We were lucky to catch up with Jennifer Drinkwater recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jennifer, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

I’m an artist, and in 2018, I started something called The What’s Good Project, which has been my combined attempt to learn from folks, make art, and shift my default way of thinking.

Inspired by the conversations I have with folks around the country, I create original paintings about what’s good in each of their communities. A portion of each art sale is donated back to these communities.

This project evolved as in response to two things: 1) I got sick and tired of being so cynical and 2) I began working in communities.

Culturally, it seems that we’re addicted to negativity. Myself, I’ve always been a worst-case scenario expert. Like I probably should have been an actuary. Meanwhile, artists, ironically, are trained, wired really, to see possibility. You can see the rub.

About ten years ago, my academic teaching position morphed into one that focused primarily on working with communities through our extension and outreach program. I started meeting folks – artists and creatives, who made their own rules – used theatre to bridge community divides, used pop-up installations to engage folks about water quality, transformed an old post office into a community space.

From these amazing folks, I learned that effective ways of making things better in places is by focusing on what is already working, as opposed to searching for holes, flaws, and possible disasters to prepare and rally against. I also realized that I’ve always been drawn to collecting stories by and about awesome community builders. Folks who change the narrative of their communities by putting energy into making what is good, better.

The What’s Good Project is inspired by the philosophy of asset-based community development. According to research, when we shift our focus from what’s wrong to what’s right, we can affect positive change where we live. The project explores what happens when we make a choice to look for what’s good where we live, as well as the best ways to share what other folks are doing to build momentum.

Jennifer, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

A Mississippi native, I decided to pursue art full-time halfway through a 700-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail. In college, I studied art and cultural anthropology, and I’ve always loved stories, particularly Southern stories.

So as an artist, I’ve always been really curious about what art shares and what art does when it leaves the studio walls. When I started working for Iowa State University Extension & Outreach as a community art specialist, I learned about asset-based community development, which essentially encourages folks to focus on the strengths within a community instead of solely dwelling on the challenges.

In my travels for ISU Extension and back home to Mississippi, I kept meeting folks and hearing their stories about the really creative, courageous things they were doing to make their communities better. These stories have been integral to my education of good community development strategies, good ways of engaging folks, and good ways to increase quality of life.

Most importantly, each of these stories have taught me that belonging is foundational to all healthy communities, and that art can be a vehicle for belonging.

Nowadays, this philosophy shows up in my painting and studio art practice, as well as the work I continue to do with communities through Iowa State Extension and Outreach.

As a community art specialist, I’ve helped to organize a community-wide steamroll printmaking event in Perry, Iowa; created installations in restored prairies in Nebraska; collaborated on public art projects in vacant sites on Iowa main streets; spearheaded a community knit-bombing project; and painted murals with middle school children on a juke joint in the Mississippi Delta and behind City Hall in Perry, Iowa. I’ve written community art free toolkits about these projects that anyone can download and implement in their own community. In 2021, I interviewed a dozen Iowa community artists and community arts leaders for a blog titled For the Common Good, an interview series I published on The What’s Good Project website.

As an artist, I interview folks about what’s good where they live, and transform those conversations into paintings and writings. These works are shared online, in my studio, and in community exhibitions in order to reach a larger audience. I donate a portion of any sales back to a nonprofit organization in each community chosen by the community members I’ve interviewed.

To date, I’ve worked and painted mainly in rural spaces in Iowa and in Mississippi. In the national media, the stories that typically arise from both states are pretty terrible, and rightly so, in many respects. And yet. The folks and stories I’m drawn to are those that share courage and transformation – the slow work of commitment to doing the right thing in the face of trauma and pushback and structural inequity.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

It took me 20 years to call myself an artist.

Never mind that I had a long line of very supportive art instructors and mentors who told me I was an artist.

My academic background was a jumble of painting, art history, and cultural anthropology, which, among other things, left me a very confused student.

I graduated high school and college (and grad school if I’m honest) feeling “not-an-artist.”

Here’s the rub. I believed the crap myths about artists, namely they were: broke, starving, self-isolating, struggling, effortlessly super-talented, obsessed with their work, and a little goth (bc it was the late 90’s).

So I graduated feeling “not-an-artist.” Instead, I felt “perhaps-a-PhD-in-anthropology?” and “maybe-law-school?”.

Fortunately, I took to the woods for two years to sort this out. A whole other story that ended with me dropping out of graduate program before I even started (oops) and moving to Altanta in my twenties to pursue, you guessed it, art.

Time passes. I now make art, yet am still “not-an-artist.”

Never mind that I behaved as an artist: I had 2 art degrees, taught art, made art, sold art.

Then, in my 30’s, two things happened: I married a man who’s not a doomsayer (opposites attract) and I started working in communities.

I started meeting folks, creative folks who made their own rules. Who used theatre to bridge local divides, who made pop-up installations to discuss water quality, or who transformed an old post office into a community space.

From these amazing folks, I learned that making things better happens by focusing on what’s already working, as opposed to searching for danger. It’s science.

So I started collecting stories by and about the folks changing their communities by putting energy into making what’s good, better.

A funny thing happened. By getting out of the studio, I changed my own narrative about who artists are (all of us), what artists can do (create impact), and how artists can act (effectively, civically, socially).

What’s evolved is a minor obsession with the intersections of people, community, and art.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The easy answer is doing what you want. Being expected to be unexpected, to go against the grain, to do things differently. I do feel extraordinarily luck to have stumbled across a profession that I am energized by and that doesn’t feel (most of the time) like a job, although I suppose that any profession has that capacity.

Ultimately, I really just like to create things. I adore being able to transform an idea in my brain into a tangible thing to share with other folks      

Contact Info:

• Website: https://whatsgoodproject.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewhatsgoodproject/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/whatsgoodproject

Image Credits
Headshot photo: Karla Conrad