Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Amy Yoshitsu. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Amy, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

I co-founded Converge Collaborative during the first year of the pandemic with two close friends. In speaking only for myself, I was motivated to co-create what became Converge out of grief and disillusionment over a previous venture; disappointment in myself that said endeavor caused such mourning; scared (obviously) and pessimistic about the course of society and our collective future; and driven to carve a path closer to my artistic dreams.

During this period, my first boss generously asked me what I want to do in the world. The answer to this framing appeared in my mind without hesitation. I wanted to dedicate myself to being engaged in the why and how of our shared systems and reality. Since college (and probably subconsciously before), I have been driven to expressing my interest in this through the creation of sculptures, objects and installations.

Additionally, I have always been keenly aware of the imbalance between the time, educational, and financial investments that so many of my artist friends and colleagues place into their practices compared to the paltry opportunities available for social and material recognition. Knowing my skills are best suited for a small community in which interpersonal relationships are key to building solidarity (and feeling I had permission to do so through reading Emergent Strategy by adrienne marie brown), I wanted to explore leveraging my privileges to create a space dedicated to supporting and empowering creatives socially, economically, and emotionally. Given my own familial and personal identities and circumstance, I am sensitive to how challenging it can be for people of color, people in care-taking roles, people of marginalized experiences and bodies to allow themselves—and/or to be gifted encouragement from others—to follow creative desires given the hurdles in our society to attain comfort, stability and respect.

In my personal journey, I was rethinking the condition in which I had given myself to situations which economically (but not in any other ways) supported my personal responsibilities. Only *in theory* did these jobs support my artmaking; for over a decade, I had little time or energy at the end of the day for creative thinking or fastidious making within the psychological environment that “free” time should go back into Slack, email, Figma.

I have always been inspired by cooperative and collective models in political history, in art history, in the history of humans caring for other humans. The idea of manifesting power-with through a group of people in solidarity seemed like a way to respond to a core theme in my artistic practice—our society saturated in power-over. Growing up in Berkeley, CA, the Cheese Board Collective is a beloved institution and implanted in me that workers cooperatives are realties, not just theoretical possibilities. In college, I was a volunteer librarian and Papercut Zine Library and got an early taste of the collective model, values, and operations.

Co-creating (and I emphasize the “co” because I do not believe Converge could ever exist in alignment with its values without the thoughtfulness and opinions of multiple people) Converge is a “risk” because we work everyday to make it a space that acknowledges and attempts to counteract the requirements of capitalism for many (and that many of us have faced): dynamics embedded with the experience of being demeaned, being ignored, being misunderstood and overlooked. I would like to position Converge as an offering (credit to Michelle McCrary, a worker-owner of Converge for teaching me the value of this word) to fulfill ourselves within multiple dimensions; to build one of many foundations needed to navigate the requirements of imposed and innate systems; to act with the confidence that the future is not predetermined and the past holds gems not widely recognized; to explore and experience the power of a healthy relationship between autonomy and solidarity.

Converge Collaborative’s current worker-owners and social members, Louis Bryant III, Katie Giritlian, Michelle McCrary, Pat McMahon, David Rios, and I have been building our workers cooperative and artist collective for more than three years. Our day to day is spent working with clients, recording and editing for our podcasts, working with community members within our workshop frameworks, and refining our own operations. In the long term, our goal is to support the facilitation of the establishment and flourishing of more cooperatives. We believe the administrative, social, emotional, psychological, economic, and logistical aspects are all of equal importance and we want to empower others through what we continually learn and experience.

Amy, 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?

I was raised by artist parents and one of my early influences towards visual arts were trips to Storm King, the sculpture park in Upstate New York. I developed my passion for sculpture while studying studio art under Annette Lemieux, learning how to see with John Stilgoe, and working with other accomplished and inspiring artists at Harvard University in what is know the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies (at the time it was Visual and Environmental Studies). Once in the workforce, I found the skills of Software, Product, Web Design i.e. UI/UX, aligned with how I mentally interacted with sculpture-making. Both types of creations require functional and technical knowledge. Layered on top, the end goal is made meaningful by attention to aesthetics and, most often, visual thoughtfulness and skill. Throughout my career, I have worked additionally in branding, logo, and graphic design for large corporations, tech companies, small businesses, independent creators, and more. I love working on design systems, creating data visualization to simplify multidimensional information and packaging many-layered decisions into accessible workflows.

