Continuous Project Altered Quarterly | October 2025
The Next
Art World
Before getting into this quarter’s essay, I’d like to share that September was Continuous Project’s lucky seventh birthday I started this consulting practice seven years ago with a vision to transform the way we perceive, acknowledge, value, and compensate cultural labor and co-create the next art world with my clients, colleagues, and collaborators. I see our current moment as a portal for this transformation. But the only way it will happen authentically and have longevity is through the empowerment of artists and art workers.
I’m working every day on that empowerment and am actively seeking ways to make Continuous Project services more visible and more accessible over time, because far too many artists and art workers are struggling: for our living, our wellbeing, our communities, our rights, our beliefs, our future—and the futures of our kin and planet. Our partnerships, collaborations, and our cooperation are the foundation of true sustainability. If you share my vision and believe in the work we do at Continuous Project, I encourage you to engage my services; share this newsletter with someone who can relate; refer prospective clients who might benefit from this work; or connect me with potential values-aligned, mission-driven partners.
THANK YOU to everyone reading this for seven years of Continuous Project. Thank you for reading these quarterly essays and Dear CP. Thank you for passing along these emails to friends and colleagues. And BIG LOVE to all of you who’ve hired me for Private Consulting or Group Consulting and who’ve joined in on the Guggenheim Application Cohort or Growth Planning Workshop. There are even a handful of you out there who would check “all of the above” on a multiple choice list of ways to engage with CP ~~~ THANK YOU
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Over a recent dinner with a small group of guests assembled by The Judith Center, one of the artists in attendance expressed her concern for so many artists and art workers struggling to make their living amid a shifting art world. She asked me about my take on where we are as a field and what I’m seeing among my clients. What arose for me in response has been on my mind not only in recent months but for a couple of decades: The art world we have depended on and benefitted from in this century so far is too extractive, too inflated, and too vertical to ever be sustainable. And what I’m seeing among many of my clients is pain and confusion over being extremely destabilized as everything they’ve been conditioned to believe was worth pursuing crumbles.
Meanwhile, I’m also seeing energy and vision, as well as generative humility. Many folks are realizing they are resilient and resourced in unexpected or previously ignored ways. Creativity and imagination arise in conversation with clients more than ever, with the realization that bringing more creativity into the parallel practice is a form of resilience, aiding in the imagination of new ways to follow their calling.
There have always been and maybe will always be aspects of the art world that lean toward the market and profit-seeking with little regard for culture more broadly. But I also have a lot of hope for experimental and radical culture right now because what I’ve witnessed in seven years of consulting with art workers on sustaining creative lives is that we’re collectively creating the next art world right alongside and interconnected with the increasingly corporate, professionalized, and flattened mainstream art world. This is how culture is made: It’s a messy, complicated, layered, and at times unexpected or even improbable amalgam of relationships that include the market but not to the degree that it eclipses ideas, beauty, fun, connection, adventure, questions, arguments, opinions, spirituality, joy—all for its own sake.
What I want to say to everyone who is struggling right now is that it’s not all darkness, uncertainty, and precarity. Like seedling palms pushing up through LA sidewalks, culture is bursting through the cracks in the market rubble. These cracks are presenting challenges, but they are also exposing new opportunities. Take time to reflect and mourn your losses, tend to the challenges, then notice what is incubating, what is emergent, and even what is already here right now. Take a look at what you’re making and doing and what others in your community are making and doing, not just in the studio but also in the parallel practice, and get inspired.
This receptivity to possibility that I’m encouraging us all to orient ourselves toward is resilience. It’s about looking inward to then look outward; being humble enough to recognize and embrace change; smart enough to know when to stay the course and when to pivot; imaginative enough to invent opportunities; and courageous enough to experiment.
It’s also about having the confidence and conviction to do what is right for you. There is an almost uncanny circumnavigation that occurs when we go inward to find our independence: What we often find on that journey is a profound understanding of our incontrovertible interdependence. That’s where I believe the next art world is happening.
See you there!
Continuous Project
Updates
+ I spent a delightful long weekend recently in northwest Arkansas as a guest speaker for the CIRCA Ceramics Symposium at the incredible new art school at the University of Arkansas. I led a panel discussion on sustaining a creative life with artists Tony Sonnenberg, Sarah Weiner, and Maura Wright, all of whom dazzled the audience of MFA students and faculty alike with their candor and vulnerability. Thanks to Linda Nguyen Lopez and everyone at UArk for the invitation and hospitality!
+ The 2026 Guggenheim Application Cohort wrapped up in late September. We’re building a beautiful community together with this project. Thank you to all of you participants! To be notified about the next Gugg Cohort starting in the spring of 2026, please register here.
+ We started the 6th annual Growth Planning Workshop in early September. As we enter week 6 of the 4-month program, I’m simultaneously designing a year-long version of the workshop that will start in January 2026. To have first access to registration for this evolved approach to my growth planning process, please register here.
+ I’ve had the great pleasure of working with The First Ten for the past two years, providing group consulting to the artists they support. Following a pilot year and inaugural year, we started September with another fantastic cohort of midcareer artists who are mothers of children under the age of ten. Thank you Amanda Valdez for your vision for this project and for inviting me into the fold :)
+ As always, I invite you to book a discovery call if you’d like to explore working together, and established clients are always welcome to book meetings online. I appreciate your business
If you’ve read this far, you’re a true head, and I value you more than you know ~~~
