If you have a chance to visit Los Angeles this Fall, don’t miss the newly opened Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. You will see and experience a truly new vision of what a museum can be. 

The art is curated into four large interconnected areas, organized across time and origin into  a global context: art of the Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Mediterranean Sea, and Atlantic Ocean. While each gallery is full of ideas, the visitor’s experience is not intellectual but visceral, and feels light. You can ignore the daily docent tours and trust your own eyes as you discover remarkable visual connections among disparate works of art.  

For example, in an area titled “Japan: Living Landscapes, Flowing Waters,” June Wayne’s 1972 lithograph (pictured above)  is shown in the context of Japanese and Korean kimonos, woodblock prints, and screens from centuries before. Each work illuminates the others.  

Around the corner, in “Blue and White Porcelain of East Asia,” another set of remarkable visual connections is made. The Japanese avante garde ceramicist Harumi Nakashima’s abstract sculpture sits next to traditional blue and white porcelain jars from the Hung and Josean Dynasties.  

These visual connections  have a powerful impact on the viewer, because you see them before you understand what you’re seeing. You slow down, you look, you pay attention, and then you understand. You are an active participant rather than a respectful observer. You are delighted by your own discoveries.  

The Geffen Galleries are accessible in every sense of the word. The museum is free to LA county residents, and reasonably priced for others. The guidebook is small, 4 x 6 inches, thick with images and easily packable, and costs $15. 

Happily, the guidebook is titled “Wander.”

As many of you know, the gallery model of selling art has been changing, with with many high profile and mid-level galleries closing, moving online, or becoming “art consultants.”

So how do you know that a gallery is viable, that it’s on the way up instead of beginning to close down? What are the signs? 

First, check their open hours. They don’t have to be open every day, but their hours should be visible and consistent: Wednesday through Saturday from 11-5 is fine. The gallery should also have a staff, not just the director and an intern. They should have a marketing, events, or social media person on board. 

If you’re an emerging artist looking for your first gallery, consider newer galleries rather than blue chip galleries nearing the end of their life cycle. New galleries are often listed on New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA). 

Your gallery should be actively promoting their artists online, both on artsy and instagram. Look to see if they attend art fairs, even smaller or regional fairs. Not only is this visibility good for their artists, but it also shows that they are financially successful. Art fairs cost at least $10,000 for a gallery to participate, so you know they have income to invest. 

But if your favorite gallery is not in a position to go to art fairs, don’t dismiss it.  Just check to see if they are active, hosting art talks, participating in local art walks  or collaborating on events with local businesses. A good gallery maintains relationships in the community as well as relationships with collectors. 

So don’t give up on galleries. Just find one that is still working hard to create a market for your work. 

I often think about the porous boundaries between life and art. Artists experience this when struggles in life present obstacles to their practice but then end up adding depth and meaning to the work.  Those of us who love art find that it can help and even heal us.  A long time ago I was overcome  by the grief of personal loss when a roomful of Cezanne’s paintings began to bring me back to life.

Such porous boundaries animate a remarkable exhibition I recently saw at the University of Michigan’s Stamps Gallery (part of the School of Art & Design).  “Breath, fragment, return,” by the artist Marianetta Porter, asks us to look at discarded or overlooked objects from the past in order to understand people and events that were invisible. 

Porter creates art out of ordinary objects: clothespins, ironing boards, and tea towels.  Her art  continues the legacy of Duchamp’s famous readymades, yet feels fresh and  original. While Duchamp took ordinary objects and declared them to be art, Porter elevates such objects  to honor the history of domestic work done by black women.  Her series of letterpress prints documents the Atlanta Washerwomens’ strike in 1881.  She takes these domestic objects, frames them thoughtfully, and elevates them into quiet and powerful political statements. 

Porter’s work reminds us that sources of inspiration are all around us. We can find art everywhere, both inside the artist and out in the world. Her genius is to help us see what we might otherwise ignore, as we find new meaning in the simplest things. 

