On the invisible labor of being an artist

A few weeks ago, my friend Morgan visited me. Morgan is a full-time artist and runs her own gallery in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Her primary goal for this trip was to go to a home in San Diego to give an art consultation— specifically to propose site-specific paintings that would be made in response to the landscape that the home occupied. Morgan is now working on those large-scale paintings in San Diego, but before she arrived there, she stayed with me in Los Angeles.

During that time, she updated me about what was going on in her preparation for this trip: drafting email newsletters, creating presentations, responding to clients and interior designers, taking calls from framers and art printers, and more.

I'm not inundated with these kinds of tasks at the level that Morgan is, but I can certainly empathize with a lot of what she has to accomplish, which is all in addition to the actual making of the art.

It was a timely conversation for me, because I'd just finished a big website redesign effort, and I got to share that with her. I shared that I switched from paying for Squarespace to house my website, to coding it myself. I have some background in building websites, but actually doing it myself was never something I felt I could do or keep up with once it was done.

Part of why I did this was because I've been examining all parts of my digital footprint and assessing what makes sense for me to support and what doesn't. For me, this has meant deleting Facebook, Threads, and all things Google (Chrome, Gmail, etc.). Unsubscribing from a lot of these platforms proved to be difficult and time-consuming, but extremely rewarding. I became more motivated than ever to bring awareness and intentionality into my digital world. The main goal was to not support companies I felt were unethical, but I was also learning ways I could own and do things myself— to decentralize from big tech, and in some cases, tech altogether.

Once you start researching "ethical ways to do X," it starts a chain reaction. You start looking at everything through that lens. After I checked off the first few big goals I had, my website was next.

It was a bit of a project, and I got stuck plenty of times along the way. There were mornings spent trying to figure out why modals weren't opening, or why images weren't rendering. There were days spent researching how to move my email from Google to Proton. There were nights spent requesting transfer codes to move my domain name from Squarespace to Cloudflare. When it was finally done, I felt proud. Not only did it look clean and beautiful, it was going to save me a lot of money. For an artist, that can be a make or break factor in deciding to have a website at all. I went from spending over $300 a year to $10 a year (which is just the domain hosting fee from Cloudflare).

We can do it all, and more often than not— we do. Morgan is always a good reminder of that. During her visit, I watched her juggle all of this in real time. One morning she was on a call with an interior designer talking logistics about an upcoming project. An hour later, she was talking to a gallery attendant who was trying to facilitate a sale for her while she was away. That afternoon she was showing me newsletter templates she created on Canva. Shortly after that, she was working on a presentation to show a client. Somewhere in between all of this, she had to think about the paintings she'd be making in San Diego—the actual art-making that all of this infrastructure exists to support.

Somehow she manages to be a mentor, gallery owner, business owner, consultant, curator, project manager, graphic designer, web designer, photographer, videographer, grant writer, content writer, social media strategist, and more. It's undeniably impressive, and I don't think we talk about it enough.

We incorrectly assume that being an artist means we spend all our time making art, but in my experience, I find that artists are mostly doing all the other stuff. In my case, that meant spending the last month building my own website to show my paintings. This is my version of "the other stuff" beyond my painting practice right now— building a website from scratch and bringing awareness to how many skills are required to share your art.

I fully recognize that there are varying degrees of complexity in some of these tasks, and that it's perfectly acceptable to ask for help. I also acknowledge that I was able to accomplish the website project because I set a lot of other things down. I haven't really participated in social media in over a year, and that's meant that I haven't needed to be a social media strategist, photographer, or a videographer. It allowed for more time for other things. I've been able to prioritize projects I never thought I'd have time for. The website has been one of many. It sounds dramatic, but it's true.

I'm not saying every artist should drop social media or build their own website. I'm saying that the labor required to be a working artist extends far beyond the studio, and we rarely talk about it. We celebrate the finished paintings, residencies, and exhibitions, but we rarely talk about the hours spent on presentations, emails, phone calls, applications that go nowhere, or (in my case) late nights figuring out DNS settings.

Morgan does it all and makes it look effortless. I do some of it and had to drop other parts to make room. Every artist navigates this differently, but I think it's pretty clear that we're all doing and carrying more than people see. I think it's worth naming that. I think it's worth acknowledging that being an artist isn't just about making art. So much time is spent on everything else we do to make sure that our art reaches the world.

I think part of why we don't talk about this is because it doesn't fit the romantic image of what it means to be an artist. We want to believe that artists spend their days covered in paint, lost in creative flow. We believe this narrative because it's what performs well on social media. It's what gets the likes. The reality of being an artist is more complicated. There are more emails than paintings, and more logistical problems than breakthroughs. Though, none of these truths make the work any less valid. If anything, it makes it more impressive that we keep making and sharing our art at all.

More soon,
Kevin