Creative Chats With Guest Liz Helfer
This is a recording from a series for the podcast that just started at the Mosesian Center for the Arts called Creative Chats. Listen to learn more and hear the conversation with Liz on the topic of where the boundary between art as lifestyle and art as business lives.
(Click here to listen on streaming apps)
Listen to Liz's earlier appearance on Little Local Conversations to hear more of her story.
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Thanks to podcast promotional partner the Watertown Business Coalition, a nonprofit organization focused on connecting local businesses and strengthening our community. Check them out at https://watertownbusinesscoalition.com/.
This program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
Transcript
Matt: 0:07
Hi there, welcome to the Little Local Conversations podcast. I'm your host, Matt Hanna. In each episode I'm sitting down for a conversation with someone in Watertown to discover the people, places, stories, and ideas of Watertown. This episode is a little different from the typical interview episodes.
Matt: 0:22
This one was actually my first in-person live event for the series I'm doing over at the Mosesian Center for the Arts called Creative Chats, where I invite anyone who's interested in creativity, in any capacity, to come in, network with other creative folks, and then I sit down and have a conversation with someone to discuss what's been on their mind with the creative life, creativity in general, and then I open it up to everyone who's in attendance to talk about that topic themselves. And yeah, it was a great first event. We had about 25 people there. I had a great conversation with my first guest, who was Liz Helfer, and then at the end I was delighted by how engaging the conversations were at all the tables. People gathered in groups of four or five at the tables and talked for a good 30 minutes and all seemed to be having a really good time and engaged in their conversation. So I got really good feedback about it. So I hope you'll come out to the next one so that you can engage in that part. You can listen to the conversation I have with Liz here, but I think to really truly get the experience, being in person really helps you fully engage and get the most out of it and make some nice connections and maybe make some new friends.
Matt: 1:24
And anyway, next one's going to be at the end of February, February 28th, from 830am to 10am. I’ll have coffee and bites again to help those people who aren't morning people. And the guest I'll have on for a little conversation to lead our topic for that day will be Jamie Kallestad, who's a singer/songwriter and also the communications and design specialist for the library here in the city. So I'll be curious to get to his topic. But for now you can listen to this conversation that happened last month in January at the Mosesian Center for the Arts with Liz Helfer. Hopefully that gives you a little preview of what this is about and helps, if you were there, helps jog your memory on what was discussed and, if you aren't able to make it out to these events, hopefully releasing these conversations in the podcast will be helpful and interesting and engaging in its own way too. So without further ado. Here's my conversation with Liz Helfer. Enjoy.
Roberta: 2:12
Hi everyone. This is so exciting. This is our brand new program and well, you'll hear all about it from Matt, who is the mastermind behind this. I'm Roberta Miller. Many of you know me. I am the interim executive director here at the Mosesian Center for the Arts. And also many of you know the center very well.
Roberta: 2:32
Maybe a few of you don't, but we are a multidisciplinary arts center here in Watertown. We have theater, we have art classes, we have classes for all ages. We have a children's theater, we have regular theater, we have birthday parties for children. So we have a whole variety of offerings. It gets to be kind of complex and if I stand up and list them all, people's eyes roll to the back of their head. So I won't do that. But I also want to invite you to come back and visit us.
Roberta: 3:05
As you see, on the walls we have an ever-changing art exhibition also. So we have exhibitions, we have openings for those exhibitions. This one in particular is called One Future and it is on the first and second floor. So it's part of what we do. We want to celebrate the arts here in Watertown and we want to do it in a variety of ways. So we want to ask you to come back, visit us often, check out our website for our ever-changing program and also support us. We are a non-profit. We are not supported by the town. We are not supported by the federal government. We occasionally get grants from the state, but we are supported by people like you so that we can be here. So I want to welcome you. I am thrilled to be able to convene people in this kind of way and have people come together to share what they care about, which is art. So thank you very much, and I will turn this over to Matt, who, as I said, is our mastermind.
Matt: 4:14
Thanks, Roberta. And thanks for everyone for coming out. Can everyone see us okay? Do we need to shift, okay? Yeah, good, okay, we'll stay here. Cool, well, thank you everyone for coming out.
