Hard Truths for Poor Artists: O Pioneers, Continued
On moving from glittering cultural capitals to smaller, more affordable spots
Welcome back, subscribers. Hello to those of you who are just dropping in for this post.
The response to this Hard Truths series has been encouraging. Thank you. I’ve been especially happy to hear from teachers who tell me they’re sharing these posts with their students.
Hard Truths, Part 5 ran too long for a single post. Here’s the second half. The first half covered some strategies for a successful move from a cultural capital to a smaller, more affordable city: consider liberalism and conservatism beyond the political divide, move at the start of your career, return to your hometown, move within range of a cultural capital, move overseas, or start a new life in a cheaper place upon retirement. We also met a bunch of artists who’d moved with some success.
It’s important to me that I keep this Hard Truths series free. No paid posts on money for artists here. If you do feel inclined to pay for a subscription, you’re my hero.
Consider the actual cost of living in a smaller city
Housing and food costs in U.S. cultural capitals are now astronomical. The other day a Bay Area artist friend told me he went out alone for a meal of humble breakfast hash + one mimosa and somehow owed $45 before the tip. When I suggested he cook at home, he hastened to name all the items he no longer buys at the grocery store because of their prohibitive expense: not only luxury items like sun-dried purple pepper flakes from Turkey but even some fresh fruits and vegetables.
A smaller city could cut my friend’s food and housing costs in half, with lower or at least comparable costs for health care, local transportation, and utilities, too.
What cost of living calculators don’t figure, however, are hidden expenses. If a working artist must travel to exhibits, performances, or residencies, it’s important to know that flying from a regional airport can be more expensive than flying from a major hub. Also, in any given place, how far would you have to go to see favorite bands in concert, eat dim sum, or visit friends? We can’t imagine exactly how our lives will unfold anywhere else, but we can price out a fairly realistic month of costs including both necessary and discretionary spending. Probably the smaller city is still cheaper. It’s worth checking.
Expect culture shock
Oxymorons FTW! We can’t expect culture shock, but anticipating cultural differences can help an artist adjust to a new place.
Before musician Ray Vega moved from The Bronx to Burlington, he’d been visiting Vermont for years as an artist-in-residence at a summer camp. “I’d met a bunch of musicians and had a feeling for the place,” Ray told me. “But I’ve got to be honest, I didn’t know what to expect, because hanging out with people for one week in the summer is not seeing how the music scene works on a day-to-day thing.”
When Ray did experience Burlington’s day-to-day music scene, he had some culture shock. “Major league culture shock,” said Ray. Though there were plenty of great players in Vermont, the scene simply didn’t have New York’s intensity. Ray had come of age playing with Latin jazz legends like Tito Puente and Mongo Santamaria, who demanded a fierce wholeheartedness from their sidemen. Ray had led his own bands through challenging shows and sessions in his work as a recording artist for Concord and Palmetto Records. Playing music was, in a sense, a form of devotion for Ray.
At first, Ray returned to New York each weekend on a kind of heat-seeking mission. Then he decided to create musical intensity in Burlington.
Build the scene in which you want to work
Many artists are natural scene-builders. Artistic practice shows us that putting enough hours into craft can reveal our work to be more than it first appears. The same can go for investment in communities and scenes. Most of us don’t identify as geniuses—at least I hope not—but do appreciate Brian Eno's idea that any expression of artistic greatness is the result of scenius, or the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene.
Ray Vega decided he had a moral imperative to grow the music scene in Burlington. “If a person is coming into a community,” says Ray, “and that person has established his or herself in a larger community and has some knowledge, it’s a disservice to the art, in general, to take a job at an institution and focus on teaching and hide yourself and not get out there and play. First of all, I want to play. If it means I have to create a scene, I’ll do it.”
Vega started a weekly series at a Burlington café. Brian McCarthy, a Vermont saxophonist who’d also lived in New York, said Vega immediately fired up the local music scene. “Here in Vermont we’re all kind and gentle, which is a wonderful thing,” Brian said. “But when Ray got here, he raised the bar higher.” Even musicians who disliked Ray’s onstage provocations eventually rose to the challenge and took pride in the vigor of the scene.