So think about it.  How do porous boundaries between life and art show up in your studio practice?

Recently the artist Julie Mehretu delivered an extraordinary speech to artists graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. Please read it for yourself (here) and let me know what you think. 

I was struck by her understanding of how important it is for creative people to be comfortable with uncertainty, both in life and in art. This advice to artists applies to all of us, especially when we’re feeling lost or overwhelmed. 

Here’s how she describes uncertainty:

“The most necessary work comes from the willingness to stay in the discomfort of the open question, to resist the urge to conclude before the thing is ready to conclude.  What I am describing is one of the hardest and most disciplined practices available to a human being, the practice of remaining inside uncertainty, of making something from nothing, of reaching into the radical imaginatory for a thing that did not exist before and could not have been planned.”

Many artists wonder how to continue making art in the face of the chaos out there in the world and sometimes in our own lives. Artists wonder whether making art matters, whether it can make a difference or make anything better. Remaining open, staying inside uncertainty means you don’t know the answers to the big questions but allow yourself to go on, trusting your own creative process without trying to predict the future. 

Sometimes we face impossible dilemmas, or just difficult decisions. The hardest thing to do is to live with not knowing what to do long enough to allow for new possibilities.  We can’t always find answers to our dilemmas by asking AI or doing a goggle search. Sometimes we need creative solutions that come only  after periods of great uncertainty. 

As some of you know, I’m writing a book on career skills for artists. I’ve worked on the book for a long time now, while coaching artists and keeping up with all the changes in the art world.

Sometimes I get too busy to work on the book, and then weeks or months go by, and it gets hard to get back to it. I know you sometimes have the same problem, when the demands of your life overwhelm you, and it seems impossible to work on your first priority: making art.

When you’re trying to return to a regular studio practice, try the method I use for my own work. I call it the 15 minute rule. You spend 15 minutes, every day, working on your neglected project. You do it first, before you get distracted by any other demands, and stop after 15 minutes, no matter how much you’ve accomplished. The next day you do the same thing, and when it becomes easy you build up to 30 minutes a day until you’ve re-established the rhythm of a regular practice. 

Here’s why the 15 minute rule works. First, it’s easy. You can do anything for 15 minutes! More important, it shifts your mental energy. Instead of feeling guilty about NOT working on your project, you’re back at it. Then during the rest of the day, your work is alive in your brain. You think about it, you get new ideas, you have made it real again. You’ve taken all the negative energy and guilt of “not working on it” and used it to create a fresh start.

The 15 minute rule will help you get any task done, especially those you’re avoiding. 

Note: I wrote the first draft of this post in 15 minutes. 

When you are stuck, you sometimes think the problem is out there in the confusing, ever-changing demands of the art world. Those factors do impact artists, but your struggles might also be internal. You are not moving forward because you’ve lost confidence in yourself and your work.

​We use the phrase “lost confidence” as though it’s a thing, a sock hiding behind the dresser. Confidence is not an object but a process, a set of behaviors you can choose. 

You build confidence by doing things that are not easy for you. You work gradually, in steps, learning as you go. The idea is to get out of your own head, with its infinite loops of hope and despair, and to take your art back out into the world.

If you’ve stopped making art, the first step is to return to a daily practice. Start gradually, even just 15 minutes a day, until you have reminded yourself that you are, indeed, an artist. 

Then you might decide to get feedback on your work.Artists sometimes use critique groups for this purpose, but I find that partnering with one other artist can be a good way to begin. Choose your partner carefully! Find someone you trust, and share your works-in-progress, talking through your intentions and how you evaluate the results.

Consider whether you need to develop new skills or gain new knowledge. It might be time to take a class or workshop, to apply for a residency, or to take your art in a new direction.

When you’re ready, think about reaching out to new audiences.This takes courage, but gradually you feel less vulnerable because you are building a foundation of confidence, one step at a time.