Matt: 4:25
If you don't know, I have a podcast called Little Local Conversations, where I focus on Watertown. Just businesses, government people, arts people. And so this is kind of a little shoot off of that, called creative chats. And I had gone to these events called creative mornings in Boston years ago where they would have people come and you'd go and you'd network a little bit and then you would talk with, or you'd listen to a talk with somebody on the topic of creativity. But then you’d kind of just go home. So I like the idea of that, but I wanted to make this one a little different. So you're welcome to try after this, we're going to do a little talk here with Liz about a question that she's come in with on the creative life and we're gonna jam on that a little bit. And then, after we talk for a little bit, I thought it'd be interesting for you guys to split off into little groups and just talk about how that question, that topic, applies to you. Just so maybe you get a little more out of this talk rather than just listening. You actually get to be involved and do that afterwards. So that's what I'm planning for this.
Matt: 5:18
So I'd like to introduce Liz Helfer, who is a professional sculptor and also the public arts and culture planner for the city of Watertown.
Liz: 5:29
Yes, yes. That's me.
Matt: 5:31
So let's just get right into it.
Liz: 5:35
Okay, I'm going to try and face you a little bit more.
Matt: 5:36
Okay, I know which way are we facing? So do you want to give a little background about your practice first, or do you want to just dive right into the question?
Liz: 5:45
I'll tell people so it's not based in, what does she know about that topic? So I have been a working sculptor since I graduated from undergrad. Yay! I moved from making smaller commissioned work in metal which is my training and ceramics, into large public sculpture. So you can see some of my permanent work in Massachusetts, New York, Latvia, a few places. And the most recent one is actually in Brookline and you can go to Coolidge Corner and check it out. And Matt was there for the installation of that. Thanks for coming by. A little cold while we're doing that. But yeah, that's the work I'm doing currently. And for the city, I totally divorce myself from my sculpture practice because conflict of interest is a real thing. And I get to work with Roberta because she also doubles as the chair of the Public Arts and Culture Committee for the city and I get to work with the Cultural Council and the Cultural District here. Yeah.
Matt: 6:36
Cool, so then let's dive into your question, because that applies to all of this. So, the prompt I give people who are going to come in as guests is what's a question that's been on your mind recently about your creative practice, your creative life in general? So what's your question?
Liz: 6:52
I might not end up phrasing this as a question, but I find it difficult and always have to delineate between my artistic life as a lifestyle versus artistic life as a business. And where is that line? When do am I crossing it? There's a lot of gray area in there. And I think a lot of artists struggle with that, in part because well, now I'm getting into the topic already, but, like in part because it's a lot of business acumen and training doesn't get imparted to artists, and I think that that's a big new contemporary field.
Matt: 7:24
Right, so how is this, so how has it come up recently, this thought, if you want to give a recent example.
Liz: 7:30
I used to always kind of bring work home with me because I work as an arts administrator, you know, and so I want to say that in this capacity right here, right now, I'm not me art planner for the city, I am here artist sculptor, and so anything I say about the city, you can talk to me about it later. But so I used to run the maker space for the city and I enjoyed that, but I found it really hard to divorce myself from the making that happened there and the making that would happen at my home studio. And it would cross over a lot and I was like, oh, this is not healthy. This runs into I need to have boundaries. Yeah, it was more about just having boundaries.
Matt: 8:03
Yeah. So do you think it's easier for an artist to have the two separate lives? If they can't make their full living from their art, which is a whole other topic. Is it easier then to have another job that isn't arts related?
Liz: 8:17
Yes and no, but the dream is to like, be an artist, right. So, like, if you talk to people, what's the dream? You go to art school and maybe they had this nice talk with you your first day and it was like everybody in the auditorium maybe 10%, if we're generous they're going to become professional artists, right. So they sat down my whole BFA class at Alfred and they said, of the 110 of you sitting here, maybe 10% will become professional artists. And we all look left and right, like is it me? Is it you? Nah, definitely not you. And but that percentage is actually a lot lower and we're graduating a lot more people from art programs now. And so who's going to be a professional artist making, if we say professional is full-time income, like they're supporting themselves through the sale of their work in some way. It's incredibly hard to do and you end up competing now, I think of, like, the proliferation of social media influencer kind of lifestyle. Which is a big topic, right, which I will profess to know not a ton about. But that is also creep, right. Like we're promoting lifestyles. We're showing the back end of things. We kind of lose some of the glamour, the mystique that comes with artiste right. Capital A art. And kind of self-promotion ends up being a big part of it. I feel like I'm losing the track of the thread of it because if you go back to like the beginning of when we think Western art in particular, there's the patron system.