Ray found support for musical intensity from local audiences. Writer and radio host Reuben Jackson was a regular at Vega’s weekly gig. “You can play at music, or you can play music,” Reuben told me. “With Ray, the music’s got that deeper level of fun and commitment. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything as a listener. I don’t sit there and think, gee, I wish I were at the Village Vanguard. I’m reveling in being present for what they are creating. That’s important.”
Armed with a fresh PhD from the New England Conservatory, pianist Gloria Chien took a tenure-track position at Lee University, a small Christian college about 30 miles from Chattanooga. She was grateful for the job but missed playing music with her friends. “After being in Tennessee for a couple of years, away from the world of school and Boston’s music scene, I was quite hungry for musical inspiration,” Gloria told me.
Gloria decided to start String Theory, a chamber music series. She’d loved attending classical concerts at Boston’s Gardner Museum, so Chattanooga’s Hunter Museum was her obvious choice for a venue. After Gloria’s first grant was turned down, she went to Darlia Conn, wife of Lee University President Paul Conn. Darlia offered for Lee University to act as Gloria’s fiscal agent and also assisted with fundraising, helping Gloria get in front of locals who’d sympathize with and donate to her cause. “We offer a good bit of support to the String Theory program because first of all, we love Gloria, but also because we see the value of it for the community and we see the value of our visibility in Chattanooga,” Darlia said.
In building the arts scene in which she wanted to work, Gloria found her strongest support outside her own music department—and at a politically conservative college. Gloria has become something of a hero to the local culturati. “Basically, she’s set this place on fire by sheer excellence,” Chattanooga Symphony Music Director Emeritus Bob Bernhardt told me. Artists who move to smaller communities may have to search a bit for support and may find it in unlikely places. Once they do, they may be unstoppable.
If we move somewhere with the intention of building an arts scene, it’s worth considering not only the differences we’d bridge to reach others, but the differences in aesthetics, approach, and way of being that others would have to bridge to reach us. Communities that have learned to be open to various identities may still shrink from aesthetics or experiences other than their own. To build a scene, we need at least a few people who recognize the value of our work and will support and/or join us.
Reflect on what you’d need to keep working and earning well in a new place
Here’s where I’ll finally share a bit of my hard luck story. Hello, schadenfreude lovers!
If you’re not in the mood for a cautionary tale, though, please skip this section.
At the end of Part 4, I described the flourishing state of my career when I left New York for good. Though my income tanked when I moved to Colorado Springs, I was able to do some work remotely. Not enough to save for retirement or my kid’s college, but enough to scrape by. Then circumstances changed. When the pandemic hit, freelance opportunities narrowed and I needed a local job.
Every time I’ve applied for a teaching, writing, or other job in Colorado Springs, the hiring committee has looked at my C.V. and responded with some variation of “You’ve done X, Y, & Z. You don’t want this job.” This, of course, is a way of saying I’m overqualified and/or they don’t want to work with me. Once I got so desperate that I removed all my experience from my resume and applied at a local garden center. “Looks good!” they enthused when I dropped off my redacted resume, saying they’d call to arrange a start date. The next day I got a call. “We thought your voice sounded familiar, so we Googled you,” the manager said. “We’ve heard you on NPR. You don’t want this job!”
Artists may find it a psychological challenge to work full-throttle in a place where a full-throttled arts career is a liability. It can be hard to dig in and, say, write more books if our career elicits fear and loathing among locals. (“A writer is just someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people,” I’ll quip in an attempt to put people at ease. But comic self-deprecation works better back East and back home in Kansas). Besides, if we too often assume an apologetic posture about our own work to placate others, we may begin to internalize their negative misconceptions. We may even start to reject ourselves before others can reject us. Poor artists can’t afford any of this. We need to remain positive enough about our work to keep doing our best and earning all the money we can.
Consider a place for a family
Children can give artist parents an incentive to move. When the University of Vermont offered Ray Vega a full-time teaching job, his autistic son gave him a good reason to accept it. “The special services for autistic children in Vermont are so much better than special services in New York City,” Ray told me. “We were willing to move for that.” As we discussed earlier, musician Reid Poole left New Orleans, where he and his wife both thrived professionally, because his hometown of Colorado Springs offered better educational opportunities and quality of life for his kids.
