Essay for The Artist as Culture Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life
by Matthew Deleget

The following essay was published in the book The Artist as Culture Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life by Sharon Louden published by Intellect Books, 2017.

On March 5, 2009 my son Mateo was born. Aside from the day at age seven when I learned from my parents that they were getting divorced, my son’s birth was the single biggest day in my life, including in my career as an artist. It clearly marked the end of the first chapter of my career and the beginning of the roller coaster ride I currently find myself on.

I grew up in Highland, Indiana, a suburb on the south side of Chicago. In 1994, I moved to Brooklyn at age 22 to attend graduate school at Pratt Institute where I spent the next three years completing an MFA in Painting and an MS in Theory, Criticism and History of Art, Design and Architecture. I did the degrees at the same time. I really didn’t see any distinction between these two disciplines. In order to contribute anything at all to the artistic discourse, I knew I needed to have a deep understanding of the work and ideas that preceded me. At Pratt I also met my amazing wife and life collaborator, artist Rossana Martinez. She was literally the girl next door and lived in the apartment adjacent to mine in the graduate dorms. She arrived at Pratt a year earlier from Puerto Rico to study sculpture and printmaking. I can’t stress strongly enough how important Rossana has been to me and continues to be in literally every facet of my life. I must admit that it was absolutely love at first site and we moved in together almost immediately. We’ve collaborated on every aspect of our lives ever since. We see each other as partners and contribute to our household equally, both in terms of housework and financial responsibility. This is a given for us as we rely heavily on each other’s contributions.

Rossana and I have both had regular jobs in one capacity or another since we were teenagers. This has included part-time, then full-time, and for me freelance work, ideally with a least a foothold in the arts or education fields. Although we do sell our artwork — in some years more work, in others less -– we never expected our studio work to provide our livelihood. Yes, of course, that would be amazing, but due to the nature of the work we make (reductive, conceptual abstraction), it’s just not realistic. After graduating from Pratt in 1997, I landed my first full-time job in the arts at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). I arrived there kind of through the back door. A friend of mine, artist Wendy Allen, asked me to fill in for her while she took maternity leave with her first daughter. I originally met Wendy working at Artnet. I worked there part-time during graduate school as a researcher on their nascent auctions database, the first of its kind. After Wendy’s time off from NYFA ended, she decided not to return to her job and thus began my twelve-year stint as a non-profit arts administrator.

My starting salary at NYFA was $28,000, which was extremely modest, especially given the expense of living and working in New York City (NYC), but it didn’t deter me. The job included other excellent benefits, such as health and dental insurance, but more importantly, it was flexible and gave me a significant amount off, which I used to do my studio work. My tenure at NYFA, in retrospect, provided me with a once-in-a-lifetime education about sustaining my life as an artist in NYC. I also had the opportunity to work directly with two pioneering arts mentors, Ted Berger and Penelope Dannenberg, as well as meet some of my now closest friends and colleagues in the art world.

My first job at NYFA was running their Visual Artist Information Hotline, a free live telephone service providing professional development and information resources to artists nationwide. During my first two plus years, I spoke with at least 10,000 visual artists by phone and later email from all over the country. This included every conceivable kind of visual artist in every conceivable kind of situation. My job was to research, identify, and advise them on everything from grants to health insurance to natural disaster relief. You name it, I responded to it, and in real time. My job required me to be knowledgeable to at least some degree about everything.

After developing the hotline, I was promoted and charged with conceiving, building, and directing NYFA’s new information and research department. This broadly encompassed all of the foundation’s print, online, and in-person professional development services. Each year my colleagues and I served tens of thousands of artists in all disciplines across the country. Possibly my proudest achievement there was conceiving and launching NYFA’s Jobs in the Arts classifieds in 2002, which quickly became the employment engine for the arts and culture industry here in NYC and beyond.