Liz: 9:30
Artists didn't have to think as much about the business side of things. They need to get picked up by someone, produce something. You know, hopefully they get picked up by the church because, hey, big pockets. But they can make some canonical art, capital A art. But you know we moved into then, like salon style, gallery representation, the art market as we think of it now. We hope for this like angel benefactor in this big way. Someone's going to find me, they're going to love what I do, they're going to give me lots of money to do it. It doesn't really happen that much anymore. Rarely. And maybe that angel benefactor is a gallery. Gallery takes at least 40% off the top. It's a pretty tough thing to deal with.
Liz: 10:07
We're talking about visual art here, which is what I know the most about. But that system is also, I think we're slowly moving away from that system. Artists are representing themselves. They don't always have the know-how to do that well or how to market themselves. But we're in a system where now, if you have the right ego, which we do associate with artists, and you also have the bravery in many ways to put yourself fully out there, we have many systems in which to do that. But then it kind of gets lost in the noise. There's a lot of noise, you know. If we're talking about social media platforms.
Matt: 10:39
Yeah. So back to your question about the where's the delineation between artists lifestyle and artist business. So then is the question more so do you want to make this your full-time thing, or
Liz: 10:48
Oh yeah, it used to be my full-time thing and it will be again. I'm not going to tell you how many years I’ll be with the city, but you know, not forever.
Matt: 10:54
So how are you approaching it as a business then and what's the current challenges for you?
Liz: 10:57
Yeah. All right so, for example, over the past summer I had two big art commissions, public art commissions. And I work full time. I have a kid. I'm also renovating my house. My studio is in my house and so my studio gets so saturated with the renovation of the house and this project is kind of that project becomes the same space. Oh well, I'm going to use this wood from this thing or whatever. But I didn't have time to give enough time to any one thing, right. And it is a time problem. We all find we have not enough time, right. It’s the one resource that never comes back, the most precious.
Liz: 11:32
There's no noodling in my process anymore. I see a proposal or I see a call for proposals. I submit a proposal or I get invited to do something. I say this is what I'm going to do and I do exactly that. There is barely any deviation from the plan. Thank goodness I'm a planner. But I know my practice well enough, I know how I work and I know the topics that I know well enough, I can plan my studio time down to the half hour to get tasks done. There is never time for brainstorming. There's never time for just that nice flow process which we all know is so important for creativity. I make it like a two-hour proposal writing session. That's where the inspiration will come, whatever, but then there's no deviation from the plan. I give them exactly what I tell them I'm going to give them. Because my time is so limited that I just have to schedule it. And that is not the process I want to have in my studio.
Matt: 12:21
What is the process you want to have?
Liz: 12:22
I just want to be in there noodling all the time. I'm not just trying to create the product.
Matt: 12:28
Yeah, but is that at odds with the business sort of things? Because you say like you deliver exactly what you say on there. But that's what they want, right?
Liz: 12:34
It is what they want.
Matt: 12:36
They don't want you to change what they want, right. They want you to do exactly what you say, right?
Liz: 12:38
To some extent, yeah.
Matt 12:40
As someone who accepts those type of things on the other side of your work, you don't want them to deviate too far from that, right?
Liz: 12:45
Not too far. But there's always, there should always be room in the process to improve, right. And that's the hope. It's like they're not gonna give you something worse, but hopefully for improvement. And sometimes, like when I put up this sculpture this summer and I looked at it and was like I see 20 ways I could have done this better, but there was no deviating from the plan, you know. And that's hard. You're like if I could do it again, but I won't do it again because this idea is done. And so the business side of things is just tight and that's not how everyone treats it right. That's just because of my own time constraints. But artists have a mystique.
