ArtSake

As an artist, where you intend to go at the outset of a new work isn’t always where you end up. You may start with an idea but in realizing it be led into surprising, even bewildering territory.

We asked artists in different disciplines: “What’s the most unexpected journey your art has taken?”

Marguerite White, drawing and mixed media artist
In 2006 I was commissioned to make a public piece for the AHa Festival in New Bedford. I fell in love with a condemned building on the State Pier and proposed an elegant and complex wall drawing involving ethereal white wash images and shadows projected like Batman signals. I imagined a serene ghostly “event” – quiet, understated. I hadn’t taken into account the siding – lichen encrusted, corrugated asbestos – (almost) nothing would stick on top of the distorted surface. Then there was the rogues gallery of onlookers. I needed a new plan.

I ended up mounting steel silhouettes and halogen lights in front – the sundown would push shadows across the wall. I bought a used copy of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and a case of spray paint. I snapped chalk lines across the curvy surface; I called my little brother for tips on “can control.” I only blew the fuses in the fish house once.

Ensuing weeks of rain and wind had me fairly unhinged. I recounted the mariner’s story to anyone who asked; men from Parks and Rec on rider mowers, truckers waiting for loads of scallops, stoned fishermen, confused tourists – they all dug it – my unplanned introduction to performance art.

Mary Jane Doherty, filmmaker
In 2007 I had an idea: to film one high school class in Cuba’s world famous National Ballet School from their auditions to their graduation three years later. And, I’d focus exclusively on pure imagery and ambient sound, material that could not be translated into words.

Good. Over the course of twenty trips to Cuba my central characters emerge, my lyrical poem unfolds. Eventually, I followed the top students to South Africa, Italy and, finally to Toronto for their exhibitions. Not much happened in Toronto, so I dashed down to Havana ahead of the students so I could film their arrival and thus have an ending to my film poem.

At the airport, I’m glommed on to my viewfinder as usual while “my” teenagers file through the arrivals door. The arrivals door shuts and I realize, with a sudden full body rush of adrenalin, that Mayara – my main character, my shy, enigmatic star dancer – Mayara is not here.

It turns out, no Cuban high school student has defected to the US before. And, just like that, my film shifts from a serene poem to a full blown drama, the stuff fiction filmmakers dream about.

Patricia Stacey, writer
E.M. Forester famously asked, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” The notion that we really don’t know ourselves exactly, completely, until we begin to create art, is one of the guiding principles that keeps me working and keeps me confident that the emptiness of the pages is a promise and not a threat. Lao Tzu says that the part of the bowl that is most valuable to us is the part that is empty. Every time we move toward filling that blank space, we are moving both toward what we know and away from what we know. Writing for me is like dreaming. I wake up afterwards and wonder what happened and who made it happen; all of it is unexpected. One day, while I was teaching some Jr. high students how to use random characters and objects to create a story, I pulled two words out of a hat: hair dresser and razor, and in the moment two characters came into being, a gay man and his lover who liked to shave people before he made love to them. The novel that followed turned into an exploration into my past in ways I never would have imagined. I wrote about the Mexican cities my mother took me to when I was very young, obsession and the inability we lovers have of reaching our passionate objects, which like the horizon, have a way of melting backwards. I wrote about cowboys, chaparral near the ocean, a hacienda, and bath houses. The story turned out to be a quilt of me. But when I stepped back, it was a pattern that was wholly new.

Michael Mack, poet, playwright, and performer
Neither my art nor my life feel entirely “true” to me unless I find in them something surprising, risky, and strangely beautiful. This has been true in the writing of my solo play Conversations with My Molester: A Journey of Faith, which explores a darkness that has haunted me since I was a child. The play opens with me as a boy being raised in a devout Catholic family, and dreaming of becoming a priest to fully participate in the mysteries of the faith. That dream ended at age 11 when my pastor invited me to the rectory to help him with what he called “a project.” In the decades following his trespass, I felt deeply estranged – both from the Church and from myself. But by writing this play – which I experienced as an act of spiritual truth-telling – I rediscovered what is still luminous and beautiful about the Church, while also revealing what is so very human. As I brought this story to page and stage as a lyric drama, I was surprised to find myself reclaiming the Church as my own – life imitating art imitating life in all its mystery.

Mary Jane Doherty’s film Secundaria recently premiered at the Independent Film Festival Boston.

Michael Mack is the writer/performer of the one-man show Conversations with My Molester: A Journey of Faith.

Patricia Stacey is author of The Boy Who Loved Windows.

Marguerite White is among the artists in New Bedford Harbor in a New Light at the New Bedford Art Museum (5/6-8/22, opening reception Sat. May 11, 3-6 PM).

