rode playfully in clown makeup, skipping rope and jumping ramps to the songs of 10,000 Maniacs, performing for senior citizens in Midwestern parking lots.

Finding comfort in your voice isn’t easy for anyone—regardless if you were taught to flip off a bar or jump rope while riding a unicycle, or not.

For many Queer kids, there is no real choice. You either learn to hide all the wonderful, uncontainable parts of yourself just to survive, or you go the punk route: dyed hair, black eyeliner, vintage thrift rebellion.

My hope is that in our collective Queer communities, we continue to mine and reclaim the dormant parts of ourselves that were tucked away in shame. That we learn to see them not as weakness, but as the kind of strength that helps us stand tall with confidence, walk the parade route without fear, and reconnect with what makes us great—our bold, different nature as Queer unicorns.

We scrambled to figure out if we could find a place to acquire it, or if possible, return to the studio archive. As it turns out, with tariffs and logistics, the cost to ship the piece back to the United States was estimated at $7,000 USD. The studio couldn’t afford nor stomach that return price. This conversation of sustainability is a longer one about who has the privilege to be able to maintain and store a life’s work or even keep an archive. The piece was shown in a group show in NYC at the time and acquired by Saatchi. But now is teetering in the liminal space from establish museum collection to well close to the dumpster.

This comes as a strange coincidence, as a similar piece from that same time period is currently on display in a group show at the MCA Chicago. It raises the question of why and how artworks either endure in a collection over time or like this sculpture risk being thrown into the dumpster fire that is the current state of the world, and of art.

The sculpture Vivisection originally shown at Saatchi has been now passed along to another dealer Alex Halverson, and is now being raffled off on Instagram. In some ways, it feels fitting. I made that piece out of trash, it was as a rebellion against a terrible landlord, and as a critique of the commodification of art objects. It was once included in a show about low-level materials used in sculpture that ended in high places. It lived for a time in a prestigious museum collection. And now, most likely, it is on the verge of being thrown back in the trash.

The irony is not lost on me.

The only thing that complicates it is this: I put my emotional and physical labor into these pieces.

As an artist, that labor defines the value of the work. At the end of the day, isn't that what art is?

People say not to act out of emotion, but I am upset. In fact, at times angry that so many of the middle-tier operators in the art world—the ones who negotiated with museums and collectors—have now disappeared or are very hard to locate. They have quietly bowed out, and now they are silent. Artists, on the other hand, have never left. We are still here. And are not going anywhere.

This question remains for many artists about what we do with our work and archives when we cannot personally economically manage the fallout from the systems that are failing and imploding around us? Just throw away all of the objects we were told had high value in the trash?

I am conflicted about posting this. Mostly because I feel embarrassed. But shame is a tool that keeps people quiet, and I refuse to let it do that to me. I care about what I make. There is no clear boundary in my mind between who I am and what I create. That blurring is the space where artists live. And it is also the space where the performance of creative labor gets repackaged and sold, often without us.

This system profits off our labor and our work. It is painful to watch. And I refuse to believe that just because the middle managers have walked away, artists should be left to shoulder the shame of what is left behind in the wreckage.

Art itself is a public offering. It carries something deeply personal into a space where it is judged, bought, and often discarded. And if you are truly present in your work, you are going to feel something when it is either celebrated or, in this case, degraded.

It is a funny irony that this body of work was originally made from recycled materials from my studio. The real critique at the time was I couldn’t afford art supplies to make the work so why not just make work from the dumpster as a critique of material history and art world class. Why not? All good artists did this from Rauschenberg to Johns to Nevelson to wonderful Outsider artists have done it. And I admire the ecological framework and model of recycling.

When these sculptures were made at the beginning of my career the conceptual drive was retaliation against beauty. The beauty standards we historically place on the best works of art. It was a little punk rebellion to the art history canon but now has become a character in a story about how we determine and assign value to works of art once they leave the studio, and when and how, and where do artworks land when they are deemed uncouth enough to hang next to the cool kids in the collection anymore.

Also, I will state cool kids and artists never care about where the work hangs, but do care about context, and the integrity of their work. If you are genuinely emotionally, financially invested in anything you do, feigning you don’t care about it is, well…not true. How could you make something that you genuinely cared about and then just casually pass it off as no attachment. It is the classic breakup scenario.

Several years earlier, Saatchi had quietly sent one of the two pieces in question to an auction house in London. Artists are rarely informed in their work goes to auction for sale unless there is a question about the provenance or titling of the work. And for the most part once art leaves the studio into the commodity game all bets are off. But as the person who made this piece and labored to make it into something great it still burns when fifteen or even twenty years later it sells sometimes for barely 10% of its original price—roughly the cost of taking a friend out for nice meal. The art game has never been structured for the actual artists who make the work to come out on top. From the very beginning the scarcity model works for those who acquire the work, and then if decided when to sell and why.

Thankfully, Cleanse, Fold, and Manipulate, the companion to Vivisection, found a temporary reprieve with a young, budding collector and auctioneer in London. Like many good works of art these days, it had been silently led to Sloane Street Auctions and acquired for significantly less than its original price. But I received a wonderful, earnest email from Alex Halveron Jones, and I thought it would be better to have the work kept by someone who genuinely loved it than left sitting in a warehouse, listed under an Excel spreadsheet, waiting to see if the price rose—or fell—enough to justify a resale on the secondary market.

