We want to be in community as we walk together through this time.

We (Andrew Simonet, Mama Nef Partlow-Myrick, and Victor Rodgers) are hosting a free weekend workshop for Baltimore area artists. We will use Artists U prompts and tools to build conversations around resources, wellbeing, artistic practice, and the audiences and communities around our work, all of it in the context of this chaotic and dispiriting moment.

This workshop is an opportunity to build clarity around your artistic practice and the resources that sustain it. It is community organizing, creating positive and rigorous conversations across artistic disciplines, ages, and cultures.

It is specific and practical: the principles, tools, and prompts artists use to make sustainable lives and to make the art and impact that matters most to them.

This work is grounded in your practice and intentions. We don’t know what you should do (obviously). Nothing here is prescriptive. We are not here to “fix” artists. That’s our whole point: Artists aren’t broken, artists are geniuses. Let’s be geniuses, together. Let’s be as creative and resourceful in making our lives as we are in making our art.

There’s nothing wrong with you. The structures of the art world teach us to blame ourselves for struggles which are, in fact, systemic. Building dialogue and solidarity is a powerful remedy. You are not alone.

Artists are incredible. As you know. Many of us face similar struggles. And artists have figured out brilliant ways of making it work. This is where our conversation begins.