What is YOUR most unexpected journey as an artist? Share a comment and join the conversation.

Image: Marguerite White, installation view of STAGEFRIGHT (2013), cut paper, taxidermy, turntables, flashlights, vellum, 9×12 ft.

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The creative process takes innumerable twists and turns, but in our conversations with artists, we sometimes ask them to describe an unexpected turn in their own personal story.

Here, we ask artists from a range of disciplines: Share a surprise twist in your story.

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, writer
I feel like the surprise twists keep coming! But let’s go with my mother’s response when I informed her that her daughter planned to take a perfectly good, freshly minted Harvard JD and use it to become an unemployed writer: “Thank God, I never thought you’d be happy as a lawyer.” I’ll always be grateful she said that. (Though I do sometimes wish she’d spoken up before I racked up three years of law loans!)

Charlotte Meehan, Artistic Director of Sleeping Weazel
I’m a 9/11 refugee. If the tragedy of that day had not occurred, I might still be living in my fifth floor walk-up on Grand and Mulberry in Little Italy. Shocks me to say this as a die-hard New Yorker, but I’m very glad to be here in New England where the sky is endless and there’s time to dream. I’m also very excited by the explosion of new theatre companies in Boston right now.

Huckleberry Delsignore, crochet artist
I have no clue how to read a crochet pattern.

Daphne Kalotay, writer
My novel, Russian Winter, came out in Macedonian. I didn’t even know what the language was and had to look it up… Who would have thought such a thing would happen for a traditional, realistic novel by a writer whose work is usually described as “quiet?”

Ellen Wetmore, multi-disciplinary artist
I sometimes wish I was a surgeon. The money! The fame! The civic praise!

Ilie Ruby, writer
Well, talk about a confluence of events, not two months after my husband and I decided to adopt 3 children from Africa, I received word that my novel had been accepted for publication. I had waited for both things for such a long time. As synchronicity would have it, they both came along at once! So, I became a new mom and a new author within the span of a few months! What followed was a whole lot of learning, growing, and editing manuscripts while sitting at my daughter’s soccer practice and on the bench at the playground. It is a juggling act to say the least – but one I wouldn’t change for the world! This has undoubtedly been one of the most magical times of my life.

Jason Grote, playwright/screenwriter
My real name isn’t Jason Grote.

Liz Devlin, curator (with a surprise twist we ardently hope never comes to pass)
Our protagonist steps on stage to accept her Lifetime Achievement Award, and then spontaneously bursts into flames. Surprise!

What’s the surprise twist in your story? Leave a comment to join the conversation.

Image: Still image from an early cut of SECUNDARIA, a film by Mary Jane Doherty, premiering at the Independent Film Festival Boston April 24-30, 2013. The film follows ballet dancers in Cuba, including a young dancer whose story takes a surprising turn.

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Place is a key element of any work of art, but how it shapes, transforms, or (as the case may be) becomes the work depends on the intentions and explorations of the artist.

For instance, in Elizabeth Graver’s new novel The End of the Point, place “is a kind of central character – the rocks, the paths, the land in nature and outside of it. People… beg, borrow, steal, gift, set ablaze, mythologize, tear down, reject and love their rocky, windswept little jut of land.” Read more.

We asked artists in other disciplines: How does place impact your art?

Sarah Malakoff, photographer
My photographs are directly impacted by place, as I concentrate on domestic interiors. I am most drawn to places that seem quite familiar but are also strange, humorous, and telling in some particular way. For me, our spaces, the choices of what we display and what we don’t, can reveal both our desires and shortcomings. For example, recently I’ve been looking at how we decorate with patterns and representations of nature just as we also wall ourselves off and require protection from the elements and outside world. These bits of character that can be inferred from the place lead me to imagine the inhabitants and dramas that may have played out there.

James Rutenbeck, documentary filmmaker
When I was in junior high, a traveling production of Spoon River Anthology played in our small town in eastern Iowa. Edgar Lee Masters’ play is a series of free verse poems spoken by residents of a fictional Midwestern town – one much like my own. The poems probe into place at a granular level but still convey a collective experience. Other works come to mind – Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. I think Spoon River Anthology affected me so deeply because it helped an awkward adolescent process a tenuous relationship with his own town.

