Quitting the Art World for Love

I am sitting in my childhood room in a sweltering hot Texas summer. I am reminiscing and embracing the nostalgia that my hometown brings me. My mission is to clear out my old life so that I can bring in a new one. I am saying goodbye to friends and family but they are not fully aware of my plans to leave. Dallas has always been a home base for me and this year even more so. It has been a connecting point between here and Mexico where I have created another life for my self. I am torn between the comfortability of home and family with the realities of contemporary life. Genocide and Ecocide are at the top of my mind and bring me to a halt every day. How can we be so complicit?

I don’t go out much anymore as I refuse to be complicit in capitalistic endeavours. I continue to be a consumer in different ways but I have learned so much from the tranquility of rest and home. Exercise has been my outlet and it allows me to have a pattern in my life that was once overwhelmed with art making. Up until a year ago I would think about art every waking hour of the day. I would go to sleep thinking about art. Ideas upon ideas but an artist can never have enough time or resources to complete all that they dream up of in their minds. I recently made the difficult decision to slow down my practice as an artist. This happened after the confirmation of a complicit culture of racism, classism, and elitism through out the Contemporary Art World. Last year I was asked “what I was working on?” I responded by saying that I am learning how to make our backyard pecan tree fruit again.

This hiatus has allowed me to open up to a romantic relationship with someone who I have been looking for through out my entire adult life. My life is about two now. I can’t selfishly give my self to an art world that treats artists as pawns in a bigger game. I have grown weary of a life that is so attached to a heavy social commitment. I got scared off by the many snakes that I encountered through out the past decade. I haven’t given up on myself as an artist but my idealistic mindset has been significantly transformed. I still think about some of the greatest people I know and they are all artists. My greatest teachers are of that world that I have decided to say goodbye to. How do I navigate my separation from a world that has defined my relationships for so long?

I continue to practice in my mind but not at the anxious extreme that I had reached. I used to mull over what would come next and usually not sleep well as a result. I still hope to have my work honored and seen but I will not rush to excruciate my self for that purpose alone. I still dream to teach and help protect the next generation of artist who want to take a go at the Contemporary Art World. I continue to advocate for a shift in how artists navigate the world while being fully aware that the planet itself could make that shift for us. I am preparing for an unknown future with my one and only. For now that is enough and perhaps once I feel like the world has slowed down I can think about making again.

With love,

H.I.J.