Hey Santa Fe Comrades, SSB will be hosting another Comrade Truebridge on February 21st.Our upcoming presenters are Marya Errin Jones and Warren Montoya.
Please let us know if you are interested and we will add you to our mailing list, contact Matthew Contos at matthew@someseriousbusiness.org if you would like to join us.
For our NYC comrades, stay tuned, we will be organizing a Comrade Truebridge in your neck of the woods soon!
Comrade Truebridge is a cornerstone program of Some Serious Business. Presented by SSB and directed by multidisciplinary artists Quintan Ana Wikswo and Matthew Contos, Comrade Truebridge is an artist-driven, workgroup, braintrust, and salon. We are a kitchen table, a laboratory, and a hive mind. At our supportive and kinetic gatherings, invited artists come together to share works in progress; discuss their project’s preoccupying puzzles, experiments, failures, mysteries, messiness, challenges, and vision; and collaboratively identify strategies, insights, resources, and possible avenues for exploration and invention.
Comrade Truebridge’s underlying ethic is reciprocity and generosity. The gatherings yield a wealth of collective knowledge and expertise as expressed by eagerness to both give and receive assistance from our colleagues and peers. Comrade Truebridge is delighted by all disciplines of art making, especially hybrids and chimeras who move between and beyond performance, literature, visual art, film and other practices. The community of Comrade Truebridge is comprised of artists with professional practices that welcome uncertainties, challenges and questions; mysteries and mistakes; risks and ignorances; the awkward and unknown—and are themselves passionately committed to true generosity of collaboration, cooperation, and resource sharing with artistic fellow-travelers.
By providing an opportunity to share the challenges and conundrums of works in progress within an environment of supportive peers, Comrade Truebridge offers artists an opportunity to engage deeply with their own and others’ work during various phases of development. Rather than a place to present polished, formal, completed works with pressures of perfection or prestige, Comrade Truebridge is truly an incubator and sanctuary for artists to step outside the realm of marketplace and gatekeepers to share the more intimate aspects of art making, both absurd and sublime.
Comrade Truebridge was founded in 2013 by multidisciplinary artists Quintan Ana Wikswo and Cat Tyc, and directed by Wikswo. With the partnership of Creative Capital, NYFA, LMCC, and other organizations, artists came from an eclectic range of disciplines and communities, with a special focus on those whose practices venture beyond the traditional boundaries of form and discipline. The first participants were NYC-based interdisciplinary alumni of Creative Capital, NYFA, LMCC, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Millay Colony. Since that initial gathering, Comrade Truebridge has expanded in a rhizomatic manner, as comrades bring other comrades.