Among my most profound life experiences have been the moments when I’ve experienced a deep feeling of community. I wondered if that feeling could be portrayed on screen in non-fiction form. When I started work on Scenes from a Parish, I intended to make an egalitarian film composed of many small narratives, with not one greater than the others. Place would be the film’s central character. I held onto the idea. So many years later, I was still searching for community, this time in a struggling Catholic parish in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Steven J. Martin, screenwriter
Place, specifically the city of Tokyo, was a major force in shaping my screenplay Summation. While it is admittedly clean, safe, vital, and cosmopolitan on many levels, Tokyo is also remarkable for something else: its clockwork. Tokyo is a machine, not unlike the omnipresent “combine” described so eloquently by Ken Kesey in his classic, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Whereas most metropolises thrive day and night in an endless, furious, pulse-like fashion, Tokyo is the definition of controlled chaos. Every train, bus, school, workplace, meal, and entertainment venue operates accordingly, unflinchingly spinning themselves according to the dictates of time, ceremony, rules, and order. It is the most comforting and infuriating scenario imaginable, depending on one’s perspective. Thus the characters of Summation exist within the confines of such a metropolis. There is a compartmentalization of their lives that suffocates, frustrates, as well as activates their choices and their subsequent need to find freedom and closure to their respective dilemmas.

How does place factor into your own work? Share a comment and join the conversation.

Sarah Malakoff‘s work is currently featured in Suburbia, an exhibition at Hagedorn Foundation Gallery in Atlanta, GA (thru 3/16).

Steven J. Martin is screenwriter and an experienced language, literature, and writing teacher in both the U.S. and Japan.

James Rutenbeck‘s film Scenes from a Parish screens at MIT as part of the Urban Film Series (4/4, 7 PM).

Image: Sarah Malakoff, UNTITLED INTERIOR (WORLD), 2010, Digital C print, 32×40 in.

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In art, “place” may be more than a setting. Place may inspire a work, be transformed by the work, be its centerpiece, even serve as its protagonist.

We’ve been asking artists questions about their lives and work, and we asked novelist Elizabeth Graver, whose new novel The End of the Point is centered around the (fictional) Ashaunt Point in Massachusetts: How does place impact your art?

In her 1956 essay, “Place in Fiction,” Eudora Welty writes about the underlying bond that connects all of the arts with place: “All [the arts] celebrate its mystery. Where does this mystery lie? Is it in the fact that place has a more lasting identity than we have?”

The setting of my new novel, The End of the Point — a fictional two mile spit of land on Massachusetts’ Buzzards Bay — does indeed have a more lasting identity than its people. I begin the book with a land transfer from the Wampanoag Indians to the Colonists in 1652 and end it in 1999, when a summer community is under some threat from human and natural forces alike. Place in my novel is a kind of central character — the rocks, the paths, the land in nature and outside of it. People in The End of the Point beg, borrow, steal, gift, set ablaze, mythologize, tear down, reject and love their rocky, windswept little jut of land.

I ended my novel in 1999 because the year felt like a way to mark a time before: Before the century turned, of course, and before 9/11, but also before the rapid acceleration that marks our 21st-century and that I view as having a profound impact our sense of place. We live in a staggeringly mobile age, where place is increasingly as much virtual as real. These crossings bring many gifts and possibilities, but they may also carry a danger of rootlessness, of disembodiment, of an “everywhere” that is, paradoxically, neither here nor there.

My novel’s four main sections take place in 1942, the 1950′s and 60′s, 1970, and 1999. People communicate with each other and themselves in the most material ways – with telegrams, letters, diaries, a message in a bottle. No one has a cell phone. When the characters are alone, they are truly alone. When they talk, they, well, talk (understanding each other is another thing, plus ça change).

What, I wonder, would Welty make of where we are now, roaming the internet on our warming planet, where actual, physical place as we know it may well not have a lasting identity, at least if we don’t radically change course? The title The End of the Point carries a double meaning – “end” as in furthest point on a peninsula, “end” as in demise. In my book, I celebrate the “there-ness” of a beloved place, even as the second meaning, the demise, hovers just outside the margin, too close to home.

Read a review of The End of the Point in the Boston Globe, which calls the author “master chronicler of the ever-spiraling human comedy.”

Elizabeth Graver has local reading events from The End of the Point: AWP Conference, Hynes Convention Center (3/9, 1 PM), Porter Square Books (3/12, 7 PM), Wellesley Books with Jennifer Haigh (3/13, 7 PM), Dean’s Colloquium at Boston College (3/14, 4:30 PM), Newtonville Books with Brian Sousa (3/19, 7 PM), Lincoln Public Library (3/20, 7 PM), and Concord Bookshop (4/7, 3 PM).

Elizabeth Graver is the author of The End of the Point, as well as three other novels: Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her short story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories (1991, 2001); Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards (1994, 1996, 2001), The Pushcart Prize Anthology (2001), and Best American Essays (1998). Graver’s story “The Mourning Door” was award the Cohen Prize from Ploughshares magazine. The mother of two daughters, Elizabeth Graver teaches English and Creative Writing at Boston College.

