Mentorship Insights for Creatives, Artists, and Art Historians With A Dash of Artist Life Updates
- Alexis Robinson
- Apr 1
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 30
April 1, 2025
Artist Life Updates
My professional life is experiencing some big changes in the coming weeks. I am stepping back from teaching at the end of this week. I’m not leaving entirely, but cutting down hours so I can focus on Seattle's downtown art community and foster a balanced life with more diverse experiences and opportunities. In the new year I realized that my time spent teaching is holding back my growth- and although teaching is rewarding and I have seen significant growth in my abilities over the last year, I feel I have reached a peak, and find myself turning down exciting opportunities to accommodate the immediate needs of my classes. The more time I spend in the classroom the more I feel the ever-present loom of my dwindling self-confidence and ambition.
The decision to step back was difficult, but after considering the time/cost benefit I knew it was the right choice for me. I know I need to add a second position to my professional life to serve my long term career goals, a current impossibility while teaching. At the end of February, I initiated the calculated risk and dropped my teaching hours. If you are interested in how I broke down my cost/benefits and ultimately came to the decision to step down, check back next week for my new post “Stepping Back From Teaching Art”.
My hours drop at the end of this week and I am feeling motivated to push for success. The springtime holds a ripe bushel of opportunities in the downtown area and I can’t wait to enter into this new chapter.
I already see an uptick in my creativity at home and I have initiated a new project. After my volunteer shift last Friday with the Seattle Asian Art Museum, I took a trip to Blick and purchased the largest canvas I could carry home. It felt absurd taking it home on the bus and looks equally absurd in my small studio. A large canvas feels like a genuine commitment to a new lifestyle symbolically placing my studio practice at the forefront of life at home.
Exhibition at the Seattle Asian Art Museum
This year has already brought exciting exhibitory opportunities for my art. For the month of March my work was on display at the Seattle Asian Art Museum in their community gallery. It was part of a collection featuring artwork made by the museum's volunteers. Seeing my work up in the community gallery was an emotional experience and will be a highlight of my year. I received so much positive feedback on the work and it was reassuring to hear that the piece resonated with others as it does with me.
Mentorship Insights for Creatives
To nurture my rekindled ambition for success, I have taken it upon myself to seek out more connections in galleries and learn about the lives and careers of successful women in the arts. Around mid March I met with Sarah Harvey the director of the Harris/Harvey Gallery.
Like myself, Sarah studied studio arts as an undergraduate, but unlike myself she continued on through graduate school in art history. She imparted a wealth of stories and experiences that were inspirational to hear.
We met for coffee across the street from the Harris/Harvey Gallery. The studio lights illuminating the current showcase from across the road, a reminder that although I have not fully arrived at my professional dreams the pathway appears much shorter than before- I only have a crosswalk to brave and the traffic light is about to change.
The main takeaways from my meeting with Sarah was to self initiate projects and establish a robust portfolio of professional experiences, i.e. small curatorial projects around the city and involvement with upcoming events. Focusing on academic writing and sharpening your analytical and critical voice helps new grads and early professionals stand out among the wealth of applicants when searching for jobs in the arts. It puts forth an image that you can communicate effectively with clients and establish a common bridge between the art and buyer. A painting is worth one-thousand words but the mark of a good critic is knowing which words best persuade collectors and bolster the artist's impact on the viewing public- most people can read but not everyone can read art.
Connecting and putting yourself out in front of the public and honing valuable skills in interpersonal and public management, communication, organization, and curation are vital to continued growth in the gallery space and are assets that set applicants apart in the interviewing process for these coveted and often multifaceted positions.
After our conversation, I realized that even in our digitized world, the arts continue to stay analogue in their processes. Daily, galleries may use social media, digital databases to catalogue their work, and communicate through contact forms instead of landlines, but at the core these establishments run against the technological grain many young professionals have grown accustomed to and encouraged to utilize. The advice your grandpa gave you, “head down the street and hand out your resume,” is the unspoken expectation of many art spaces. Of course an online presence is still imperative, it offers a place to reference after an initial face to face meeting. But as I have learned (the hard way) your community actions and how you show up matters more than your resume and results won't happen behind a job application interface.
From my experience don’t actually hand out your resume unless you are asked, but stay curious and remember why you want to work in the arts. For me, my mission has always been to support and uplift artists, whether that is through teaching, attending exhibitions, or hopefully someday serving as a proxy to represent work to collectors.
When asked why I am so passionate about supporting other artists, I find the question perplexing. I am always tempted to ask why wouldn’t I? If I myself, as an artist, do not feel a responsibility to safeguard my community who else would, we are the keepers and storytellers of humanity and that role seems pretty important right? We are connected to the past through art and craft and remembered through our creative expression. Centuries from now what do you think would last most reliably to express our experiences in this lifetime, a long broken and unreadable IPhone/laptop/computer, your ephemeral digital footprint, or the collection of art, craft, a physical documentation of experience made or collected over a lifetime. Personally, if I were a future historian, I would be much more interested in the art and most likely only use the tech as a method to properly date the more tangible artifacts that express human connection to the past. But, I am also biased and cannot make predictions into the future, only make educated inferences looking to what has historically been preserved to understand past humans.
Final Notes and Insights
To summarize, March has been a month of transformative learning. I am feeling more confident about my direction and look forward to the rest of 2025. There are no guarantees in this world, but after meeting with Sarah I feel more in control over my life.
Thank you for catching up with me and if you are also a young professional looking for more insights on my professional pathway as a young creative check back next week for the next post “My Cost Benefit Analysis: How I Knew It Was Time To Step Back From Art Education”.
My meeting with Sarah is one that I won’t forget and the insights gained were invaluable for my next career moves. Going forward, I plan to continue on reaching out and making connections with more local professionals and most importantly center my passion for the arts forthright.
If I learned anything from this last month, it’s that I need to be more forthcoming with my passion to uplift and support the arts and find creative ways to share that passion with my community. I may be an artist but my passion for the arts extends beyond my work in the studio. My individual artistic practice, when compared to the broader impact of galleries and art spaces, feels insignificant. I don’t want to spend my career solely focused on my own work, but spend it supporting the greater picture, the continued success of the arts in spite of growing indifference toward its impact on our communities.
After reflection, the most important takeaway from this month was discovering and quantifying my artistic passion. It has given me direction to move forward to make the most of my time working toward a more professional and focused career.
Thank you for reading and I hope your week is filled with exploration and excitement!
Warmly,
Alexis
Painter on the Page
Some March Makes
A small collection of some of the works I made the last month
Affiliate Links
If you are interested in supporting me as an artist I am a Blick affiliate; which means if you use any of my links to purchase art supplies at Blick online I will receive a 10% commission at no cost to you as the buyer which helps me continue to afford to create art and run this blog!
Blick Art Supplies Link:
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