Brontez Purnell in Clement Hil Goldberg’s Our Future Ends. Photo: Robbie Sweeny

VISION

The visionary four-decade legacy of Some Serious Business producing live events and providing resources for vanguard artists—many at the earliest stages of their careers—is the powerful bedrock for its reemergence as a vital artist-centered nexus that presents visionary creators and thought-leaders. The roots of SSB are a highly collaborative partnership model that supports artists throughout the lifespan of their projects: offering resources to incubate emerging ideas, germinate new work, and present those works to the public.

Some Serious Business serves as both a catalyst and sanctuary for artists to sustain their creative lives as well as propel their projects towards new and adventurous evolution, audiences, and territories. This emphasis on the complete ecology of art making is a model informed by artists, presenters, and audiences at the forefront of ambitious work.

Led by a passionate commitment to put the artist’s needs first, SSB is a “space without a space” that brings together a unique network of partners and provides a synergistic ecology that extends our impact in multiple directions. Some Serious Business’ muscular strategic planning and intelligent leadership establishes a fertile environment in which experimentation, intrepid vision, risk-taking, and innovation can thrive.

Helping diverse creators navigate the arts environment and access resources for growth, SSB produces events and projects that expand existing boundaries, incite unexpected passions, raise issues that advance knowledge and understanding of our world, and spark peak experiences—opening doors to the transformative power of art in contemporary society.

Some Serious Business supports projects in three core program areas, each of which offers responsive, tangible and expansive resources, services, and strategic partnerships. SSB’s programs are a uniquely mobile experience, with work and presentation spaces located in a variety of sites from Amtrak trains to museums, from open fields to town centers. Our programs include strategic partnerships with diverse organizations and yield a cross-pollinization of artists and communities, widening of marketing and publicity opportunities, and creation of mutually rewarding collaborative networks.

INCUBATION

SSB AWAY provides crucial time and space for artists to germinate ideas that might otherwise be marginalized during the intensity of public scrutiny and artistic production…to play with and explore emerging, unfamiliar, messy or mysterious aspects of their practices…ideas, processes, theories, dreams, and artistic experiments. Building an international network of retreats offers artists the agency to take time away from their habitual surroundings, to rest and inhabit a nourishing space of creative sanctuary with the option for solitude, access to nature, quiet, and multivalent privacy.

SSB - incubation - VISION

L-R: Resident Artist Jasmine Hirst; Alexandra Henry’s Street Heroines; Northern Youth Project

GERMINATION

SSB offers resources for artists to conceive, undertake, and/or complete new projects. Consulting on strategies to support the artist’s ultimate vision for the work, SSB’s supple approach is meant to bolster their creative process. SSB also hosts artist-driven salons and public discussions of works in progress, issues, and ideas that foster dialogue about the intersection of art and social history and the role of the artist as an engine for social change. Cultivation events offer introductions to new stakeholders and potential supporters, marketing and publicity assistance, and a place to present “first look” projects and performances.

Incubation at SSB

L-R: Glamour Glory and Gold directed by Brian Butterick; Hilary Lorenz’s Moth Migration Project; Resident Artist Kristofor Giordano’s Meditation Hut

PRESENTATION

SSB creates opportunities for artists and audiences to share and encounter new works through performances, events, and interludes. A network of sites, spaces, environments, and virtual platforms offers artists a range of settings to present and celebrate culminating presentations of new works. SSB prizes audacity, experimentation, emotional honesty, passion, and surprise. SSB collaborates with artists to cultivate new audiences and look beyond conventional choices in production and outcomes to create transcendent experiences.

some serious business presents - lydia lunch, christen clifford, female genius

L-R: Resident Artist Christen Clifford; NO WAVE OUT: Lydia Lunch and Umar Bin Hassan by Jasmine Hirst; FeMaLe GEniUs in Santa Fe

SSB - Presentation - performance, forget about that sweet fuck baby, stonewall 50 years later

L-R: Arlene Schloss in 99 nights at No Se No by Toyo Tsuchiya; Brontez Purnell and Heather Acs in Clement Hil Goldberg’s Epilogue Our Future Ends at The Stud, San Francisco – Photo: Alex Gerard; Gay Sex in the 70s by Joe Lovett.
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