Read Part II of “How Does Place Impact Your Art?” featuring responses from artists in a range of disciplines.

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Artist grants (such as MCC’s fellowships) often require that submitted work be original, not a translation, adaptation, or interpretation of work by another artist.

But where the dividing line resides between original and interpretation is not always so clear. What about art that begins as an adaptation or interpretation but then veers into entirely new territory? Appropriates imagery, video, or text but then reinvents it into something altogether different? In short, what makes a work of art new? Curious, we asked a range of artists in different disciplines.

KL Pereira, a writer who often draws from mythology and fairy tales
Newness in art (as in life), doesn’t refer to something that’s never been seen before. Every tale, character, every fracture of light across brushstroke has been seen, touched, heard, and dreamed somewhere over the history of the world. Art is new, and made new again, when it achieves enough emotional resonance to stop your heart. To be new, art must cause you to die for a moment, to cease to be, while forcing you to reconsider that which you know and that which you thought you could never know. Art that is new, truly new, must also have the energy and critical magic to inspire not just your resurrection but your renewal. It gives you no choice but to go on.

Jody Weber, a choreographer whose current project adapts/incorporates a work of nonfiction literature
While it is true that modern dance’s pioneers invented movement languages that were revolutionary, modern dance in the twenty first century may rely too heavily on the idea that movement invention is the yardstick for “new” work. We have over one hundred years of valuable modern dance vocabulary that continues to be in creative conversation with the much older language of ballet, and the yet older languages of countless dance forms around the world. For me nothing is “new” beyond the individual artist’s perspective on the world they live in and the way that they engage the language of their form to reflect on this unique moment in time.

Suara Welitoff, a film/video artist who uses appropriated footage
Art comes around and around again and again.

Kieran Jordan, a traditional Irish dancer/choreographer/performer
As an Irish dancer, I work with traditional steps and rhythms that are hundreds of years old. Irish dance steps are usually not transcribed or written down, and there is little standardized terminology for the movements. Steps are passed on through live teaching, and are retained through practice and performance. The repertoire lives in the dancer’s body and mind.

Creating new choreography with “old-style” steps allows me to participate in the Irish dance tradition in an exciting and personal way. The traditional steps provide the vocabulary, but the themes, designs, and new steps that emerge are very much part of a contemporary creative process. I suppose this is why we call it a “living tradition.” As a choreographer, I honor my traditions and continue to probe them – learning and contributing, reviving and creating. Digging into old dances inspires new ones.
Read more and see a video of Kieran’s dancing.

What do you think makes a work of art new? Share a comment to join the conversation.

You can read more enchantments from KL Pereira (@kl_pereira) on her Web site and at grubdaily.org where she blogs about genre fiction. Pereira teaches courses on Crafting the Villain, Horror and Dark Fiction, beginning and intermediate fiction, and novel writing at Grub Street.

Jody Weber recently received grant support from the Somerville Arts Council to support a multi-media dance work that incorporates portions of Jon Turk’s kayak expedition memoir, The Raven’s Gift.

Film/video artist Suara Welitoff recently won the Rappaport Prize from the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.

Kieran Jordan, an MCC Fellow and Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Master Artist, is a performer, teacher, and choreographer of Irish dance. She will be performing with the sean-nós Irish dance show Atlantic Steps at the Berklee Performance Center on March 23rd. Learn more at the artist’s Web site.

Image: still image from RORSCHAK (2010) by Suara Welitoff.

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As we stand before the (nearly) blank canvas that is the year 2013, we thought we’d take the opportunity to look back and share some of our personal favorite posts from the year 2012.

Bill Peters Talks Maverick Jetpants
It was especially fun to interview Bill Peters, a 2008 Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow. His writing has stuck with us through the years for its one-of-a-kind voice. So when we learned that his novel-in-progress had evolved into Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality, recently published by Black Balloon Press (and praised in the New York Times Book Review), we were excited to ask him about the book and its journey.

“The morning I turned in my final copy edits,” he says in the q&a, which is by turns highly entertaining and a fascinating look at the writing craft, “I corrected one last typo while waiting in line at FedEx. I could’ve gone another year editing, another five. After I mailed away the manuscript that morning, I thought: Well, I guess that’s why you write other stuff.”

Cur8or
In exploring new art, we focus a lot on artists making new work (which makes sense), but it would be a mistake to overlook the role that curators have in shaping the local arts scene. So we started asking questions of curators. Eight of them. Thus, Cur8or.