Within Converge Collaborative, I love doing this work with our internal design team. We are multi-talented creatives, each specializing in different areas, which provides us the ability to facilitate the strategy, execution, launch and marketing of a project. From research and roadmapping, to design and engineering, to photography, filmmaking, and audio production, to digital marketing and content creation, we can assist during a phase or throughout the lifespan of a product, event, or campaign. I love collaborating with such strong and beautiful writers, listeners, bookmakers, film buffs, sound enthusiasts, and question-offerers. As a BIPOC cooperative, we have insight into many experiences and are attuned to both the “main” narrative (in the US) and how that intersects with the many stories and threads we see, hear and live IRL, and in media and digital spaces. As artists, our worlds are dedicated to culture work. We understand how to engage with audiences, trends, meaning, and can facilitate imagination and execution.

If you are interested in learning more or getting in contact, we would when people reach out. Old fashioned email works: [email protected] or follow us on Instagram or Linkedin @convergecollaborative. You can also learn more about our work on our site, convergecollaborative.com.

We have two podcasts out. *Bring Your Full Self* is a series of conversations that center the humanity and emotions of people of color in the context of their labor, how they generate their work, and survive inside the systems of capitalism. In the first season, members interview each other so listeners get to hear about the process of building Converge and learn about the interests and histories of each member. The *Curious Roots* podcast digs deep in the living earth of our personal, familial and communal lives to help us understand how we exist in the world today. It is hosted by Michelle McCrary and the first season focuses on her maternal family and what happened to her Grandmother’s community of Harris Neck, Georgia. We are currently working on Season 2 of both podcasts.

We have also been offering Open Exposures, a series of workshops that examine how people of color in the diaspora experience the complex relationships between travel, colonization, and photography. We will be announcing new workshop dates soon!

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

All of my practices are driven by my personal experiences as a result of my family’s lineage of racialized trauma, assimilation through capitalism, and location as Asian-Americans in colonialism’s created racial hierarchy. I combine historical research, close looking at tools (such as tax documents), material explorations and images of our built environment to explore the interplay between systems and our emotional, psychological and bodily conditions, which deeply affect us materially and socially.

I seek to both understand how we got here and to engage in ways we can create a future less dependent on control and, instead, more focused on empowering what it means to be human. My work and drive within Converge Collaborative is part of this desire.

I hope through my work that people are inspired to look more deeply at how we are shaped by so many forces (capitalism, hierarchical social systems, etc) that are human-made but are marketed as normal, natural and therefore positioned as what is “right”. I create my work as a way to understand myself and my interpersonal relationships, to work out the why and how of the dynamics. I am always pulling at a very intimate thread and then creating towards the knowledge that my conflicts, traumas, frustrations, are shared by so many. For me, understanding is part of building empathy and healing, I hope my work can be a part of that process for others.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

More material support, more money. In our current system, money is the means to having the time to ideate and experiment, the supplies needed to make creations, the support needed to perform, exhibit, screen, and market such events. Systemic material support would lead to systemic social support. It would increase opportunities and the ability to use a skill to then survive physically and psychologically in our society. As I alluded to earlier, it is my experience that many marginalized folks do not dare dream of pursuing something creative in fear of triggering their loved ones’ visions of instability, downward mobility, etc. And, these fears are not without justification. I know personally.

In the visual arts, one traditional path for balancing stability and an art practice has been through academia. These opportunities, like those in other sectors withered by neoliberalism (and other forces), are less available and less stable than they were for past generations. As a society, we need a place for artists and creatives. We need the work to be honored, recognized, and compensated for its impact on society and culture. The gig economy, the highly competitive and limited grant system, and the focus on the productization of creativity is not the answer.

This reality is one of the core reasons we have built Converge Collaborative. We are seeking to build an ecosystem since we cannot wait for one to be given to us. We favor collaboration over competition and recognize the bootstrap, winner-take-all systems have not and are not designed to work for the majority on this planet.

Contact Info:

• Website: amyyoshitsu.com and convergecollaborative.com
• Instagram: @amyyoshitsu and @convergecollaborative
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyyoshitsu/ and https://www.linkedin.com/company/converge-collaborative/