In 2022, when I graduated from the MFA program which I moved halfway across the country for in the midst of a global pandemic, I had the mindset that making as much work as possible and showing that work as much as possible was the clearest path for me to succeed as an artist. That version of success was bound to the status symbols I think a lot of artists aspire to early on in their career: getting represented by a commercial gallery, selling work at high prices, getting profiled in high-profile art publications, etc. I would be lying if I said I didn’t still want those things, but I feel less and less like they should be the primary measure of success for me or any artist.

Since finishing that MFA program, I have taken basically every exhibition opportunity that has come my way, whether it was at a commercial gallery, a local project space, a group show, a solo show, in Chicago, in another part of the country. I never said no. And in a lot of ways there were measurable positive impacts of this way of operating. As of today, I have sold nearly every piece that I’ve made since receiving my MFA (even if I did have to compromise on pricing here and there), I had my first solo show outside of Chicago, which was my most successful exhibition sales-wise to date, and I make a larger portion of my yearly income from selling art than any other time in my life.

These are all really great things. But I’m not sure where I land on whether or not it was worth the 14 hour days in the studio, the over-leveraging of my financial resources to pay for shipping costs, the stress of getting work done on time, the mental buildup of what the next opportunity will “mean” for my career only for it to inevitably fall short of my expectations. After my last solo show, despite the fact that it was objectively my most successful show to-date, and that I felt superb about every piece I put in the show, I still felt like I had put significantly more into the experience than I got out of it. It felt like I’d just barely broken even, not necessarily money-wise (I never did the math), but energy-wise. I felt spent. Artistically, emotionally, financially spent. Which in hindsight is the inevitable result of saying yes to everything without hesitation. Or without consideration of how I was actively over-pumping my own creative well and almost letting it run dry.

So after finishing this show, last September, I started to feel ready to truly take a break. Like not just a month or two to regroup before getting back in the studio but a legitimate prolonged reset of my relationship with my practice. And then I didn’t go to my studio for two consecutive days for nearly 6 months. And everything was fine. No one forgot about me. In fact I would run into people and they would still say “you’ve been busy recently huh!” which blew my mind because to me, I’d been doing absolutely nothing art-related for the better part of a year.

What I did during this time period isn’t particularly relevant or interesting outside of the fact that I think I fully rested for the first time in about 5 years. I laid around, watched movies, worked on music, read books, ate food, but not in a depressed way (mostly). These are things that I’ve done a decent amount of during the past few years, but I think never without a low threshold for guilt associated with them.

This time I allowed myself to have guilt-free rest for a few months straight. And then, shortly after the new year, I started to get the first feelings of readiness to return to the studio (partially brought on by some unexpected modest internet acclaim beginning in January). Immediately after those feelings appeared I proceeded to contract a respiratory virus which turned into bronchitis which lingered in one form or another for a little over two months. Nature had exerted its will on me.

After the first couple of months of this period of rest, I started to think, “what if I just say no to any opportunity that requires me to make new work on a deadline for now?”. And I’ve mostly adhered to that for the past 8 months (with one small exception, go check out some new work at Elsewhere Fair, June 4th - 6th in Philadelphia). The result is that really for the first time since I set out to build a new life around being an artist, I have given myself time to learn and experiment and make new work purely for the enjoyment of it.

Now that I’m back in the studio, I’m obsessed with what I’m working on. I’m spending 12 hours a day at the studio sometimes. I wake up thinking about the thing I’m working on. I leave my apartment at the crack of dawn and come home tired from working on art all day. I don’t feel any need to rush outside of my eagerness to see my own finished work and share it with the world. Maybe that’s success? Maybe having time and resources to be able to do that is kind of the whole deal. Obviously that’s not my life all the time, but it’s only my life right now because I decided to give myself a break. I’m not sure how long I’ll keep saying no. I just got asked to do a solo show next year and I am considering it. But I have nothing else lined up for the rest of this year.

We’ll see what happens.

-mikey