Sustaining Craft

And then COVID-19 hit the United States. “A few weeks beforehand, my boss was telling me, ‘No one’s gonna, with all the stuff going on, no one’s gonna go to your show,’” Hannah said. “I was like, ‘It’s not gonna be a big deal. It’s gonna be fine.’”

Ultimately, the exhibition was postponed until February 2021. “Then it just all gets taken away,” Hannah said. “I taught a lot of extra classes to have money to buy art supplies. I missed out on things with friends to stay home and make stuff. One of my friends recently moved away, and one of the last dinners they had before they left, I didn’t go to because I was like, ‘I really need to stay home and make stuff. I’ve already been out too much this week.’ It makes me a little bit sad that I missed stuff like that.”

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Sustaining Craft is a passion project of Hew & Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Music provided by Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends).

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Special Guest: Hannah Genevieve Lawrence.

Growing up in the hearing world, Brandy Mimms didn’t realize for years that there was an entire other community she could participate in. “I grew up mostly in the hearing world,” Brandy explained. “So we have the deaf world and we have the hearing world. I grew up in the hearing world because my family wanted me to be hearing so badly. I appreciate them, thank you, but they never really exposed me to the deaf world as a kid.”

Still, she followed her interests, which included music. To listen, she simply has to feel it. “I have to feel the vibration,” she explained. “I can hear it a little bit in my hearing aids, yes, and I’m not saying it has to be rocking loud, but it has to be loud enough for me to really feel it where I can feel, okay, this is hard or this is soft. I need to feel that. If I don’t feel it, I feel like, ah I’m lost. I don’t know where I’m going. I feel very crazy. That’s how I listen to music -- feeling the beat. And I have bluetooth hearing aids, so music is always in my ears when I’m not talking to people. I’m always listening to music. The vibration is right there. I have a love for music and music helps me with my dancing and helps me to express myself.”

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Sustaining Craft is a passion project of Hew & Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Music provided by Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends).

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Special Guest: Brandy Mimms.

Stacey Bowers wanted to make her friends laugh. She used some of her previous knowledge of jewelry making and learned how to stamp metal to make delicate pieces with interesting phrases on them.

“I think it has a lot to do with my own personal taste in jewelry,” Stacey said. “I typically wear things that are small and discrete, and I think a lot of other people appreciate that, too. But my attitude is not small or discrete. It's a little combination of the inner and outer me.”

She worked full-time as the communications director for the Thea Foundation while making jewelry every hour she wasn’t at work. As of February 2019, she decided to transition to jewelry design full-time with her company, Bang-Up Betty.

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Sustaining Craft is a passion project of Hew & Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Music provided by Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends).

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Special Guest: Stacey Bowers.

Joshua Kurtz joins Elizabeth Silverstein of Sustaining Craft for a follow-up interview.

Over the years, Joshua has found that simply asking might lead to unexpected results, like when he asked his drama teacher if the school could perform the musical he wrote at age 17. Or when he needed to raise his rates as a professional Dungeons and Dragons dungeon master.

“I realized at that point, ‘Huh, I’m a very niche market, this is a very niche market, I’m not charging enough for my services,’” Joshua explained. “And it’s hard, because I’m asking people to come back over and over and over again, and I’m asking an audience and it’s mostly kids. But I did wind up raising my rates, which got very little resistence. Everyone was very supportive, especially when I said why.”

As of January 2020, Joshua is a full-time dungeon master, teaching Dungeons & Dragons and other table-top role-playing games to audiences of all ages.

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Sustaining Craft is a passion project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Music provided by Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends).

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Special Guest: Joshua Kurtz.

Hannah Allen stumbled into the flower industry with a customer service job. “I had no intention of touching flowers whatsoever,” Hannah said. “Only because my manager was just like, ‘This is your job. Don’t expect much.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, sure, fine.’ I was young and dumb, so I was like, ‘I’ll just do whatever. Just give me a paycheck.’”

Then the head florist, Marie, asked her for some help. “She got really overwhelmed one day and she was like, ‘Come on over,’” Hannah said. “She was drilling me on the flowers, on what’s what, I had to label them. She taught me all the basic arrangements that I needed to know.”

