New Year, New Goals

I've been sucked under by the divisive politics of our time, like nearly all of my colleagues in the arts, and so many not in the arts. I'm not sure how that's going to change my work yet, except that it's paralized me for a bit while I watch and wait and think.

Professional development

It looks like Q1 this year is officially my professional development time.

Just in January I have taken 4 seminars already:

• Taken an inventory seminar to size up all that I did last year. Since the quantity of work I produced was down, I wasn't feeling so hot about my practice. I met with Barb Noonan who walked me through her inventory process and came out the other side with a very very long list of 2016 accomplishments. The problem was that I had narrowed my measure of success to include only works created, shown, or written about. The true narrative included travel, international exhibits, and developing entirely new work product, mastering materials I had never used before; like the cast resin Russian nesting dolls in this piece: "I know it existed, but I don't remember it." The title comes from a line in the book Secondhand Time, an oral history of the Soviet Union. I also created two films last year. Below is Variations on Breathing created for NFAA YoungArts.

• I've taken a 4 part webinar on the role of the board chair with Washington Non-Profits.
• I'm currently taking Sharon Louden's 4 part webinar series on how to talk to galleries with Creative Capitol
• I've taken a terrific marketing for artists seminar with Amanda Dellinger at Gallery 110. As a result of that seminar I'm going to work on my website interaction for hand held devices and update my elevator pitch.

Continued development

Last year I was accepted into a two-year leadership development program that's pretty coveted for good reason, called Leadership Eastside. I'm working off part of the $4500 tuition by working in their office directly with the ED. My role is volunteer coordinator and I've implemented a database management tool for the organization to consolodate and organize the volunteer opportunities and manage the volunteer base. We're reading The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing your Organization and the World, Heifetx, Grashow, and Linsky, Harvard Business Review Press, 2009. This month, my quad is leading gracious space and I'm walking the group through a blind contour drawing exercise. This exercise develops and improves your haptic skills and can help people learn to see more broadly things they commonly overlook.

I'm also serving on the board of CoCA, an organization I have fierce allegience to. My catalog Kate Vrijmoet: Essential Gestures is available on Lulu.com.

I've also spent time in my studio making the space more welcoming, inviting, gracious--applying some of the principles I've learned in Leadership Eastside.

My professional goals for 2017 include:

1. Blog regularly
2. Create new work
3. Work on new water paintings. I'm going to be incorporating non-white people into this series. In light of our social/political climate, this is my way of contributing to the normalization and greater acceptance in our culture being anything but caucasian. I'm nervous about this because I'm concerned some people will deliberately misconstrue the meaning because of how high racial tensions are now. But this is my truth. I have to live with my life, my history, my past. And my past includes being befuddled by the constant barrage of racist remarks in my household growing up. These paintings are one way of both examining it and working to undo some of the damage.
4. By the end of the year have a body of galleriable work
5. Continue with my book group, right now we're reading Rudolf Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception
6. Continue with professional development
7. Get back to developing my database development software solution
8. write 3+ grant applications
9. Apply to 10 art institutions
10. Make a regular studio schedule
11. Read through the research I've recently received
12. Research how to get my work into museums

Here's our film from The Incredible Intensity of Just Being Human. Special Thanks to Issaquah Schools Foundation and ArtEAST