We recently connected with Ana King and have shared our conversation below.

Ana, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s jump back to the first dollar you earned as a creative? What can you share with us about how it happened?

As I’m sure you can imagine, I have been getting my hands on crafts essentially for my entire life. In elementary school, when Duck Tape was a huge craze, I honed the practice of making Duck Tape wallets for myself, my family, and my friends. I would sell each wallet for about $5-10 and use my earnings to by more patterns and colors. That was even when I made my first business card! From there, I would make friendship bracelets and spend a lot of my free time watching Youtube tutorials on new and challenging patterns. In middle school, I would make these geometric paintings using painters tape and allowing for friends to customize their color ways and would charge $10 for them. These are my earliest memories of selling my craftwork. I didn’t truly start thinking of pursuing art and craft fairs until my sophomore of college, about a year and a half ago.

Ana, 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 am a 21 year old artist currently studying Fine Arts with a focus in Sculptural Studies at the University of Toledo. I have always loved drawing and painting and crafting, but originally I started my college career as an environmental engineering major. After my first year, I switched majors to art, as I could no longer deny that art was my true passion. In my work, I love including lots of color and patterns regardless of the medium. Recently, I have been focusing more on my life as a queer individual who experiences gender in a non-conforming way. I like to discuss the gender spectrum, as well as body dysmorphia that is often paired with gender dysphoria. The piece I am most proud of is a set of about 7 wheel-thrown ceramic pieces, entitled Beyond The Binary, that were all created from the same weight of clay, but resulted in staggeringly different pieces, as I pushed the material to its limit in each iteration. This let my external impact, coupled with the laws of the material and physics, to create remarkably unique pieces despite the identical start.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I would love to have my work someday displayed in a museum. I work at the Toledo Museum of Art currently and I often walk through the galleries thinking “one day, my work will be on one of these walls.”

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Having your work on display in galleries, or even at a booth in an art fair, is so vulnerable, intimate, but so incredibly exciting. To be able to show others the inside of your mind in a formal setting is honestly one of those hallmark moments in which you finally feel like a “real artist.”

Contact Info:

• Instagram: art.by.aking
• Facebook: Art By AKing