Marie was transferred, and Hannah became head designer at the shop.

She’d always loved weddings since she was young. As the flower girl at the weddings of her mother’s friends, Hannah was determined to do the best job she could. When a bride came into the shop looking for affordable wedding flowers, Hannah remembered how much she loved weddings. “A girl came in looking for cheap wedding flowers on the fly,” Hannah said. “My manager handed me this big binder full of wedding information on all the questions you need to ask and all this stuff. And he was like, ‘Here you go. You can do it.’ I was like ‘Oh, ok.’ Having that sit down with the bride and getting excited and talking about what we’re going to do for her wedding was what ignited that, I think. I had this entire trade-style crash course on how to have a wedding consultation. That’s where it started, I think. It was the wedding stuff.”

In 2018, when she decided to “go rogue” as she described it, she started with Hannah Allen, Flower Gal. Then came Petal to the Metal Floristry. “I was just making an Instagram post one day, and I was just like, ‘Everything is going so fast, it’s petal to the metal.’ It just clicked in my head. It was the best pun of all time for a flower business.”

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Sustaining Craft is a project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Everything is funded through partnerships with friends. Music provided by Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends).

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Special Guest: Hannah Allen Anderson.

Michael joined the military at the age of 16. By the age of 31, with a three-month-old daughter, Michael was let go from the military in what the armed forces calls a reduction in strength. He was sent back to the United States with his family, with no understanding of life as a civilian for the past 15 years.

“I panic," Michael explained. "I experience a lot of stress. We were trained to not recognize stress. We didn’t talk about stress. We didn’t talk about trauma. So you’re outprocessed--in other words, you come through this process of coming back to what we call ‘the block.’ And I would say you try to hold your head up, you try to be proud. You try to be an adult. You try to play the male role but you are in a nether world. Even though you’re back with the family that birthed you and raised you, you’re back with a whole different mindset, a whole different paradigm of what life’s about, and you are disconnected. You suffer from disassocation disorder. You’re out of your element, your’re out of your sphere. You don’t know what to do.”

Michael graduated with honors from the UA Little Rock Masters Social Work program with a concentration on community and family therapy. He works as an education specialist in a program at UA Little Rock with an office from the Department of Education. He also plays once a month in Hot Springs and performs several times a month for veterans with dementia, VA staff, and veterans in the day health care program.

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Sustaining Craft is a project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Each episode is only possible with the help of friends: Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends) and Joshua Kurtz.

Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/sustainingcraft

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Special Guest: Michael Eubanks.

Jessica and Justin Crum decided to move to Conway in 2014, where Justin began working for PBS creating documentaries. He created educational documentaries, included one that aired nationally. But with little room to grow, he decided to take a step back into the scripts he’d written previously. “My roots are very much in narrative filmmaking,” Justin shared. “And I did grow to love documentaries there, I didn’t want to only do documentaries, and there’s no way to branch out from that there with PBS, really, unless you’re Downton Abbey. I just felt it was the right time to move into other scripts I had written before and start producing those. PBS was a bit of a training ground for me in a lot of ways and built my confidence up. I left there with the intention of making the film I’m making now, which is Papaw Land. I’ve been working on that for a year and a half. And it’ll probably be another year or so. It’s a long process.”

And Jessica tried to continue her career as a fashion designer. She was freelancing for her contacts in LA and started saying yes to other projects. “When people locally would say, ‘What do you do?’ I would say I’m a designer,” Jessica explained. “I would tell them textile design, fabric design, graphic t-shirts, and they’d go, ‘Oh! Could you make my logo?’ I was like, ‘Probably.’ I’m a yes person, so I was like, ‘Yes, of course I can,’ and then secretly I was like, ‘I’ll figure it out.’”

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Sustaining Craft is a project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Each episode is only possible with the help of friends: Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends) and Joshua Kurtz.

Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/sustainingcraft

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Special Guests: Jessica Crum and Justin Crum.

