 So I really wanted you guys to connect because I'm interested in how both of your work engages in this idea of sustainability in relation to the working artist. And I was wondering if both of you, maybe we can start with Dene, could say like how you got started in this idea of sustainability and what is your definition of sustainability? Okay, I think I started with survivability. Moving to New York was like can we make it, can we stay here. And then sustainability and then I think where I'm at now is around building wealth and what are the many types of wealth and how does a system of wealth building happen that will support your work as an artist so that you can continue to make work over a longer period of time. So I think that's kind of where I've come from. Longevity, yes. Yes, okay. And for you, Russell? For me I think that just in general being an artist is a resilient practice. You have to kind of figure things out. I think now we have to have as artists we have to think differently on how we engage the market. Not in reliance on old ways, old systems of building, but how do you actually develop a sustainable practice, economically sustainable practice by way of thinking about your art as a trade. Not just a creative practice, but then how does that creative practice transform into a trade that you actually want to exchange with someone. And once you do that, there's a psychological transformation of like, oh, I'm a business person. And oftentimes in the past, business and art or artists as an entrepreneur, they didn't work. And I think what we're doing is we're seeing a transition of creative practitioners, which are tremendously artists, are starting to embrace that, right? And it's building the gaps of where a lot of art schools are not preparing them for the marketplace. So it's like how do artists start to institutionalize some of their ideas where they can sustain not just a couple of years, but they can look decades forward. So both of you have talked about this idea of work. The importance of you need to put in the energy and the effort in to make something last and to create a plan and framework for it. So that's akin to this idea of hustling, right? And that's something I hear all the time constantly like, oh, you got to hustle. You got to work on your side hustle. Like I think it's a trendy term almost. So I guess my question for both of you again would be like, can you actually just describe a moment in your career where you've had to hustle and what you've learned from that? My career did not start out in art or culture. I am a trained technologist and working technologically for 14 years before I made a transition. And in order to enter that space, I had to hustle because the cultural sector has gatekeepers and old lards and you have to fit very specific criteria, go to the right schools, have the right people, realize you in order to get in the space, especially when you're trying to go into the museum and gallery space. And I kind of did things my own way, you know. The kind of the Brooklyn way is just kind of hustling. I have an idea. Instead of trying to get someone to sponsor my idea, let me just try it out in a group of concept. I'll give that work. And I'll leverage that group of concept to get, you know, support around it. And my work really started off early in my early days was doing a lot of work in Bed-Stuy, which then translated into Afro-Punk or the days of Afro-Punk doing the artist's wall. So every concert had an artist's wall. So that went from that to starting curing shows on my own that I financed myself and that I didn't have any money to finance them myself anyways. Because for me, if I have an idea if I'm not willing to put that energy and finance into myself, how can I expect someone else to? So it really talks about investment. Oftentimes, investment looks at the external investment to something else. And, you know, I grew up with kind of self-resiliency. My mother taught me that at a very early age. So hustling was in my DNA. At some point, you hit a glass ceiling at hustling. And when does hustling become a professionality and how do you transform that into a career? Just for you today? Um, so I have a good friend and we had this other FaceTime conversation. She was like, yeah, girl, grinding leads to dust. And I was like, oh, I got you to put on a t-shirt. Grinding leads to dust. So I think for me, hustle, I will say when I first moved to New York, it was definitely hustle because, like I said, I was just trying to survive. I was like, okay, we moved to the city with our onesuit case. We're going to do it. I'm going to be a dancer. And I was like doing the Audition Circuit, which is a forum, you know, it's on hustle. But I've been really interested. And I feel like this whole year, I'm like, it's rest and recovery. I'm interested in working less. I'm interested in, um, and I think also for my creative process, the stress of just stress is not good for my creative process. So I'm trying to figure out how do I create spaces of like peace and wellness while I still pay all of my bills and save money and pay for me. Paying off my debt was a huge part of that. Because I was like, well, what are all the sort of stressors around my work that are not necessary for it? And how can I remove them to try to create as much space as I can? I try to create a schedule where I am trying to work, make more money in less time. So that way there's more space. So there's more chill. Sure. And then there's less hustle. Yes. And so I think that's where I'm in chill mode. Okay. As much as I can. Yeah, no, I think it's really interesting. This is not really a question. But I think you guys kind of described both like two sides and this idea of self-investment too. Because Rasu, you were saying like, you got to believe in yourself and keep going. And if you have this idea, keep pushing forward. And today you also said that to a certain extent, but you also are recognizing the, like this need to take a step back too also and be a bit reflective about the work that you've put in. Right. So this very holistic view, I think. Because the city will let you work until you die. Like the city, if you let the city, it will just continue working you. And you'll be like, oh my gosh, I've been in New York City for all these years and I'm just tired. So I think that if you let it, the city will make you just like run and you have to kind of say, you have to say, what am I running? I always ask myself am I running or am I walking? Like am I in a place where I'm like trying to get this product done. So I'm kind of like moving at a certain clip. And then there's times where it's like a paper walking. We've saved up for this month. We need to make sure to make space to address things that maybe don't get addressed when you're in hustle mode. It's very easy to let your health care slip, to let your just like basic paperwork. You're getting your taxes done, getting your counting done. It's like, because you're so busy hustling, who's taking care of the books? Yes. The next