Liz: 13:19
We've elevated artists to this like philosophical level capital A art. We're making things. We are people who are thinkers as much as we are makers. I think that's where you get that delineation of capital A art. Bigger discussion, fine, won't get into it right here. But now we've really crossed that line into like artists as craftsmen.
Liz: 13:41
Art and craft as like a delineation is also a fraught topic that I have opinions about, that I won't talk about too much right now. But all of a sudden we're asking artists to not just be free thinkers. We're asking them to also manage themselves as a business. And that is a very different way than we've done that. We did that for hundreds of years. Right, they might have somebody else to manage them as a business, and there are people that are managed, have an agent, have a gallery, have somebody who does this thing on their behalf. And now I think we're moving more towards, and I have to say I have issues with the gallery system as it stands, but I think that that's a really tough thing to navigate.
Liz: 14:13
I think we're also really lucky that now there are a lot more resources for artists to learn how to manage themselves as a business. Like, if you guys know, in Massachusetts in particular, there's programs like Assets for Artists through Mass MoCA and they're offering all these workshops. Yeah, there's a lot more training. And they're finally starting to pick it up in art school. They're like, oh, we're going to release all of these undergrads with these BFAs out into the world and they don't know what to do once the university resources aren't there under them. They're finally starting to teach the business of art. But the business of art is vague and weird.
Matt: 14:44
All right, so I'm going to maybe put on your planner hat a little bit then. So, as someone on the other side who gives out grants and stuff to people, how are you viewing the artists when they're applying for things?
Liz: 14:51
Yeah. So I won't talk about an example in Watertown. I'll talk about an example, so I review grants for the New Hampshire State Council for the Arts, which is the state where I grew up. I used to receive grants from them when I was a bit younger and now I review grants for them when it's a good time. When I see applications, okay, I'm going to back up a few steps.
Liz: 15:07
I have opinions about what makes an accessible application and I think this is actually a key piece. It's like if we assume that not all artists are, especially visual artists, are the best at representing themselves through writing, then our applications should not be inherently writing-based. And that's a tricky thing because we want artists to explain themselves. We need to understand what they're trying to do so we can correctly support them. A lot of applications, and we haven't done this here, but in other formats they've moved to you have the option to submit a video to represent yourself. You can just talk about it, you don't have to write about it.
Liz: 15:36
This is also the assumption that not everybody's first language is English. Not everybody is great at typing. There are so many things that enter into this. So what makes it accessible? Make resumes optional. You can share it with us if you want. We don't always have to read it. We probably won't read past the first page anyway, because that's how that goes. And limit artist bio, artist statement. If they need to be the same thing, fine. But also define those things for people so they understand exactly what you're asking for because it's not universally known what those things are, even in the art world.
Liz: 16:04
So making an accessible application is the very first step, but then that review process also needs to take into account, I'm gonna get so much variation in the application. Even when I ask for these very specific things. It's always nutty. So when I'm ranking applications for the New Hampshire State Council, I look at what's coming from an individual versus what's coming from an organization. An organization that I know has a lot of resources should probably be putting in a pretty strong application because they have a lot of resources to bring to bear. An individual who may not have a lot of time, but then you're also, it becomes an issue of do we think they have capacity to manage a grant. But there are a lot of questions that come into that and so you're asking about what's accessible. What are the things that I'm willing to accept. Like there's a typo, I shouldn't care about that typo.
Matt: 16:50
So then maybe let's go back to you as an artist, and how did you first start? When did you first cross the boundary over from art as just a lifestyle and art as commerce for you and how did you cross that boundary?
Liz: 16:59
You know, when people ask what are you going to be when you grow up and you're like we're going to treat art as a profession. I'm going to say I'm going to be an artist. I'm also going to say I'm going to be an artist because I think it's a very freeing thing to be. But maybe not. You know, artists is broad, many genres, right. I always said I was going to be an artist. And I told my, I have a twin sister. We’re identical. And I was like, you can’t say that. I’m going to say that. This is going to be my thing. You can’t have it. So anyway, she did a lot of other things that could also be classified as an artist.
Matt: 17:27
I interviewed Liz for the podcast and she talked about how she, for what 20 years with your sister, made this huge like clay city in your house.