It’s a strange, bittersweet symmetry: one piece teetering on the edge of disappearance, the other gently held in someone’s care, suspended between memory and marketplace.

When Saatchi sent the ultimatum email, we weren’t sure who would be able—or willing—to acquire such a large work with such short notice. We reached out to Alex, who was excited to take the companion piece. With that, the situation was momentarily resolved. Until now as the raffle on Instagram unfolds.

Just a few weeks ago, Alex reached out again to let me know he was moving. Despite his genuine excitement and enthusiasm for the sculpture, he needed to find it a new home. And so, the refugee status of these artworks continues.

So much about the world of post-secondary sales exists in a kind of silent ember. Rarely do artists talk publicly about the reselling their work except in passing, maybe during a bathroom break at a gallery dinner. But let’s face it even gallery dinners rarely happen these days. And when they do, they’re usually take-and-go affairs.

Additionally, no one wants to talk about the real reasons things get sold: the economy is struggling. Good work circulates for complex, often uncomfortable reasons—death, bankruptcy, divorce. Or more recently, ideological tensions—like the fallout from the Israel–Palestine conflict can trigger sudden, silent purges from the back rooms of collections.

As someone who genuinely loves making work, I find it strange to want to keep moving forward while also having to contend with the resurfacing of pieces I made twenty years ago—like a well-meaning friend from high school who shows up out of nowhere. The memories feel great for one night, but in the end, we long to return to our quieter, more stable lives.

Except that for artists, there is no separation. The work is the life. And the question many of us are now facing is: How do we protect what we’ve made? Do I really have to destroy my life’s work in order to survive? And then who gets to profit off the work not destroyed? Those who have the power to keep going long after everyone else files for bankruptcy?

There’s a privilege in having made something, in having it shown publicly, and even in having someone purchase it. It’s an even rarer reward when your work is acquired by a prestigious collection—the icing on the cake.

But there’s another, quieter privilege I’m only now beginning to understand watching work you’ve made reappear—sometimes through auction, sometimes through email, sometimes through the looming threat of destruction.

This writing comes after several years of experiences like these transactions that bypass galleries and land directly in the artist’s inbox. The convenience of forgetting history is something artists are constantly reminded of, as we navigate a system that profits from blaming us when things go wrong. And this writing comes out of embarrassment, reclaiming a quiet shame about works I was once told were incredible then discarded. Pieces that were compared to wedding rings promises that they would never, ever, ever be let go of.

Well. Time always has a way of showing the true value.

The big should’ve, could’ve, would’ve questions could be worth exploring. But in the end, we are in the trenches as artists, having to deal with the wreckage.

Perhaps the dealers knowingly sold work at overinflated prices—or perhaps they didn’t. Either way, here we are again, circling the same conversation: Who shoulders the weight of bad decisions?

Just last week, I was trying to explain the financial urgency I’m under not just how to pay my studio rent, but how to avoid destroying the work I’ve already made. One response I got from a dealer was: “Yeah, such a hard time. What a reckoning.”

But who is really feeling this reckoning?

Who has made money, quietly closed up shop, and gone on with their life without absorbing the emotional consequences of those past transactions?

Artists are.
We are.

Because it feels like an abandoned child. You can’t just look away when you’ve given your heart and soul to bring something into the world.

The middle managers of the art world rarely contend with the emotional vulnerability and labor required to make good work. Nor do they deal with the residue the discarded objects, the sold-off ghosts of what was once a shared exchange. The system is structured to move on to the next desperate, brilliant, raw talent. And so the cycle continues.

But I keep coming back to a question we all ask, silently or aloud:

If those who make harmful decisions never face the financial consequences, is public shame the only path to justice?

Even then, people’s memories are conveniently short especially when there’s a chance to flip a piece for a minor profit. The artist, once shamed or abandoned, is suddenly rediscovered—repackaged and revalued by the very tastemakers who once discarded them.

And then there's the stickiest part origin stories, point-of-sale value, and where the work ends up. I thought about titling this piece To All the Ones I’ve Loved Before—a kind of homage to the artworks I genuinely loved that now float in a strange liminal space, the byproducts of bankruptcies, divorces, ideological disputes, and estate liquidations.

A few scenes and past works I loved that still burn in my head:

· The first major colored pencil piece I ever made—bought, then re-sold at auction and acquired by a great younger collector, for a great price.

· The billionaire who said they were opening a museum and would never sell—but did.

· The wonderful collectors whose children didn’t want their collection—including several works from my first museum retrospective. One was an actual gift.

· The gifts sting differently than the purchases.

· And lastly, the collector who bought work at a steep discount, swore they’d only donate to a museum if the time came, and then—after we traded their sculptures for their retirement condo—still ended up sending those drawings to auction less than a year later. The sting of that decision still lingers.

One thing remains true:

Art will never die.

It is like vermin—tenacious, unsettling, uninvited, unstoppable.

It resurfaces even when you thought it was gone.

Make it out of garbage.

Sell it as glitzy garbage.

Or throw it back into the garbage.

Someone will find the pieces and make the next masterpiece.