Some Serious Business presents #FiftyQuestions to highlight folks who are creating, presenting, questioning, and critiquing. Each featured artist picks a handful of questions to answer.
1- What event or factor in your life has been the most pivotal in your decision to become an artist?
2- What artist do you consider most influential to your ongoing development as an artist?
3- What has been the most significant challenge you’ve faced that you overcame to continue your art practice?
4- Describe your ideal workspace.
5- What one sentence do you hope describes how your art practice will be recorded in history, and why?
6- In thinking of the lulls and gaps or lost places in your practice over the years, who or what has re-energized you?
7- What project of yours do you personally consider your most satisfying, and why – regardless of external support or accolades?
8- What are habitual internal fears and bogeymen that come up for you around making art – excluding universal concerns of time, space, money, in/adequacy, and recognition?
9- Who of all the artists who have ever lived would you most love to share your work with? And why?
10- If you could travel in time, within what era or milieu would you most like to have an artist residency? And why?
11- What is you current guiding motivation to work and/or express yourself?
12- Who or what would you most like to collaborate with?
13- Do you have a relationship with the distant future – in other words, are you making artwork that bears a message or impact for coming generations?
14- What role does your genetic or cultural background play in your practice?
15- What surprises you most about what you are doing right now in your practice? If the nine-year-old you could see you right now, what do you think they would think?
16- What do you worry you will never be able to express?
17- What emotion as an artist makes you most uncomfortable and why
18- Can you recall your first memory of bliss in self-expression?
19- Who has been your greatest mentor, living or dead, real or imaginary?
20- Do you have a relationship with an animal in your life that influences your art process?
21- What unchangeable fact has been most frustrating to you as an artist?
22- How deeply do you feel your self-expression is impacted by the field in which you work – its morés, standards, culture, legacies – and how so?
23- How would you describe your ideal relationship with other artist colleagues?
24- What do you feel are the greatest or most tenacious barriers to creating art over an entire lifetime?
25- Do your dark nights of the soul tend to be constructive or destructive to your self-expression?
26- Is destruction a positive phenomenon for you?
27- What is your artistic relationship to loss? Either personal loss, or lost works of art, or other kinds of loss?
28- When does Joy tend to visit you?
29- Who or what are you speaking to or with in your current work? Who or what would you like to speak with in your art in future?
30- If you have one goal for change in your artistic field, what would it be?
31- If you could amplify a specific sense, which would it be? If you could minimize s specific sense, which would you choose?
32- How have your years in artmaking affected or influenced your sense of self?
33- What do you suspect is your most powerful artistic blessing? Or blessing in general?
34- Have you ever had a physical illness, event, or impediment that has changed how you make or approach artmaking? And how?
35- If you could create a new public institution for your field, what would it’s mission be?
36- Who or what do you feel is most invisible to others in your practice?
37- How do you feel most often misunderstood or misperceived, either as an artist or in your work itself?
38- How important is it to you that others connect and understand and appreciate your work?
39- What is your relationship to criticism?
40- What is your relationship to praise?
41- Is there a seasonal rhythm to your practice? How so and why?
42- How would you describe the prevailing norms in your field – are you impacted by them? How or how not?
43- What is your relationship to your audience, real or imaginary?
44- What makes you most likely to shut down or go into dormancy as an artist?
45- Do you have a particular skill or knack of which you are most secretly proud? Something you feel you can do that few others can, no matter how small?
46- Which would you prefer: to be a rogue artistic outsider or to fit within a community of similarly-minded creators?
47- Describe the greatest gift someone has given to you that invigorated your artistic expression?
48- Are you more interested in the universal or the individual? How important is it to you whether you express yourself as a unique person, or rather add your voice to a collective conversation?
49- If you could be anything besides an artist in human form, what would you like to be?
50- What would be the most thrilling moment or situation in timespace to find your art being enjoyed?
The #FiftyQuestions series was created by Quintan Ana Wikswo for Some Serious Business and may not be used in full or in part without permission.