Liz: 17:34
Yeah, very fun stuff. So but that, just the act of creating, like the idea that making an art is inherent to our human experience and then we kind of get a beat out of us with responsibility. Or we look over someone's shoulder and they're like, oh, mine sounds good as that, I will stop. Or somebody says something to a kid. Art is inherent to us, right. Maybe not capital A art, but art as in the way that we live our lives it should be integrated into it. We're used to it being integrated as part of our lives in childhood. And then we kind of shed it a bit, unless we have particular training or education in it, which is why arts education is so important. Different topic. So I was like I'm going to be an artist, went to school for art, had my thesis show in undergrad and then had a bunch of people want to buy my show, and thank goodness, because I would have had to melt it down otherwise. I couldn't afford to keep it. And then I was like, oh, I'm selling work. Oh, it's happening. And realized many years later I had vastly underpriced my work but was at the time super apologetic to these people who were buying my work and was like, are you sure you want to buy it for that much? No, don't second guess. And then, you know, got picked up by a couple galleries. Eventually shed those galleries because different issues.
Liz: 18:42
I had no training, I didn't know what I was doing, you know. That was the jump was like selling the first piece. It was like, oh, it's happening, I need to figure this out. I started asking people and not everybody had a good answer. I just take it on board and hope you find the right answer, eventually make your right answer. I actually use an algorithm to figure out the cost of my work now. You know, I'm like how many hours, with the material cost, versus how I value my time. Then add on a percentage based on the scale of the stinker. So it's changed over time. But I had to figure that out. I don't have someone telling me and I think it's very valuable information to have at the jump. Yeah.
Matt: 19:18
Yeah, let's see, I want to give people time to talk about this. Maybe let's just wrap it up here and then we'll open it up for all of you guys to talk about this yourselves. Or do anyone have questions specifically for Liz that they want to ask her while she's up here? Or you guys just want to do your little self-talk? This is the first time we're doing this event, so we're open to suggestions here. Any questions for Liz? I'll put that out first. Roberta.
Roberta: 19:48
Well, I know Liz and Liz is a really remarkable person and she has a remarkable amount of energy. So she can manage to have a full-time job, raise children, and also have a sculpture studio practice. So, in terms of thinking about how the arc, I'm going to ask you to step back a little bit, the arc of your life. I'm a lot older, so I'm now at a point where I actually don't have to make money. I'm retired, which is an unbelievably freeing position to be in because I've worked my entire life. So I'm asking different questions about how I behave and how I invest my time. So, when you think about your life and the arc of your life and all the things that you're managing to fit in, some of us mere mortals probably could not fit that many things into our current life. Could you just reflect on those choices that you've made at different points in your life and what do you envision for yourself when your circumstances change? I'm sorry to make this such a complicated question but.
Liz: 20:56
No, it’s a great question. I will try to be concise. I think it's impossible to encapsulate one life in a few sentences, anybody's life. So a couple years ago now, I went and talked to the graduating seniors in 3D at MassArt and was asked to give a talk to them about the trajectory of my career. And the main thing I said to them was yeah, we see, like I'm going to be an artist, I'm here at point A, I'm going to get to point B over there, straight line. And, as everybody knows, nobody does straight line. Well, maybe a few people do, amazing, but mostly you do a lot of this, a very zigzaggy line. And so a lot of the choices I made were more about happiness than they were about business. And I was super broke for a super long time. Then I got a real job.
Liz: 21:46
But a belief I hold is that, and I started to form this belief when I was an undergraduate and we'd have non-traditional students who had had whole lifetimes before they went back to school and decided to study art and the formal making of things, and they made more interesting work because they had passions already. They weren't just building their life around art, they were making art about the things they cared about. And so to develop your passions is almost more important than the understanding of how to make things. You could figure that out. That's a hard skill you could figure out at any time, but developing your passions is so important. I grew up very outdoorsy, was a whitewater raft guide and ski instructor. And one of the formative things I did when I was in my early 20s, I got invited, which was crazy, to help guide a trip down the Grand Canyon as a raft guide. And like that's what I'm going to do. I'm supposed to go do this other thing for art, I'm going to go do that.
