New Rules — Jess T. Dugan on achieving and maintaining creative autonomy

The amazing and terrifying thing about being an artist is that you can set your own career path. There’s no specific way you have to go about doing things. At this moment in my career, creative autonomy means that I can structure my practice, my creative work and my life in whatever rhythm makes sense for me. That means focusing on my priorities and saying no to many opportunities, even though they’re good or interesting. It can be very easy to get diverted from your actual goal, which, for me, is creating my own work and making a living off it. 

I also don’t make work for the market. Of course, I think about the market and put my work into it, but I don’t make things because I think they’ll sell. So, creative autonomy means I can make the work I want. Work that’s coming from my heart and soul.

I’ve always had a clear idea of the career I want to build, but I hit a significant learning curve after ten years of aggressively building. At that point, I had been saying yes to every lecture opportunity, teaching opportunity, commercial assignment and every opening. I hit a point where that was no longer sustainable, and I’d also had enough initial success to take my foot off the gas for a minute. And yet, I struggled with learning to say no. It felt so counterintuitive. I had to learn to trust my gut and overcome the fear of missing out. 

Becoming a parent also required honing my priorities because my ability to travel, my work time and my money all became more limited, and that has forced me to be really intentional about my work. This was never a limitation; it actually provides a kind of structure that’s been positive for me. 

My strategy has always been to get my work in front of as many people as possible and meet as many people as possible, knowing that any connection could take a long time to yield something. I’ve always had this blind faith that things will happen if you put yourself out there enough. When I was younger, I would also reverse engineer the CVs of artists I admired. I would look at artists five or ten years ahead of me and see where they exhibited, what grants they got, and what collections they were in. It gave me all these avenues to pursue and insight into how I could craft my career.

People think of the art world as this monolithic, impenetrable beast, but it’s just a group of people who make decisions and have certain preferences and tastes, whether those people are curators, donors, galleries or publishers. I think sometimes artists like to complain that they’re not getting any traction or they’re not getting shows or acquisitions. But then you ask them what they’re doing to make that happen, and it’s really nothing. 

You have to be part of the community. You have to show up at other people’s shows. You have to express interest in what curators are doing. You have to go to fairs and talk to people. I understand that does not come easily to every artist, but it’s vital. I did not come from a world of connections or from inside the art world. And yet, I have found that by being part of it over some time, you slowly meet a lot of people, and then suddenly, you’re in this ecosystem and not outside it anymore. Then it starts to seem less like one big gate and more like 30 different possible access points that could be the right fit for a certain body of work.

Now, I have this established career and am no longer emerging. I think a lot about how I will grow from here. My initial impulse was to move to a more prestigious gallery, and then I realized that I just wanted to go out on my own. I want that freedom. I want to manage my career, at least for now. It was scary to let go. When I first considered leaving my galleries and not having representation, I worried about my reputation and whether I needed that kind of validation for my career. Earlier on, gallery representation was hugely important, and it introduced me to museum curators and got me to the place I’m in now. Contemplating leaving, I was wondering if curators would buy from me directly. Will my reputation be affected? Will it seem like I’ve spent 17 years climbing this ladder, and then I jump off it? None of those fears have come to pass.

I finally understand that having the freedom to manage my career fully is really important to me. The flip side of this liberation is that. I spend a lot of time emailing curators, having virtual studio visits, overseeing the production of my work at the lab, coordinating shipping and proactively reaching out to museums to plan shows and tours. I have found that I enjoy this part, too. A part of me is very entrepreneurial and loves building relationships, dreaming up deals and making things happen. I’m at a point in my career where I’m interested in following the work. I’m asking bigger questions: what makes this life of mine meaningful? And the answer I’ve come to is that it’s all about connection.