Social | #ArtistHotline Returns to Twitter on September 19

Artists, creatives, and curators: use the hashtag to join the #ArtistHotline community from 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM EST. 

Looking to think outside the confines of your own practice or career? Head to Twitter on September 19 for #ArtistHotline, a professional development Twitter chat that takes place on the third Wednesday of each month. It’s an online forum that facilitates resource-sharing and encouragement between a community of artists and arts administrators. Each #ArtistHotline tackles a variety of subjects through a generalized Open Chat, while also covering select key themes in-depth through a subsequent Guest Chat segment and an Artist/Arts Administrator Q&A. We’ve curated a great lineup of experts for this month’s #ArtistHotline; learn more below and find pointers on how to follow the chat, ask questions, and share your own best practices.

September 19 #ArtistHotline Schedule

• 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM EST: #ArtistHotline begins with an Open Chat. You can ask questions and receive advice on any arts career topic throughout this segment.
• 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST: During the “Resources for Curators” Guest Chat, we’ll tweet with a multidisciplinary panel: Larry Ossei-Mensah, who is Susanne Feld Hilberry Senior Curator at MOCAD and cultural critic; Xavier de Sousa, an independent performance maker, curator, and producer; and Cheryl Tipp, who is Curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds at the British Library. They’ll share their experiences in the curatorial field with advice on how to chart your own path as a curator.
• 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM EST: A Staff Q&A about “Art + Business” with Judy Cai, Senior Program Officer, NYFA Learning, will draw from NYFA’s newly-revised second edition of The Profitable Artist: A Handbook for All Artists in the Performing, Literary, and Visual Arts (Allworth Press, 2018). Cai will explain how key business concepts and tools can benefit an individual artist’s practice or project.

Join the #ArtistHotline Conversation

Here’s how you can participate in #ArtistHotline throughout the day on Wednesday, September 19!

• If you don’t already have one, create a free Twitter account now.
• Follow the conversation live on Twitter by following the “Latest Tweets,” rather than the “Top Tweets,” for the hashtag #ArtistHotline.
• Tweet your questions and include the hashtag #ArtistHotline in each tweet.
• Don’t hesitate to introduce yourself, retweet and respond to other tweeters, and share what’s on your mind!

“Resources for Curators” Guest Chat Participants

Larry Ossei-Mensah is the Susanne Feld Hilberry Senior Curator at MOCAD and cultural critic who has documented contemporary art happenings for various publications including NeueJournal, Uptown, and Whitewall Magazine. His writings have profiled some of the most dynamic visual artists working today, like Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, Lorna Simpson, Meschac Gaba, and street artist JR. As a curator, Ossei-Mensah uses contemporary art and culture as a vehicle to redefine how we see ourselves and the world around us. He has organized exhibitions and programs at commercial and nonprofit spaces from New York, New York to Rome, Italy, featuring a roster of critically-acclaimed artists including Derrick Adams, Firelei Báez, ruby amanze, Hugo McCloud, Brendan Fernandes, Derek Fordjour, and Peter Williams. Ossei-Mensah is a co-founder of the 501c3 collective ARTNOIR. In 2017, he was the Critic-in Residence at ART OMI in addition to serving as a member of MoMA’s Friends of Education and a mentor at the New Museum’s incubator program, NEW INC. Currently, Ossei-Mensah is exhibiting a solo show of Allison Janae Hamilton’s work at MASS MoCA co-curated with Susan Cross.

Find Ossei-Mensah tweeting @youngglobal.

Xavier de Sousa is an independent performance-maker, curator, and producer. Having grown up with Europe’s oldest performance art festival, CITEMOR (Portugal), he has been working in theatre, dance, and live art since graduating from Kingston University in 2010. As a curator, he started at Vogue Fabrics Dalston with Who The Fuck is Alice? an evening that celebrated the dichotomies between pop culture and live art, with all the proceeds being raised to support arts charity ArtsEmergency. Since then, he co-curated the CUT Festival, which saw barbershops and artists of East London collaborating with international artists in a celebration of barbershop culture. Recently, he has been producing and curating Queer Migrant Takeovers across the UK, which have taken over buildings and platformed migrant artists and activities. de Sousa is also producing and curating New Queers On The Block, a new touring initiative for queer performance makers in the UK, led by The Marlborough Theatre (Brighton) in partnership with Grand Theatre (Blackpool), Home Live Art (Hastings), Quarterhouse (Folkstone), and Theatre in the Mill (Bradford). Throughout his career, he has worked with Latitude Festival, Tate Modern, Vogue Fabrics, Southbank Centre, Whitechapel Gallery, The Yard Theatre, CITEMOR (Portugal), Operastate Festival (Italy), Onassis Culture Centre (Athens), Kalamata Dance Festival (Greece), Old Vic Tunnels, Camden People’s Theatre and ]performance space[, amongst others. Learn more about de Sousa by visiting his website.

Find de Sousa tweeting @xavinisms.

Cheryl Tipp is Curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds at the British Library. She manages one of the world’s largest collections of natural history sound recordings and has written on a range of subjects surrounding field recording and audio archiving. Her latest piece on music and nature will be published in the anthology Metaphonics (Jap Sam Books), which is due for release later this month.

Find Tipp tweeting @CherylTipp.

“Art + Business” Staff Q&A

Judy Cai is Senior Program Officer, NYFA Learning. She manages and facilitates various professional development programs at NYFA, such as the Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, entrepreneurial boot camps, and online learning. With a strong interest in arts and cultural exchange, Cai also manages a number of NYFA’s China programs and outreach to local Asian artist communities. Since 2013, she has led four intense professional training programs for Chinese art administrators and curators in the United States. Prior to this position, Cai was the Outreach Coordinator at the Flushing Council on Culture and the Arts. A strong advocate of global arts exchange with extensive experiences in international communications, Cai has also worked at Christie’s, Dance/USA, and Shanghai International Arts Festival. She holds an M.A. degree in Arts Management from Carnegie Mellon University, a B.S. degree in Culture and Arts Management, and a Bachelor of Law degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Find Cai tweeting on September 19 @nyfacurrent.

Inspired by the NYFA Source Hotline, #ArtistHotline is an initiative dedicated to creating an ongoing online conversation around the professional side of artistic practice. #ArtistHotline occurs on the third Wednesday of each month on Twitter. Our goal is to help artists discover the resources needed, online and off, to develop sustainable careers.

This initiative is supported by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation.

Images, from top: Tiffany Smith (Fellow in Interdisciplinary Work ‘18), Plant Life Installation view, photo credit: Tiffany Smith; image courtesy: Larry Ossei-Mensah, photo credit: Andy Boyle; images courtesy: Xavier de Sousa, Cheryl Tipp, and Judy Cai