Liz Devlin of FLUX.Boston is hilarious in her Cur8or, but she’s also refreshingly candid about what it means to be a curator: “I think some individuals believe curating is simply a matter of choosing artists you think are cool, getting gussied, and throwing (soirees). … People don’t see you scrambling to pick up work from galleries, crawling on the floor to paint scuffed walls in a side scrunchie, talking artists off the ledge when they are stressed, and waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night because you can’t remember if you bought enough nails from Home Depot.”

Candice Smith Corby and Leslie Schomp, terrific artists besides, curated the intriguing Self-Fabricated, about expressions of self using fabric and stitching. “We were imagining someone else curating us into their show,” they say in their witty and wonderful Cur8or, “both of us wishing some magic curator would call us up. … The lightbulb went off that we could organize our own show.” And to fund the catalog for the exhibition, the artist/curators used USA Projects, a crowdfunding site with a donation/rewards model. Crowdfunding was a major force in the arts in 2012, and we explored it numerous times on ArtSake.

Grinding Out Opportunities
The most visited pages on our blog, by far, are the weekly Artist Opportunities round-ups (not surprising, since y’all are ambitious!). Every week, we assemble a list of calls to artists, residencies, contests, etc., and usually punctuate the posts with an antique or public domain image.

Among these, a personal favorite is the “grinder” drawing above, depicting the future of learning as imagined in the early 1900s. (Though I’m pleased that we, people of the future, have come up with slightly less grindy ways of imparting information.)

The True
2012 was the year of the Mike Daisey controversy, and how “the truth” should be handled in art is, well, a complicated question. We approached the topic from several angles on the blog: in a q&a, nonfiction writer Pagan Kennedy says that there’s never a need to bend the truth to make a story more interesting; “It’s entirely possible to find a whimsical, weird and heart-breaking tale that’s all true.”

In another post, Julie Akeret likens portraying the truth in art as an unearthing process, with different tools for different genres. “In documentary filmmaking, the shovel is a better tool,” says the filmmaker, who has worked in both fiction and nonfiction. “In fiction, I like the pick.”

Art in Response to Art
This year, we started doing semi-monthly posts based on the Artist to Artist model – conversations with artists from different disciplines about topics central to their work and lives. We pose a question to a varied group of artists – such as How Do You Choose Your Titles?, Why Did You Decide to Become an Artist/Presenter?, and How Much Art Do You Give Away? – and compile the different responses, hoping to illuminate both the commonalities and the variances of different artists.

While all of the posts were interesting to put together, perhaps the most gratifying was Art in Response to Art, about artists whose art inspired or was inspired by work by another artist. It was fascinating to see how visions achieved in one medium might translate to or inspire ideas in another.

“Seeing their work on the wall just knocked me out,” says Brendan Mathews, on visual art inspired by his story My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer. “It was a reminder in the best possible way that you don’t control what you create.”

In another Artist to Artist, we asked about how to foster a thriving arts community. Favorite answer? So many good ones, but it might be this, from Scott Listfield, “What makes an art community thrive? You. Doing stuff.”

So artists, keep doing stuff/thriving in 2013. Happy New Year.

Images: cover art for MAVERICK JETPANTS IN THE CITY OF QUALITY (Black Balloon Publishing, 2012); still image from USA Projects video for Self/Fabricated; FRANCE IN XXI CENTURY, SCHOOL, from WikiMedia Commons; still from THE HAIRCUT, a film by Julie Akeret; Maelle Doliveux, from the Cage Full of Beasts series, created in response to My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer by Brendan Mathews.

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At what point is a work of art truly, fully complete? When you’ve achieved your vision? When all final edits have been sent to your publisher? When you’ve simply run out of paint?

We asked artists in a range of disciplines: How do you know when your work is done?

Shelley Reed, painter
It’s never really done, I just can’t bear to work on it anymore. They generally take a long time. I could always go back in and make bits better, but it would be soul-crushing and intensely boring not to move on.

Sean McCarthy, writer
I almost always have an easier time starting stories than I do finishing them. I must have at least a couple dozen “starts” or unfinished stories lying around the drawers of my desk and on my computer. Sometimes it is a matter of lacking a resolution, or needing the right final paragraph or sentence to close, but more often than not, a story doesn’t look or feel finished until I’ve cut absolutely everything that I can. Once I do, and can see the real shape of it, usually things begin to come together, but even after that I’ll usually let it sit for a while. On a rare occasion I’ve had a story accepted at the first place I’ve sent it after just a few revisions, but I’ve had others – many – that I’ve had to send out for a few years before they get in somewhere, and then of course others that never get published at all. Even if I think it’s done, if it comes back cold from the first ten or fifteen places, I’ll sit down and take a look at it again which usually means more cutting.