As head of the department, I ended up directing a staff of about ten full- and part-time employees, all of whom were accomplished, working artists, performers, and writers in their own right. Who better to advise artists than their colleagues in the trenches with them? I really saw it as a kind of dream team. As director, I also developed and oversaw an annual budget of well over $1 million, conceived and refined new programs, met with funders and wrote grant proposals, collaborated with other arts organizations nationwide, and so much more. I learned almost everything I now know about the arts industry at that job, among them, the importance of new ideas and innovation, the value of collaborating with creative individuals, and the need for hard work, nimbleness, and acceptance of perpetual change. All of this must be planned for deliberately and sustained over the long haul. I truly believe it primed me for the rest of my life as an artist.

When I was not working full-time at NYFA, I worked in my studio during nights and weekends, which was a dedicated room in my apartment that I also shared with Rossana. I love working at home and honestly wish I had more space to do so now. As an artist I tend to go to the studio and work when I have something to say, which can be unpredictable. I usually don’t find something to say while kicking materials around in the studio. I also tend to work in very short, intense bursts. I feel there’s something virtuous about it. I don’t think I could be there for eight to ten hours a day. The isolation would make me crazy.

Right now, I think of myself as always in the studio, whether I’m there physically or not. I’m always thinking about my work, planning upcoming exhibitions in my head, writing down ideas on my cell phone, and making very fast, rough sketches on Post-it notes. I then source the materials I need for a specific piece and knock it out in the studio, usually very quickly. I’m decidedly unromantic about the creative process. Relative to other artists, particularly painters, my studio practice might appear somewhat erratic, but that’s how it has evolved over the last twenty years. In the early 2000s, as the nature of my work changed – larger works, less than healthy materials – I needed to find a dedicated studio outside of my apartment. And as my studio time was so limited due to my full-time job, it needed to be as close to my apartment as possible. I was living in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn at the time and found a great studio in an old industrial building within walking distance in Gowanus, which overlooked the pastoral Gowanus canal, a Superfund site.

In 2009, after twelve years at NYFA, I followed in my friend Wendy’s footsteps and planned to take a three-month paternity leave when my son was born. I grew up without seeing much of my father and was 100% committed to being present and hands-on with my son. That part for me was simply non-negotiable. When Mateo was born, it really flipped a switch in my brain and I knew in my heart that I simply couldn’t go back – as much as I loved it – to working full-time at NYFA. With a heavy heart, I resigned from my job there. In retrospect, however, this was the best decision I’ve ever made in my life. And it was also completely insane. It was 2009, after all, and the economy had just imploded causing the Great Recession, from which this country is still recovering to this day. Here I was with a newborn son, no job or any prospect of one on the horizon for that matter, and in the middle of the worst financial crisis since my grandparent’s generation. It was like a massive earthquake had just occurred and I was honestly utterly overwhelmed by it. It was in the irrational fog of being a new, unemployed father that I decided to dive into a new venture and run MINUS SPACE full-time, an artist project I started with Rossana back in 2003. Our first regular exhibition, a group show called Open House for Butterflies, after the children’s book of the same name, opened on July 31, just four months after my son was born and a month after I quit my job. I’ve been running the gallery full-time ever since.

My wife and I co-founded MINUS SPACE in our living room in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, in August 2003 as a platform for reductive art on the international level. After five years of exhibiting our work with some success after graduate school, which to some degree concerns the legacy of Minimalism and Conceptual Art, we both felt that something was clearly missing. We felt there was a lack of real, genuine discourse, specifically artist to artist. A strong sense of community was also lacking, as well as a sense of greater meaning to what we were doing as emerging artists trying to get a toehold in NYC. Contextually this was also a period of time when abstraction was at its nadir in relation to the gallery scene and overall market. You were hard-pressed to see new abstraction, let alone painting, which is my personal interest, on the walls of a gallery anywhere in the city. Many other artists we knew and exhibited alongside us here in Brooklyn felt the same way and we decided to roll up our sleeves and do something about it. Rather than following the well-established route of opening some kind of exhibition space, which we felt wouldn't address our main concerns, we looked to the Internet instead.

