In this two-part workshop, Sharon Louden will offer visual artists strategies to engage their communities and demonstrate pragmatic approaches to sustaining a creative life. Louden will share the expertise she has gained through collaborations and conversations with gallery owners, museum professionals, critics, curators, nonprofits, residencies, academics and others in different art communities. Louden draws on examples and models from the front lines of the visual arts landscape collected on two extensive book tours, daily conversations and interactions, as well as a long career as an educator and leader. The workshop series is specifically designed to empower artists, demonstrate pragmatic approaches to sustaining a creative life, and demystify the “artworld.” This workshop will provide a close look at the topics below and we recommend that artists have taken either A Sustainable Creative Life: Relationships and Ecosystems or another workshop with Sharon Louden in the past.

Topics will include:

• Best practices to engage communities of artists online 
• Activating and engaging your network over time
• Methodologies to create opportunities and work together 
• Specific examples of what artists and arts professionals are doing to survive, create, and thrive 
• How to collaborate with museums, nonprofits and other arts organizations
• Exploring what a “post-exhibition” world can look like 

In addition, there will be multiple touch-points of correspondence between Sharon and participants throughout the duration of each part that will include extensive sharing of documents and answering of questions. In between these sessions, participants will have access to an online forum where they can stay in touch, share information and resources, and build community outside of the class sessions.  

Workshop Dates

Session One: Monday, April 4, 7-8:30pm ET

Session Two: Monday, April 11, 7-8:30pm ET

Additional one-on-one consultations

After the workshop series concludes, participants will be given the opportunity to sign up for an additional one-on-one consultation with Sharon Louden where she can answer questions specific to each artist’s situation. Consultations are 45-minutes long and take place by phone (or Zoom if you are outside of the US). The price is $120. Sharon will make 20 or more sessions available to those who attend the workshop.

Recordings

This online workshop series will be recorded. The recordings will be shared with all registered participants after the workshop concludes, regardless of whether a participant attends the live workshop. The recordings will be available online to registrants indefinitely; they are not available for download.

About Sharon Louden

Sharon Louden is an artist, educator, advocate for artists, editor of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series of books and the Artistic Director of the Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution. Published in 2013, Living and Sustaining a Creative Life is now in its 7th printing, with sales in 24 countries. From 2013 until 2015, Louden traveled on a 62-stop book tour, where she met thousands of artists. Louden has continued this momentum bringing her second book, The Artist as Culture Producer on an extensive 102-stop conversation tour from 2017-2018. This book is now in its second printing and has also been sold in 24 countries as well as adopted in many schools and libraries throughout the US. Her forthcoming book, Last Artist Standing, will be released in 2022.

Sharon is a faculty member in the MFA Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In addition to teaching in colleges and universities, Louden is also active on boards and committees of various not-for-profit art organizations and volunteers her time to artists to further their careers.