Cullen Washington, Jr., visual artist
The work is never done. It is always in continuation. I look at the work as a series of solutions. Each piece is a study that is one possible solution out of many. Each one is in conversation with the one before it, as well as offering relevance to the next.

Annette Farrington, writer, artist, and singer/songwriter
I try to work as organically as possible, letting the work lead me intuitively. I believe that each song, writing or painting I produce has a life of its own and I am just the messenger of the creative force. I have to listen very careful and feel very deeply as to what the sounds, words, colors and shapes want to become and also honor them when they tell me the work is finished. Like the Zuni artists who carve the Zuni fetishes – they are intuitively drawn to a rock or gem and they study it very carefully. They listen and feel that the spirit of the stone will reveal itself as to what it wants to be. Once the artist intuits this message he/she begins to carve the animal spirit into the stone. In essence the artist is revealing the stone’s true nature. I try and do this with my work. Of course I also look and say, am I satisfied with this creation, does it do something for me, does it excite me in some way? If the answer is yes then I know it is done.

Scott Tulay, visual artist
With some larger diptychs or a recent tetraptych, which is about 6′-0″ x 7′-0″, I have to work on our large dining room table and rig extensions to the table on the sides to see the whole piece at one time. Usually I start these at night and keep drawing until I can’t stay awake any longer. Because I know we need a place to eat the next day, the drawing is done.

Elizabeth Streb, choreographer
I run out of time or money or get bored or all. Nothing else would act as the impetus for cessation of making a choreographic event.

Michael Zelehoski, visual artist
I hate to say it but when it sells. Until then nothing is safe.

Share your own take in the comments.

Sean McCarthy recently had a fourth story accepted for publication with Glimmer Train, and his story “The Den” placed third in The Ledge Magazine’s Fiction contest, scheduled to be published this spring. Two of his stories published this year were nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Shelley Reed was recently awarded a Traveling Fellowship by the SMFA.

Image: Shelley Reed, TIGER (AFTER LANDSEER AND OUDRY) (2008) oil on canvas, 72×56 in.

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To make art, you sometimes you need to find a way to fund it. These days, that can mean traditional grant funding programs, like MCC’s Artist Fellowships or Local Cultural Council grants, or alternative methods like crowdfunding or microfunding.

We asked a group of artists and funders: What’s the most important thing for an artist to keep in mind in asking for support from a funder?

Joanne Hillman, Chair of the Winthrop Cultural Council, one of MCC’s Local Cultural Councils
Along with an innovative project, I would say that one of the most important things that the Winthrop Cultural Council looks for in an application is how much of the community is served by the applicant. It is also extremely helpful if the applicant “paints a picture” for us about their project – give us the details.
Deadline for applications to the Local Cultural Council Program is October 15, 2012

Sara Archambault, LEF Foundation Program Director
Having clarity about your vision for the project is critically important. This is not just the “what” part of your proposal (i.e. what are you creating?), but also the “why” and “how” and “who.” The process of preparing a grant request may help you achieve this clarity. Funders are often asking questions about your project that you, in your enthusiasm for the work, may not have asked yourself in regards to execution, audience, and feasibility. If you find that you are hitting major stumbling blocks in answering the questions put forward by the funder, have an honest talk with yourself. Is this project ready for review? At LEF, we welcome conversations with potential grantees to help you determine if you are ready to apply. I would see if the foundation you are approaching also invites these conversations. Sometimes speaking with a program officer can be very helpful; if not with potential dollars, then with essential feedback. Additionally, I would recommend that all grant seekers do their research before approaching a funder. Look at their mission and guidelines. Does your project fit the foundation’s program priorities? The next deadline for the LEF Foundation is Friday, January 25th 2013 for letters of inquiry for documentary film projects in the production and post-production stages. Get a jump start on that research here: www.lef-foundation.org!

Stacey Alickman, a visual artist whose USA Projects campaign successfully met its funding goal
Asking friends, family and virtual strangers to give money for your project is awkward. But in the process, I learned how to reach out on behalf of my art. The act of writing and inquiring if someone might be interested in making a pledge actually led to more than just funding for my project. I was offered an opportunity to teach a class, apply for a grant and to be part of a group show. Getting the project funded and consequently having more time to work in my studio is also why I was able to sell three paintings this year. Paradoxically, asking for help is a means to greater self-sufficiency.