question for us is, how do you imagine like the future of the working artist given this, given the work that you both are doing within sustainability? Yeah. Artists in general are creators. So I'll just go over it broader. Creatives need to get the act together. You know, because the economy is shifting towards a freelance economy, or gig economy as we call it. So right now we're around 43% gig economy. They say by 2027, we'll be at 50%, maybe a little bit above 50% gig economy. So that basically means, and what that means in layman's terms, is that the average person won't have a day job. The average person is freelancing and hustling, hustling, you know, to get checked and checked. The ones that's going to be able to survive that, the ones that actually have structures, frameworks in place in order to engage the marketplace. And for me, that's, once I had a breakthrough of understanding life, the difference between home and marketplace, it shifted everything for me, right? So you think you can elaborate here? Yeah, so sure. So like, home is ideas that, or the idea of, you know, just, this is me, this is my practice, my values. Marketplace is what you're exchanging. Right? So that exchange could be social, that exchange could be transactional. So once I understood that, I started to really start organizing myself on the marketplace versus home. That makes me think about how I pay for my work now, and how that's changed, and I was like, I'm not going to pay for my work. That was one thought. And also, because I was on an intense budgeting process, a lot of dance, you know, you have costumes, you have a lot of things that you're paying for, tech people, this and that. And I was like, well, what does it look like to make work in a way that I can afford to make it myself? And I think everything is so professionalized, content-wise, like, everybody expects, like, all your videos to look really great, all your photos to be magazine-level, like, everything has to be, it's like, you're competing with, like, a creative advertising house in terms of quality, of production quality. And I've been really pulling myself away from that and saying, what can I make that's really interesting and unique with just the resources that I have that are not going to stress me out? So I was just doing a thing where I'm like, okay, I will try blogging in my house, and I have this, like, closet behind me that has hooks, and maybe I'll hang different things on the notes as part of the background, and I think a really good word can come out of having some of those limitations where you're not like, oh, well, I have to hire a sound person and do this and do that. So you create this production around yourself when it's like, can you do that every week affordably? And if not, then I'm like, okay, what is the most interesting thing you can make with what you have and let sort of where you actually are in life like shine through the work, because I actually think it makes the work more interesting because not everything has to be, like, this super, super polished work to be interesting. And I think you learn more about, I would say that my work took off more when I started doing that. When I started saying, like, well, these are all the pieces that I have, or like, I bought all these costumes for this other work. What else can I make with them? And it sort of forced me to go back, open my craft closet, which was like a million pieces of sparkle, and be like, okay, none of this sparkle is making money in the closet. Okay, so we need to, like, we need to make, what are we making? And really trying to, like, use up what I have, like, put things to work, and that made my art budget go down to, like, $50 a month that I might be spending on my work. But then I'm selling that work for maybe a $500 to $1,000 performance. So now we've created actual the ability to make a lot of money off of every piece of work if you're choosing to sell it in the market. It's not everything you may want to sell. It might want to keep some things for yourself, or it's part of just your process. But I'm like, how can I increase and make it, this how much I will make off of it, whereas I think when I first moved to New York my mindset was, oh, I need to save all this money so I can run a theater for two weekends. Or I need to save all this money so I can pay for this many dancers. So the idea of, like, rather than, like, saving up to then level up your artwork, work from your most sustainable place, make it as interesting as possible, and there will be a market for it because it will have an honesty to it. So it kind of sounds like through sustainability practices in relation to art and creative practitioners that while those who have sustainability practice themselves there's more of a potential for an originality to come through. That idea of value, something meaningful when we're in a society saturated with things that aren't very meaningful, that are very glossy as you're saying. So that wasn't really a question but that was just what I was getting from you. Yeah, and I think it's less stressful. Yeah, and I think there's something to be said of, like, what type of work do you make when you're not stressed? And once I took away all of the, like, okay, we don't have to have like a sound person, like, I was like, what do I really actually need? And I bought this iPhone and apparently can do lots of things like building it up in there. I started downloading smacks, like, you know, we have really actually very sophisticated art making tools, but we still feel the pressure to do, like, just reach beyond and go into debt. I know a lot of dancers who've gone into debt for producing shows because they're like, okay, I need to produce a big show so I can get good footage, so I can apply to this grant because the grant requires, like, un-pet, high-res footage. Yeah, I think there's just, way less stressful. Yeah. And so I think that I also am more likely to experiment because I'm not spending a lot of money per iteration. It's not like, oh, I produced this show, it cost me $5,000. I can't produce a $5,000 show every two weeks, but I can produce a $20 show every two weeks. Yeah. And, like, whatever that looks like. And so then, like, the work gets to change and grow for me a lot faster. Yeah. Because the spend is much more sustainable. Yeah, I have a friend who just kind of broke through as a successful artist, right, financial definition. And one of the conditions is a very passing conversation. I was asking him about, you know, if you had, you know, how would, if you were to duplicate this woman, start looking at her, how would you duplicate it? He was like, you know, having a process is really important, but not just having a process for the work so, like, if you remember when Michael Jordan was to play, he used to get in the zone, but the fundamentals of his game allowed him to get those phenomenal zone breakthroughs. So, when you have a structure that allows for phenomenal breakthroughs to occur, and I think a lot of us, we're just waiting for that