Continuous Project Altered Quarterly | September 2026
Making It
Nadia Szold’s new film The Figures: An Abstract on Geoffrey Young looks at the life of the eponymous poet, publisher, artist, and gallerist. She tells Young’s story through some of the many artists and writers (the figures) he has intersected with in his rich and varied life. The film also explores the unique role of the Geoffrey Young Gallery (1992-2019) in the art world and the literary influence of the publishing imprint (The Figures) he co-founded in 1975 with his (now ex-)wife and helmed for 30 years. It’s an intimate portrait of a working artist’s life, replete with visits to artists’ studios; chats between Szold and Young as they traverse Young’s cozy New England home, stuffed with papers, family photos, books, and art; interviews with poets who cherish Young’s self-published chapbooks; close views of Young’s face, transformed through the act of reading his own poems in a darkened recording studio; doubles tennis with friends on a clay court in the woods; family confessions steeped more in wonder than regret.
More than most artist profiles, The Figures is a portrait of a working artist, giving just as much time to Young’s parallel practice and plural practice as it does to his creative practices. I use the phrase “parallel practice” to describe all of the operational infrastructure, administration, communications, and relational labor required to bring one’s creative work into public view. And I use the phrase “plural practice” to describe a work life that encompasses two or more endeavors branching off from the same skills and knowledge; for instance, a sculptor working in wood may also make and sell wood furniture. Every artist who wants to be an artist in public must have a parallel practice, and most working artists (whether artists in public or not) have plural practices, using their skills and knowledge to make their personal work (which may sometimes yield some income) and also do work that is explicitly intended to earn money.
As Szold shared in a delightful discussion with Young and Johanna Drucker (who also appears in the film) following the recent Los Angeles premier of The Figures at Beyond Baroque, she wanted to make a film about creative longevity, not just about “making it.” Citing the recent PBS documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World as a counterpoint, Szold explained that her aim was to show another kind of life unfolding. Without taking a moral position or attempting to define success, the film tracks a series of choices Young made in his work and life that accounted for both creativity and pragmatism. The Figures is a portrait of a working artist making it work.
In so many fields, our society reifies relentless striving for and bald achievement of fame and fortune, implying that anything less or anything different than a prescribed definition of success is not only inferior but unwelcome, invalid, or even lazy: If we’re not seeking all of the attention, we don’t deserve any attention. (And/or: If we’re not seeking all of the money, we don’t deserve any money.) Within this narrow framework, there is little room for self-determination. In The Figures, Szold invites us to take a look at another way of being, in which personal agency, community, and family are favored over ambition.
One choice Young made was to reside in a small town in western Massachusetts, where he writes poems and makes art. His chosen parallel practice includes self-publishing these poems and artworks in chapbooks that he sends to a select mailing list. Prior to sunsetting The Figures in 2005 and closing the Geoffrey Young Gallery in 2019, Young chose to work as a publisher and gallerist to earn the money needed to support himself, his family, and his own creative practice. These jobs were his plural practice, extending his knowledge, skills, and interests beyond his personal work into the realm of commerce and allowing him to work free from convention. In this light, we're given a view of an artist who is exceedingly capable.
I’m sure it hasn’t always been easy. The topic of work arises in his poems from time to time, revealing his ambivalence. Here’s “The Job,” in full, from Young’s collection Pockets of Wheat:
So much proof-
reading lately,
he began to look
for typos in his
Conversations.
Much like the work I do with clients at Continuous Project, The Figures asks an important, though often sidelined question when grappling with how to make a living: What kind of life do you want to live? The question is big enough to encompass others: What kind of art do you want to make? What kind of career do you want to have? But the larger question of what kind of life you want to live acknowledges that your humanity is not defined by your productivity. Young seems acutely aware (in hindsight, anyway) that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” as the recently departed Annie Dillard wrote in her slim, devastating manual The Writing Life. It’s quietly inspiring (and, to me—a reformed “success”-seeker—deeply reassuring).
I have several clients who have recently taken on or are seeking jobs, or are radically rethinking and reconfiguring their income, most for the first time in years. Some are restructuring or adding for-hire income streams to their studios; others are looking outside their own studios for employment. At first I explained this trend away as a collective response to the ongoing art market correction and the broader economic circumstances we’re all facing. But my conversations with these folks reveal more nuance. Yes, they require more income to support themselves, their families, and their practices amid rising costs of living, flagging artwork sales, and a changing culture. But they are also seeking something less tangible and perhaps even more valuable: liberation from the art world. With a potent mix of frustration, disappointment, boredom, and disgust over constraining narratives, systemic inequities, and expectations inherited from the field rather than emerging from within themselves, these working artists are discovering (and in some cases, rediscovering) the desire to leverage their energy, interests, skills, and knowledge to generate revenue commercially or embrace the nine to five.
No longer perceived as an oppressive chore keeping them away from their creative work, a job is a material and symbolic key to various kinds of freedom for these artists: to make the work they’re truly called to make, to experiment, to authentically engage with community, to be present with their families, to breathe a sigh of relief, to choose their integrity over conforming to a way of being that may never have been the right fit. A job allows them to protect their art, process, and time from the vicissitudes and harshness of the art market. Liberating themselves from the art world also means liberating their art, relieving it from the pressure of also being a product and grounding it in the realm of the personal, perhaps even the spiritual.
I met Nadia Szold earlier this year on an airplane coming back to Los Angeles from the east coast. We exchanged some words about where we’d been, where we live, and what we do. She told me her new documentary is about a poet and artist. I told her that I help artists navigate their careers and gave her my card, asking her to let me know when she would be screening the film. Little did I know that The Figures would be so directly relatable to my work and what's been going on for some of my clients. Or that it would so beautifully address some questions I’m currently asking about my own life—again. The example of Geoffrey Young's life is a welcome affirmation of my clients' choices, and of those I’ve made for my own art, my living, and my life.
