We are living in a time of adversity, complete with its own ugly, venomous toads at the helm, and would do well to remember lessons of the past. I find inspiration in the life and career of the sculptor Ruth Asawa, currently having a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (the exhibition travels to New York’s MoMA in the Fall).

Although Asawa’s remarkable sculptures need no backstory to explain their power, her life as an Asian woman artist contains multiple examples of overcoming real obstacles and discrimination embedded in the law.

Born in California into a family of Japanese immigrants, Asawa was 16 when they were sent to a Japanese internment camp. Despite this wartime oppression, she learned how to draw from artists and illustrators also interned at the camp. She originally wanted to be a teacher, but again her Japanese ancestry denied her a teaching position during the war, so she decided to concentrate on art. Later, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, she studied with Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller. She began to create the suspended, looped and tied wire sculptures for which she would become famous.

When Asawa married the architect Albert Lanier, interracial marriages were illegal in all but two states, so the couple moved to San Francisco, where she found her place in the art community. Defying all stereotypes about what was possible for a woman artist, she and Lanier had six children. 

Every time Asawa encountered an obstacle, she managed to move through it, and found a precious jewel of possibility. 

Faced with misbehaving technical devices, most of us have figured out a simple hack: turn it off, unplug it, start again. A similar principle applies with human communication: change the channel. 

The artists I know complain that nobody answers their inquiries. You craft a careful email message, asking for information, or requesting a meeting, or presenting a proposal. You leave your contact information, and look forward to a quick response.  

And then nothing happens. No one answers, or even acknowledges the message. Many of us begin to fill the silence with our own insecurities, deciding they hated the proposal, or found the question inappropriate. Then we give up. 

My best advice is to change the channel of communication. If you sent an email, follow up with a phone call. If you’ve been texting and suddenly all goes silent, make a phone call. If your contact is a local organization, visit them in person. If you’ve submitted a written proposal through an online process, send it again via snail mail, or send an inquiry via LinkedIn or Instagram. Try alternate means of communication at least three times. Then wait two weeks (unplug yourself), and do it again. This is like a system reset. 

The reason all of this is necessary is that we now communicate on too many channels, and they get overloaded. The circuits are jammed. You can check your route on google maps, to find out if there’s too much traffic, but communication  channels are not easily seen.  

And don’t forget to try an old-school method of communication – ask somebody.  I was recently frustrated because an editor wasn’t answering my emails. A friend who knew her personally explained, “Oh, didn’t you know? She just had a baby.” 

Artists are never only one thing. Your creativity flows in many directions.  Painters paint abstracts and landscapes, which may turn into abstract landscapes. Sculptors create figures but also make ceramic boxes. Visual artists experiment with sound.

All of this imagination seems natural and right, until your art starts getting criticized or misunderstood. “She hasn’t yet found her voice,” they say; “his work is all over the place.” Galleries are famous for this attitude, asking  artists to present “a coherent body of work.”

So what do you do? Should you stick to one theme, one medium, one process? The answer is a resounding no, but it’s still your job to help viewers understand how your work makes sense as a whole. You don’t need to put yourself in a box, but you might need to find the right umbrella. 

A good umbrella lifts you up (think Mary Poppins). It places your work in a larger context. It can be straightforward, where you have a series of explorations using different media, or different materials. Perri Howard says that her artwork “resides within the emerging genre of New Polar Aesthetics, expressed through painting, drawing, sculpture, and sound.” Sometimes your umbrella is a broad concept. Nina Elder states that she is “an artist and researcher whose work focuses on changing cultures and ecologies.” Even when you focus on one subject, it may express multiple meanings. Janet Jacobs explains: “Light is my primary subject. It is the way we see in the world. It’s how all things grow on the earth, and it is a metaphor for awareness.” 

Remember, Mary Poppins’ umbrella had magical powers. It became her  parachute into new places and a compass pointing her in the right direction. Where will your umbrella take you?

Amy Sherald is best known for her iconic portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama (2018). When she was honored with this commission, she had been creating  portraits of Black Americans for over a decade. Now, in her first major retrospective, we see 50 works that express what she calls her Democratic vision, portraits of everyday Black Americans.

Sherald’s portraits reveal the quiet dignity and strength of individuals going about their everyday lives. A man sits atop a tractor, proud to be a farmer when his ancestors were forbidden to own land. “The Bathers” shows two young girls holding hands, dressed in colorful two-piece bathing suits, in a wry commentary on earlier works by Renoir and Cezanne. A man in a polka dot shirt smiles shyly, and is simply titled “Handsome.” 

Sherald describes how she finds her subjects: “I look for something I’d call presence—this quiet magnetism that pulls me in. It’s really about seeing someone who feels like they already have a story to tell, even before I paint them.”

The portraits seemingly refuse to make political statements.   These individuals  do not represent anything other than themselves. They simply claim their humanity, in what Sherald calls “a gentle presentation of Black identity.”   

So it is shocking to find ourselves in this political moment, when images of Black Americans are being flagged for removal in a purging of DEI content. Just as Sherald’s exhibition travels from SF-MOMA to New York’s Whitney Museum, the goons now in power are attempting to eliminate the historical record of achievement by people of color. This includes  images of the Tuskegee Airmen, the nation’s first Black military pilots in World War II. 

These heroic figures live on in the faces of Sherald’s everyday Black Americans.

Many artists distinguish between their art practice and having a “real job.” They are happy to have the freedom and flexibility that comes from doing creative work. They remember the restrictive aspects of having what we used to call a “job job.”

• You have to get dressed and go to work every day
• There are clearly defined hours and responsibilities
• You see friends and family after work or on the weekends
• You need to meet objectives set by your manager 
• Some parts of the job are boring and repetitive
  
  

But maybe you should think again. What if you took these seemingly negative constraints and built them into your art practice?

• You would get up, get dressed and go to your studio most days
• You would stay there for a set number of hours
• Friends and family wouldn’t interrupt you since you are “at work”
• You would manage yourself, setting goals and finding ways to get feedback
• You learn how to work through the boring and repetitive parts of your day
  
  

By treating your art practice as a real job, you build in the structure and accountability that help you make progress long enough to succeed. By setting boundaries, you give your art-making the respect it deserves. People gradually stop expecting you to interrupt your studio time to run their errands. Family members begin to hold their “urgent” questions until after you’re off work. 

Most important, you let go of your own ambivalence and second-guessing about what you should be doing with your time. You have a job. You’re in the studio, at work, and everything else can just wait. 

Even if you don’t make New Year’s Resolutions, take the time to look ahead and think about what you want to accomplish. 

What will it take to reach your most challenging goals? Most of us can visualize what success would look and feel like, but when we try to see the path forward, it seems to be full of obstacles. These big boulders and little rocks, which can be both internal and external, get in the way of progress. They often take the form of “if onlys.” If only I had an MFA, if only my kids were older, if only I lived in a bigger city. When you focus on conditions that are hard, or even impossible to change, you end up sitting down in the middle of your path. 

Don’t hang on to dysfunctional  behaviors and ways of thinking, as they can provide an excuse for staying stuck. It’s better to focus on what you do have, your strengths and resources, your talent and your vision. Remember what you’ve already accomplished, no matter how long it took. When you let go of your “if onlys” you make space for positive energy and new ideas.  

As you think about what it will take to reach your most challenging goals, keep the focus on actions within your control. Ask yourself questions like these:

• What choices do I need to make now? 
• What conversations do I need to have?
• What distractions can I remove from my life and practice?
• What activities and relationships do I need to let go?
• How can I make better use of my time?

When you start getting answers to your questions, identify next steps. In this way you have the beginnings of a plan for the New Year.