As a direct result of our day jobs -– me again at NYFA and Rossana as an administrator in the Department of Art & Art Professions at New York University -– we both had solid experience with conceiving, designing, and building web sites. I’ll note here that the web at that time was not at all considered a serious space for art. Really only a handful of arts organizations and individual artists had web sites at the time, which were at best basic web pages or online newsletters. We felt, however, that the web presented a huge opportunity for what we wanted to accomplish, so we spent the summer of 2003 learning how to code in HTML and began to build MINUS SPACE online. Web sites at that time were terribly labor-intensive and extremely expensive to build so we knew we needed to do it ourselves for it to come into fruition. 

I want to stress that language was also a persistent problem for Rossana and me as emerging artists. We were often called “Minimalists” in press releases, reviews, and in every day conversation. We didn’t see it that way however. Although certainly part of our artistic heritage, Minimalism really came out of the concerns of our parent’s generation and was vastly different than our own. So as we conceived MINUS SPACE, we dubbed a new term -– reductive -– and wrote language to define its scope.

In the very early days of MINUS SPACE, we simply invited a handful of artists we knew and admired from our immediate community in Brooklyn to participate in the project. We began with artists, with whom we forged deep, meaningful relationships during school, including both graduate students and faculty members, as well as other artists with whom we exhibited during our first few years out of school. We built profile pages for each of them featuring their work, information, and ideas. We posted news and other information on what we called our Log, which was an early incarnation of blogging. And we also published interviews with our artists, built a chronology of the development of reductive abstraction globally, curated exhibitions online (still a rarity today), and many other things over the next three years. When we launched the site, we quite naively thought that it would never reach beyond the boundaries of Brooklyn. But very much to our surprise, it did. MINUS SPACE quickly took off the moment the site went live and artists from across the country and around the globe got in touch with us to participate. We gladly accepted. Artists were then followed by others interested in reductive art, such as art historians, curators, writers, and ultimately collectors. In retrospect what we built was a social medium, a platform for reductive artists, our community of practice, our tribe.

We developed and ran the site for nearly three years until it suddenly tipped in 2006. We began to receive email inquiries from people traveling to NYC who wanted to visit our “gallery”, but couldn’t find our street address on our web site. No exaggeration, we received dozens of emails like this in 2006. We would, of course, write back saying MINUS SPACE was a web site, not a physical space, but that we’d be delighted to meet up, get a cup of coffee, and share notes. That summer we also travelled to Europe and saw firsthand the project spaces that several of our participating artists had created in their cities, including PS in Amsterdam, Hebel_121 in Basel, and CCNOA in Brussels. We returned home fully invigorated and immediately opened a project space of our own for temporary exhibitions. And we decided to do it in our Gowanus, Brooklyn studio space.

To mount an exhibition, we simply moved all of our stuff to the side and turned it over to another artist with the specific mandate to do a project they weren’t able to realize elsewhere. We’d mount a show or performance, send out an email announcement, and host a reception. Our exhibitions would sometimes last a few hours, a weekend, or maybe a couple of weeks at most. After an exhibition finished, we turned the space back over into our studio again and continued working. In the end we did about four projects each year with the goal of convening people together around an artist’s work, sharing ideas, and building community. We envisioned it as a kind of utopian space and we ran it in this manner until 2009 when our son was born.

Back in 2006, we also received our first invitation to curate a “MINUS SPACE” exhibition at another venue. This began a whole new area of exploration for us, which we still continue to today. Between Rossana and me, I generally take the lead on outside curatorial projects and I’ve curated exhibition in collaboration with university galleries, museums, non-profits, commercial galleries, and private collections both here and abroad. The most recent project was a group exhibition in 2015 entitled Breaking Pattern, highlighting several generations of artists investigating and advancing the discourse around pattern, optical, and perceptual abstract painting. The show coincided with the 50th anniversary of the now legendary Responsive Eye exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Breaking Pattern originated at our gallery, but was greatly expanded for the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University, our very first collaboration on the West Coast.