Children also can give artist parents an incentive to stay. Kids make relocating more complicated. A co-parent may prove unwilling to move or we may not want to uproot children once our family is settled somewhere—and that can mean not being able to support our kids as well as we’d like.
Kids are the greatest. They do often change our careers.
Some questions for smaller city research
Attending events in and out of our artistic fields can show us if a place has a simpatico community or the makings of one. We can talk with other artists, asking questions. Where were they in their careers when they moved there? Did they have some history or connections with the place when they moved? How has the move worked out for them professionally, socially, and financially? How much of their living do they earn locally? How much of their living do they earn from their art? What do they like or dislike about the local culture? What does the town’s art scene need and is there an opening for someone to provide it?
Be alert for signs of existential openness. Do people make sustained eye contact in conversation? At a party or event, does anyone approach you or are you making all the effort to engage?
A combination of reportage and your artist’s spidey sense will tell you what you need to know about a potential new home.
Never mind. Just make the leap somewhere affordable.
On the other hand. When going out for humble breakfast hash in a large coastal city can set us back $45, seeking out an ideal alternative home is a luxury many artists can no longer afford. I asked musician Erica von Kleist, who moved from New York to Whitefish, Montana, for her advice to young artists considering a move:
Erica: “A couple years ago, my answer to that question would have been find a place with a scene, with some venues—find a place with a nice community you feel like you can relate to. All that's still true. But with the skyrocketing cost of living to the point where we're at apocalyptic levels? Now I'm just like, dude, go where you can live as cheaply as you possibly can. I don't know what that means to you, where you're thinking of living, but figure out a way to not get yourself into trouble financially. Have that be your number one concern.”
Given economic trends, any place an artist can work while affording decent food and housing may be the right one—especially if an artist has no commitments that would prevent them from moving again. Maybe things will work out.
As I’ve mentioned before in this series, writers, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, and painters tend to buck trends and go against the grain. This is what we love about artists. The headstrong creativity that drives our work can also convince us that we’re pioneers who can build artistic lives anywhere. Some of us can. I’d still argue that the expense of cultural capitals doesn’t make any relatively affordable city the right home by default. It’s best to look before we leap. It’s easier to thrive artistically and economically when we’re part of a community that accepts us. Welcoming smaller communities exist around the world and are well worth finding.
Still more to come in Hard Truths for Poor Artists, including a couple of full artist interviews.
Thanks to the many artists who spoke with me about their experiences of moving to smaller cities. And thank you, as always, for reading. Share and subscribe if you can.
This is a timely series for me as I'm about to move from Prague, where I've integrated into the free improv scene, back to somewhere in the US I don't know yet where... Thanks for writing openly and honestly!
Michelle, you speak to Steve Coleman, who instituted a further concept along these lines. Early on he left NYC for Allentown, PA. But I remember in the 90's he actually created a spoked wheel or spiral concept to touring. He would rent a house for a month or longer and take out his band with a large van. That house would be home base for the time there, but he would work with musicians in that specific locale, but slowly move out from there like a wheel with spokes or spirally. He did that in the Bay Area or slightly north of there. Folks like Vijay, Josh Jones, Liberty Ellman were all beneficiaries of working with his band or doing gigs in the area and beyond. While in the Bay Area, he would venture as far I believe as Seattle going north He could probably go into more detail. He also did the same in Bahia as well as in Cuba. In Cuba, folks like Dafnis Prieto and Yosvany Terry were also beneficiaries. I know this is a little off the beaten path, but I think it's a novel approach to extend your reach and cultivate relationships.
Although I know most folks aren't set up to go as DIY as they were, but Medeski, Martin and Wood basically got in a van with their equipment and travelled to small towns all over, but definitely in the south east. They would pull up to a bar and work out a deal to play for the door and develop their fanbase. I know it wasn't all fun and they were in some very dead places culturally or at least looked that way from NY, but look where it got them in the end with a fan base all over. Hitting the college chitlin circuit might give you some ideas about where to stay a while as well. #mytwocents