Dawn Kramer, MCC Choreography Fellow
The “mantra” that my MassArt class had last spring in the course called “Art, Life, and Money,” was “patience, perseverance, presence.” One never knows who will be on any given panel and what the panelists’ particular interests will be… so it is important to keep trying and not give up hope. Maybe your work is particularly experimental and uses a combination of media, and maybe the panel in one year is particularly traditional. You probably will not be awarded a fellowship that year. However, in another year, the panel may be more avant-garde, and your work will be recognized and appreciated. When you present your work in any form-whether a written proposal or anonymous digital, supporting material – it is important to be as clear and precise as possible about your goals for a particular project or about selecting the “best” visual representation of your art work. If you are submitting video of live performance, remember that five minutes of video-time seems much longer than five minutes of live time, so present your work with that in mind. The first minute of video material will either “grab” the panelist’s attention, or not. Ask someone else to look at your supporting material, especially if it is someone in the arts who does not know your work already. That is the kind of viewpoint that could be very useful in selecting what you present to a panel. Good luck!

For more information on funding opportunities for Massachusetts artists, read our ArtSake guide to local funding and check out our weekly artist opportunities round-up.

Image: photographic still from work choreographed and performed by Dawn Kramer.

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This summer, the Massachusetts new play community got a boost when Polly Carl, David Dower, and others from the American Voices New Play Institute relocated to a new homebase at Emerson College, where they launched the Center for the Theater Commons (learn more about the group at an introductory event in Boston, 9/17, 7:00 PM)

The organization’s focus is international (rather than strictly local), but their work to advance new theater-making runs alongside a burgeoning local new play scene. The time seems right to think about how the landscape for new plays could continue to develop, for the better. So we asked artists: What do you hope to see in the new play community’s future?

David Valdes Greenwood, Huntington Playwriting Fellow
Plays aren’t fully plays until they are live on a stage. I’d love to see more places that use the term “development” actually commit to offering more than table reads and on-book concert readings. An off-book workshop staging, with even the most minimal production values, can help the playwright see the actual nature of the play as theatre, not only as dramatic text. In contrast, endless readings, which allow theatres to say they “develop” new work, do little reveal whether the play has legs in its intended 3-D environment.

Dawn M. Simmons, playwright/director, Co-Artistic Director of New Exhibition Room, Director of Programs for StageSource
I would love to see better funding for both the artists and the companies that produce new work by area writers. I’m also buoyed by the growing appreciation for local writers and new work by Massachusetts’ audiences. If we continue to cultivate that appreciation throughout the Commonwealth and get it to radiate outside of New England to the rest of the US I think we can establish ourselves as a center for artistic innovation in the same way we’re a center for academic and technological innovation.

Shawn LaCount, Artist Director, Company One
I hope to see brave, daring and brilliant playwrights (or theater makers) produced by adventurous, mission driven theater companies (or ensembles) with a focus on the theatrical event, bending and manipulating the form while telling truly relevant stories that reach audiences across age, race and class lines. Local funding would provide a sense of pride, confidence and loyalty among theater makers, theater goers and future theater lovers of all kinds. Boston creates very important new plays. It is high time the region celebrates that work.

Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro, MCC Playwriting Fellow ’11
I think local theaters should lower their ticket prices, put on new work festivals, and open up their dark nights to readings of new works. They should have resident playwrights and monthly writing groups so playwrights, usually the most solitary members of the theater community, feel they have a professional roof over their heads. The development time for new plays should be cut in half and the number of full productions should double. Local arts councils and other grant giving organizations should fund as many individual playwrights as they do theaters. All this might result in more experimental, political, and structurally and emotionally complicated plays both on main stages and in unexpected spaces.

Obehi Janice, performer/writer/director, FUFU & OREOS
rewrite everything. We are a region with an adoration for history, but I think we can do more to rewrite our narratives and tell new stories. For example, rewrite the Boston/NY thing. We know what that thing is, and I’m more than sick of it. Inferiority complex, the Sox versus the Yankees, fame versus local acclaim, it’s all fudge. If you live and work here, you are here for a reason. Bloom where you’re planted and if a new season has better soil, move on to the next. If you are a Bostonian, develop your soil. flip the process. Self-produce, devise, and find new definitions for development. Perform first, and then write (this is my process). Producers can think beyond “community engagement/outreach” and consider new ways of devising theater that change the experience of the Boston audience member. Play-make with the abandon of a kindergartner. If you like your work, try to produce it yourself. If your friends like your work, ask them to help you. Which leads to… seek your tribe. This is a collaborator thing. This is a collective thing, both formal and informal. I guess I’m stealing the tribe-idea from Seth Godin, but I’m Nigerian, so the functionality of like-minded people has been in my cultural history for ever (or, to be blunt, “tribe” has always been in my vocabulary). Maybe your writer’s group can become a producing/presenting organization. Think beyond traditional production. Most importantly, consider helping someone else develop their soil.

