you have to try

I have found myself applying to arts opportunities with a hunger, confidence, and ambition I didn’t previously have. It’s hard to be an emerging artist when many opportunities land you in the cyclical trap of “you must have experience to apply to this opportunity that will give you the experience you need to apply.” Many people, not just artists, know this feeling. Jobs that require previous history with xyz to be eligible, but you need that job to have the experience with xyz. I often became demotivated and stuck, feeling that I was under-qualified and inexperienced, that I was too much of a new and emerging artist to be involved in these events, performances, exhibitions, workshops, and programs.

There is such a grey and muddled area when it comes to describing what phase of your art career you are in. Are you emerging? Mid-career? A youth artist? A community educator? An arts facilitator? A cultural worker? A student of the arts? It’s all different depending on who you ask, and someone who calls themselves mid-level may seem established or nationally known to others. These categories are, in some ways, gatekeeping tools as much as they are descriptive ones. Yes, a grant organization may use the terms “emerging” versus “mid-career” to determine who is more urgently deserving of funds, or as a way to more equitably allocate resources, but at the end of the day, that’s all they should be: fund-seeking categories. I think it’s okay to identify with these terms in your practice, but I also think they should not be a way to accidentally limit yourself. If you see an opportunity for mid-career artists but you’ve considered yourself emerging for a number of years, don’t let that title stop you. Send emails to the organizations, the funders, the opportunity creators, and ask them if they think you’re a good fit for the opportunity. Read the submission guidelines and see if what they’re actually looking for is describing you. Don’t let the category be the cover of the book, you can read the first few pages before judging the opportunity, and yourself.

I know what changed for me, though. I realized that my work and my practice were valuable, and I understood that this is what I want: to use my creativity and the talents I am proud of to make change, to teach people, to contribute to my community. I can’t do that silently, and my art has worth and it deserves to be seen if I have spent my time, money, blood, sweat, and tears developing these skills and creating what I’m creating. I can’t undermine myself and I can’t assume nobody wants to see what I make or that nobody wants to create with me.

I think many artists fall into the struggle with self-promotion, with the feeling that sharing your practice on social media means making “content,” and I have been there. I hate self-promotion and I hate the way it can flatten something that took everything out of you into a post, a reel, a caption. But there is a second part to this that has to exist, and it is that if you spend all this time and energy making things, and you want them to be seen, they are worth promoting, they are worth sharing and advocating for. It is not “creating content” or “marketing” your art, it is saying to grant organizations, publishers, exhibition runners, and curators: this is my art, I put a whole lot of hard work into it, it is valuable to me, and I know it will be valuable to you and to our community.

So I started applying to everything that interested me, that was local and realistic, and even when I felt imposter syndrome, even when I didn’t feel like I had the “right” or “enough” experience, I just clicked the link, I read the questions, and I started realizing that a weak application was better than not trying at all, because almost always when I finished writing I realized I could successfully answer every question, even if I was sourcing my qualifications from only two relevant experiences. And those experiences were real. I’ve done workshops, several actually, I’ve vended my art at more markets than I can remember, I’m published in several art and literary magazines, journals, and collections, I’ve read my work at more than a few poetry events, and I’ve exhibited in galleries, and even held my own solo exhibition.

Maybe you’re reading this thinking “well, I haven’t done half the things you have,” but you have to start somewhere. You can seek out opportunities catered toward specific communities, whether that’s youth, queer, senior, racialized, or disabled artists, you can participate in student events and opportunities which often welcome new and emerging work, and you can allow yourself to believe that what you make deserves to exist in public. There are opportunities out there, you just need to try, you have to try.