When the gallery was in danger of closing, Castellano decided he would take on the project. He started raising money and planning pop-ups, absorbing the risk. “I didn't want to bring anybody else down,” he shared. “I wanted to do it pretty much on my own back. I did the GoFundMe for it and I had a lot better response than I thought I've ever had. So I have to do it now. Yeah, it's like yes, okay, I get to do it and have to do it. … It's really the community.”

He’s also built an educational element into the gallery, sharing the smaller details of working with galleries, like making sure a name is on the back of every art piece, resumes and portfolios are up-to-date, and that every “no” hits hard, but each “yes” makes up for it. “I've been rejected more times than I've been accepted but I was accepted a few times and that makes all the difference,” he said. “I want to be the person that I didn't have.”

Each artist accepted into Gallery 360 walks away learning how to work with other galleries as well. “Everyone that gets to show here is going to learn how to be an artist by the end of their show,” Castellano said. “That way, they are stronger about going into other places and being represented. A lot of times, gallerists and people that represent don't want to have to deal with people that don't know. It's a lot of work on their end. if they come in and they're completely perfect, then they have nothing but good roads ahead of them. So even the smallest things like not putting information on the back of the piece is detrimental sometimes because you never know if that could be a sale or if you're never gonna see that piece again because it can get lost.”

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Sustaining Craft is a project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Everything is funded through Hew&Weld and partnerships with friends: Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends) and Local. Magazine (http://localmag411.com/).

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Special Guest: Matthew Castellano.

And that interest had started years ago, with a family project. LeMaster’s father, gifted in construction, decided to build their family home from the ground up. The family lived in a mobile home while they first built a barn to house all of the building materials, and then started on the house a few years later. “I kind of felt like i grew up on a construction site,” LeMaster said.” I loved so much of that process of building our house and being able to be so involved in that process. Hanging doors, helping my mom pick out wall paper and paint colors.”

After graduating with her degree and working for a year and a half at a local firm as an intern and then a junior designer, LeMaster decided to take a break. She joined her mother again, helping her flip a house as LeMaster considered what her next step might be.

She didn’t intend to start a company.

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Sustaining Craft is a project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Everything is funded through Hew&Weld and partnerships with friends: Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends) and Local. Magazine (http://localmag411.com/).

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Special Guest: Kathryn LeMaster.

Robert Bean found himself stuck between needing a job that didn’t involve his craft, wanting to spend time with friends, and still being able to practice his art. “I have to practice, I have to draw, I have to create,” Bean said. “At the same time, I don’t want my life to be nothing but, I go to work, and then I come home and go to work. … I got creative and I said, ‘Well, what would happen if my friends were going out to dinner, or we’re going out to grab a beer or something--what happens I just take a sketch book with me?’ And so I started drawing on site. I started going out with friends and I would take a sketchbook and I would sketch while we were out. I do that all the time now.”

Bean turned the idea into a class at the Arkansas Arts Center, Urban Sketchbook, where he also serves as the Painting & Drawing Department Chair of the Museum School. “I encourage my students, if you’re sitting around in the doctor’s office, take a sketchbook,” Bean advised. “Draw in the waiting room. If you’re sitting at the DMV, draw while you’re sitting there. Waiting for your car to get fixed, sketch. You can find the time to sketch. You can find the time to keep those drawing skills alive because we have a lot more dead time in our days than we realize. It’s the idea of developing those kinds of disciplines that eventually roll around into making money. Because as soon as you start to create enough, as soon as you start to draw enough, you build body of work. Once you build that body of work, then you can show it. It took me ten years of figuring things out. I do look back at that period in my twenties and go, what if I had that mentor when I was 21 years old that would come in and say, ‘You’ve got to do this and this and this’? Maybe I would have started to make money earlier, but I was in my late twenties before I started making money somewhat consistently with my work."

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Sustaining Craft is a project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and crafts people to participate. Everything is funded through Hew&Weld and partnerships with friends: Joshua Kurtz, Morgan Allain (The Inkling Girl), Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance & Nomad Neighbors), and Local. Magazine.

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Special Guest: Robert Bean.