Liz: 22:32
And those were the better choices I made. Maybe, probably. I can't say how it would have gone the other way, but I'm glad that I've decided to prioritize the passion. I also just happen to be passionate about sculpture.
Guest: 22:48
Hi, this is so rich, like what a rich text to dive into. One of the things that you talked about was you know, you had your show, you sold pieces and you were like I am monetized. And it made me think of something I've heard on social media that the algorithm, you find your niche, you have to sink into the niche and then you end up resenting it. Because you can't break out of it. And so I'm sort of wondering, like over the course of your career, is the audience that you build or the support that you create around you, as much of a cage as it is your sort of diving board or launch pad or whatever? Like what is your relationship with what your audience expects of you? And you know, how do you think about that?
Liz: 23:34
That's a great question. There's a reason I don't take direct commissions anymore. No, it's a good question. I think it's a lot about feeling so railroaded that you lose the passion for what you're doing, right. That happens no matter what you do. Like I'm passionate about, you know, feeding people and you go and do a thing, and then you just get so burned out about it. The same thing happens in art, no matter what you're doing, or can unless you give yourself time to rejuvenate. This is where I get railroaded all the time, just based on time, and then I lose passion for the project. I'm like I just need to cross the finish line and give it to them because this isn't fun, you know. Not that fun's the main goal, but fun's important.
Liz: 24:07
I have avoided, specifically avoided, doing any social media stuff. I'm not like on there as an artist promoting my stuff. The things that I do are through word of mouth and I think that that helps. That's less caging. I know that that's not the format that a lot of people are moving towards. I think we're moving away from the word of mouth thing a little bit more. It's the part where you can experiment, is the part that you need to keep. That's it, even if you only give yourself like an hour or a couple hours a week or maybe a month. Just it's the scheduling your time so you have it to do the thing. Right now I am over at Indigo Fire just throwing some pots. And when I went to Alfred University, which is a very prominent ceramic school where I did sculpture, pots was a four-letter word. You couldn't throw a formal pot, it wasn't sculptural enough. Oh my God, you'd get in trouble. And it was like no, I just want to go throw some pots.
Liz: 24:54
So that's where I get to have a little freeing, like not just focused on the studio work time. Yeah, and that's important. I hope that answers that question.
Matt: 25:01
Roberta, going back in.
Roberta: 25:13
I'm sorry this is kind of a self-serving question. So this place, the Mosesian Center for the Arts, is often what we do is we cultivate creativity. We support it, we cultivate it. All of the artists that you see on the walls are people who have submitted art to us so that it can be seen. So it's kind of a grow and show opportunity that people have. And we have classes and we have different kinds of events like this, and we just had our open mic, you know, earlier this week, so that people kind of come in and show what they've gotten, and it doesn't have to be perfect. But I'm asking you, as an artist, this is our mission, this is what we are about. How could we do it better to support all of the people here to cultivate that emerging art or developing art kind of capacity that I think we all have?
Liz: 26:06
Yeah. So I don't know if I can fix any programming or marketing, but I think that it's getting people through the door for the first time. This is what I found when I was at Hatch is you get someone through the door for the first time and they start coming back. Because all of a sudden they figured out how cool this thing is. And so, like tomorrow night we're going to have River of Light, which is this big community event. It's happening here and it's going to bring people who have never been here through the doors. And then I'm almost certain they're going to come back. They're going to be like, oh, this place is for me. I might not have thought it's for me, because capital A art, is intimidating and weird. And you know, you go, I bring my dad to the contemporary art museum and he goes, I could make that. I was like, not the point, we have to leave now. You know not everyone's gonna make that jump to like the conceptual side of what's going on here. But, like, I do think it's the getting people through the doors and then, you know, getting them to come back. Hook, you got the hook, yeah.
Matt: 26:56
I mean it gets back to kind of your word, of word of mouth style, right. It's like, here's a question here. How many people here know me or had a conversation with me in this room? Right? So, like these people came here because they know me, right? And those people who don't know me, I'd like to meet you afterwards. It works over time, right? It's slow, slow.