As I mentioned earlier, I dove into running MINUS SPACE full-time in July 2009 and launched a formal, year-round exhibition program. By “full-time”, I mean a full-time work schedule, which was at least 40 hours/week, usually more, but with nowhere near a regular, let alone full-time salary with benefits. My salary during this time, and even now, is completely unpredictable and cobbled together from an array of sources, including arts consulting work, teaching, visiting artist residencies, curatorial fees, sales of my studio work, and, of course, sales from what is now our gallery. My income is usually pretty lean, with some years a little less so. As someone who is self-employed, every single day of my life is hustling to find and secure regular work. It’s relentless. And again, I have a family. As a younger artist, I could do without, but that’s simply not an option anymore.

I will add that one terrific benefit to me was the Affordable Care Act, which continues to give me access to good, relatively inexpensive health insurance. My health is the second non-negotiable thing for me. In addition to my family, there are now many people depending on me to be in top form mentally and physically, and I’m really fortunate that my overall health is good. I’m literally knocking on wood with both hands as I write this. I eat well and exercise daily – swimming, running, and cross training. In fact, I actually do most of my strategic planning for my life, studio work, and the gallery while I’m exercising. My mind is usually incredibly clear and high on endorphins then. I’ve curated many exhibitions while running across the Brooklyn Bridge at night and I’ve resolved major challenges with the gallery while swimming laps in the pool.

In 2011, we had the opportunity to move MINUS SPACE from our petite, 176 square foot project space in Gowanus to a slightly larger one in Dumbo, Brooklyn. We moved to a slightly larger one again in 2013 and then again to our current ground floor space at 16 Main Street in Dumbo in May 2015. With each successive move, four to-date, we spent countless days planning, and honestly stressing, to ensure sure we could sustain the additional overhead. Running a bricks and mortar space is so much more expensive than producing a web site and rent is a gallery’s main expense. We do have an incredibly supportive partnership with our current landlord, Two Trees, which helps us keep our doors open. Our ultimate goal with the gallery is to be totally uncompromised in what we exhibit AND to be self-sustaining, meaning the gallery will at least pay for itself and partly for us. Being uncompromised and self-sustaining are not mutually exclusive, but they are an ongoing challenge, which regretfully produces some regular financial panic attacks. I will also stress here that Rossana and I are not people of wealth –- we are middle class at best here in NYC -– and we do not have a financial backer for the gallery. We run it like your local coffee shop, as a true retail business.

Sustainability is something I think about every day. I ask myself, is what I do on a regular basis sustainable? I honestly don’t have a clear answer for that. I do find, however, great personal meaning and satisfaction in what I do as an artist, writer, curator, teacher, and gallerist. Do I sometimes feel totally overwhelmed and exhausted by it? Yes, without question. But am I super lucky to do be able to do the things I feel so passionately about on an ongoing basis? Absolutely. At the end of every year, when we close up our studios and the gallery for the holidays, my wife and I dedicate time reflecting upon the past year. We look at our successes and our failures. We look at what worked and what didn’t, what gave us satisfaction and what caused friction. We then spend time laying out a roadmap for the year ahead, which encompasses our studio work, the gallery, and our life as a whole. Each year we also recommit our attention and energies on working smarter. It’s simply not possible for us to work any harder at this point, nor is it sustainable for us in the long run.

As I approach middle age, it’s become increasingly clear to me that my time is not a renewable resource. And I want to spend the best of me focused on the things that dovetail precisely with my core personal values and artistic beliefs. I am incredibly fortunate to have a strong, stable, and loving relationship with my wife and son. It is the cornerstone of my life in the arts. I also get to contribute in a small way each day to building a stronger artistic community, of which I am one small part. I don’t think it’s possible to be completely egoless as an artist, but I never think of myself as at the center of things. I am part of greater arts ecosystem and the health of that system depends on what each of us contributes to it. I will also add that I love honest, hard work. Maybe it’s the Midwesterner in me, but it gives me tremendous pleasure to get things done.