breakthrough, but you need to have a bit of a structure in order for them to break through come, you know exactly what to do with it. Yeah. Yeah. Structure and a team. Yeah, he does have a team. Because that's like... Yeah, he has a one person team. But there's like, when I'm working around like wealth or extreme wealth situations, I'm like, oh, they have like a whole group of people in charge of making sure the bills are paid, that the taxes are done right, that this is, I'm like... Check their emails. Can you imagine if you had someone take care of all the administrative parts of your life, you would have so much time to do other things, but once you're really talking about making a good amount of money or even trying to approach wealth building, you really have to have a good team of people, and I think that's something artists can do right now is start building those relationships. Do you have a good accountant? Do you have a good entertainment lawyer? Do you have a good tech person that if you're doing live performance, have you built a system that you have people screening things so that way you know, should I be signing this contract or not, and it's like it can take time to build that network but I think the best time to do it is before you meet it, you're like, oh, you should go to a meet up for entertainment lawyers that's free just to start meeting people or when your friend has a big show and they have made it, look at who's their agent, who's their literary agent, who's their speaking agent because all of these relationships you might need later and you always are going to pay more for something when you have to buy it on the spot but if you have pre-planned and built a relationship organically, sometimes people might try to do this because they're like, oh yeah, you've been following my work for a while and I've been following your work for a while, but I think it's like, do you have essentially your wealth building team with you when opportunities do come up? I've been talking about this idea of spaces for artists and creatives to come together so I guess this is kind of more like reflective but why is the LP such a great space for that kind of for those conversations to just happen and like have that initial start there because most of the artists are young or like mid-level in their career still trying to figure it out so yeah that we talked about the whole time is there's really no organization that does an authentic period, right? So if you're looking at artists who are working with communities in a very authentic and integral way also socially engaged artists there are now institutions flexing and bending to have that conversation sprinkling some of the language into their initiatives but it's not in their core values the LP is unique because engaging communities engaging people of color and in fact there's a POC led and also POC dominated and involved community we look at things differently we know what it's like to be taken advantage of we know what it's like to be appropriated so I think there's a sensitivity and nuance of application of how to engage our practice and social engage art and to create a cohort and a pipeline of people who have great ideas for the public to see and with that there's not many organizations that do it there are some but I'm not going to shout them out right now but with that said I think that LP is a leader in a young institution that is identifying young creatives who are socially engaged cultivating them, giving them resources to tools setting them back out in the marketplace and then supporting them further so I think that's really important and I just to kind of interject you used the word authentic to describe the LP in relation to other institutions and I think this idea of authenticity in relation to an institution whatever that may be they don't always they don't usually go hand in hand so I was wondering if you could explain what you went by authentic yeah authentic meaning that you're speaking from within you're not speaking from without so like you're not using the flavor of the month or the terms that's being pervasive in society just to be marketable or to get funds but you're really centered in your voice you're really centered in your values really centered in the community or the audience that you're speaking to making for and you know what this is hot right now let's use that language we'll galvanize the whole community but then once it's off the table we're going to scrub that language we're going to scrub that community what serves us we see that a lot see that in corporate privacy we also see that in nonprofit I would say one of the things about the Laundry Project that I have found really valuable is that not only does it bring together active artists but it continues to bring them together so I would say that the network are very intentional about maintaining the network I still talk to if not work with many people that I went through the Laundry Project with we're still in conversation so it was like the conversation happened in the smaller intense period of time but now it's five years later and we're still in conversation and our practices have changed over five years we're like oh am I going to apply for a professor job people are kind of making different decisions but literally from the email list to different times of the year that they bring people back together I think that's one of the biggest parts of the continuing the conversation I think you can have programs or experiences that are just one intense time and then people go their separate ways and you're kind of like hey I saw you in the grey house but it's different to be like are we still in conversation are you still working on that question you were working on three years ago and talking about how it's changed and why and it's okay to let that evolve because it's not like you're at a fixed your process is going to change so I would say I really appreciate the continued networking and community building process that they do even after you have done all about creating ripple effects we've been discussing at the LP and it gives you a really good framework to continue to check in on your work so you have your seven principles I should know for the LP has like six principles but you can continue to revisit those principles because it's easy to like be dissolved with yourself a little later like is this really community engaged is this really doing this and you can continue to like revisit it and have a framework that you can use that to communicate with other institutions or partners or spaces that you want to engage with and say hey these are things that are important to me are they important to you so having to practice the principles in the process of being a fellow having a continued framework that you can use it to keep yourself accountable and to create common ground for communication and value setting when you are working in the company that's all she wrote but thank you so much for your time today and you have really enjoyed starting out.