Liz: 27:19
It's that networking thing. Oh, networking, oh, I hate this word. It's like networking is just knowing people and then caring about those relationships, okay. Be nice to people. This was, like I remember after that lecture I did and students were coming up to me and I'm talking to them and it's like the key thing I want you to know is like it's going to be difficult. You're going to figure it out, you'll have ups and downs, you'll do the thing. If you push hard enough, you will do the thing. Great. Even if it's not the art thing. If you find the other passion is the thing, do that thing. But also keep people in your circle. Know people. Get to know them. They will talk about you. And you’ll talk about them and all of a sudden you;’ve created a beautiful network.
Liz: 28:00
Like I just yesterday went to see a friend of mine down at UMass Dartmouth and she's from China. I met her when I was working at Franconia Sculpture Park and she was an intern, but we're the same age. And we became very good friends even though she worked for me. And this was 13 years ago and now she's an artist in residence at UMass Dartmouth. I was like I want to come down and we're going to catch up and it's going to be amazing. And we sat back and looked at each other. It was like God, I missed you. I missed you, oh my God.
Liz: 28:25
We had great conversations about flow state and the work and the things we're doing and community engagement and yada yada. And then I was like you know, we talk about the things we care about. This is our network, we're going to collaborate on something, but also this is work. All of a sudden we blended the lines. I’m going to have you come do an artist talk here. I'm going to come do a talk down there. Our work, our lives are intermingled because we care about the same things and then it blends into work and that's like that awful gray area, but that's also really beautiful.
Matt: 28:51
Cool. Any other questions? Or? Cool, well, I think the next thing I would like you guys to do is, if you feel comfortable with it, look at your neighbor and ask that question. Talk about your art and your practice and where that delineation between art as lifestyle and the commerce of it lives for you. And, I'll just leave you with that. Thank you, Liz for
Liz: 29:10
Thank you, Matt.
Matt: 29:11
coming up and sharing your thoughts and stories.
Liz: 29:15
As non-sequential as they are.
Matt: 29:18
That's how it works, right.
Matt: 29:18
Thank you everyone.
Matt: 29:51
So that's it for my conversation with Liz. Hope that sparked some ideas in your head about your own creative practice. And again, as you could hear at the end, there was some good, lively conversation for a while after the conversation I had with Liz, just between all the people who were there. So if you want to come out and be part of the next one it's February 28th, 830 to 10am, again at the Mosesian Center for the Arts here in town. Head on over to littlelocalconversations.com and under the events you can find the next Creative Chats, February 28th with Jamie Kallestad. And just RSVP there to let me know how much food and drink I should be getting. It's a free event but just helps me know how much to get. And if you want to find out more about Liz, you can listen back to her episode I did with her previously on the podcast, which gets into more of her journey, if you're interested. I'll link to that in the show notes. And if you want to listen to more interviews with people, not necessarily all creatives, business folks, city folks, head on over to littlelocalconversations.com. I have all the episodes there. Done over 40 at this point and I'm going to be start releasing some new ones that are kind of round tables with different areas of focus in the city. Excited to start sharing those soon with you. And you can subscribe to, I send out a weekly newsletter just to let you know what's been released this week and anything that's coming up. You can find that in the show notes or on the website. Or if you just want to follow along on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you're streaming, you can do that as well.
Matt: 31:10
Rate and review is supposed to be a thing. I don't really care. I'm not trying to reach the world with this. I'm just trying to reach the folks in my community. So instead of rating and reviewing, you can do that if you want I guess, just tell a friend that you think might be interested. All right, and then a couple of things here to wrap up. I want to give a thank you to the Watertown Cultural Council, who I'm getting a grant from this year. I want to give them the proper credit, which is, this program is supported in part by a grant for the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. You can find out more about the Watertown Cultural Council at watertownculturalcouncil.org and you can find out more about the Mass Cultural Council at massculturalcouncil.org. Also want to give a shoutout to a promotional partner, the Watertown Business Coalition. They’re a nonprofit organization here in Watertown bringing businesses and people together to help strengthen the community. Find out more about them at watertownbusinesscoalition.com. They also have events to help network and bring people together. They've got some stuff coming up, so check that out on their site if you want to network within the business and nonprofit community. So that's it. Until next time, take care.