a new culture of discourse. I think that what we don’t say is often the loudest statement. What we don’t ask is often the biggest question. For example, I desire more discourse on Black identity politics. I might ask: Where is Black theater in Boston? Is Black culture represented in high art? Does it matter? Why am I the only Black person in this audience right now? What is a Black play? Should a Black play employ a Black director? and Why do I feel hidden? I believe a new culture of discourse can push development forward and make connections more profound, beyond the symbolic way the #1 Bus connects Harvard Square and Dudley Square…

Luckily, new play-making in Boston has no status quo. It is ever-evolving. Every day I sense a shift.

The Massachusetts Cultural Council is currently accepting applications for Artist Fellowships, including in Dramatic Writing, deadline October 1, 2012.

Image: Promotional art from WANDALERIA by David Valdes Greenwood, produced by Argos Productions.

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It can be a slow burn or a lightning strike: the spark of an idea for a new work of art.

Sometimes it starts with an image, or a memory, or a misheard fragment of speech. Or it may start when one artist experiences another artist’s work, a journey of imagination as an art audience that leads to an exploration as creator.

We’re interested in art made in response to other art. So we asked artists, What are your experiences creating work inspired by or inspiring of another artist?

Rodney Wittwer, on a poem inspired by photography
Two of Laura McPhee’s photos specifically inspired lines of “Tire Swing, Frozen River” (read the poem, with McPhee’s photographs). They were part of an exhibition (River of No Return) of her work at the MFA Boston. I did not go there with the intention of writing a poem, but there was something so evocative and overwhelming that I felt compelled to jot down several notes. It wasn’t just the physical size of the photographs (large-scale), but the immensity of landscape in combination with the intensity and intimacy of the girl who appeared in several of them.

Although the poem went through several incarnations, most much longer with expanded narrative, I realized that the essence was really in the original notes I had made at the museum in direct response to McPhee’s work. Thus, the condensed final version.

Interestingly, when I went back to look at my original notes to write this piece for ArtSake, I noticed that the final lines (not related to anything viewed at the MFA) had been written just a couple days earlier; so I like to think I was somehow “prepared” to let the photos inhabit me.

Cristi Rinklin, on an art installation that inspired music
When I approached Shirish Korde to perform in my installation, I was initially drawn to the beauty and meditative quality of his music. Because he is a colleague of mine at the College of the Holy Cross, I thought it would be a great opportunity to finally publicly collaborate. But once we began talking about common themes within our work, the dialogue really took off. When I spoke about my fascination and concern about cycles of creation and destruction that constantly besiege humanity, Shirish talked about similar cycles of decay, destruction, and renewal in Hindu Cosmology. We also talked about parallels between the ways we both combine traditional, hands-on techniques with technology. But once Shirish played for me one of the pieces he planned to perform at the reception for Diluvial, it was like seeing my work come to life in my mind’s eye. In the same way a great soundtrack adds drama and texture to a cinematic moment, Shirish’s music gave my piece gravity and movement, and completely transformed the work’s emotional impact.

Brendan Mathews, on a short story that inspired visual art
In the fall of 2011, a graduate illustration class at the School of Visual Arts used one of my stories – “My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer” – as the basis for a semester-long project (see images from the exhibition with lines from the story). I didn’t know anything about it until one of the students emailed me to let me know there would be an exhibit in New York in the spring. Seeing their work on the wall just knocked me out.

One artist, Keith Negley, did a series of portraits that were so close to my sense of the story that it was like he was there as it was being written. Maelle Doliveux used a single line to explore pain and pleasure in the story; her work was so vivid that it really opened my eyes to way those forces are knit into the setting and the lives of the characters. And Molly Brooks created a graphic novel that imagined a whole other life for one of the characters and that made it her character, not one of mine taken on loan. It was a reminder in the best possible way that you don’t control what you create.

Have you created work inspired by or inspiring of another artist? Share a comment about your experiences.

Rodney Wittwer’s book of poetry, Gone & Gone, will be published by Red Hen Press in September 2012.

Cristi Rinklin’s Diluvial is on exhibit at Currier Museum of Art through September 8, 2012.

Brendan Mathews’s short story My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer was published in Best American Short Stories 2010 and is available as a Kindle download.

Images: Laura McPhee, MATTIE, BOB, AND BO, ROAD CREEK CUSTER COUNTY, IDAHO (2005), courtesy of Carroll and Sons Gallery; Maelle Doliveux, from the series A Cage Full of Beasts.

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