We were lucky to catch up with Becka Rahn recently and have shared our conversation below.

Becka , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

As artists, we are risk takers by nature. It’s not the same kind of thrill-seeking risk as jumping out of an airplane or wrestling alligators, but it’s a series of little risks every day putting your art out there into the world. I feel like every day you make a new gamble: Will this piece get juried in or rejected from the exhibition? Will someone buy this from my Etsy shop so I get paid today? Will anyone like this post on Instagram so the algorithm thinks it’s worth showing to a new audience? I don’t know ahead of time what the result of any of these everyday tasks will be in my art practice, but I have to keep showing up and putting things out there and taking the risk.

There is one beyond-the-everyday risk that I think really has had an impact on what I am doing now and that was “accidentally” moving to doing my art as my full time job.

When I first started out, I was working full-time at a day job and making art in my spare time. I think that is a common story for a lot of artists. I worked as an arts administrator at an art center, so I was working in my field but I was devoting the majority of my time, identity, and creativity to the non-profit. After working there for more than a decade, the center was going through some transition with leadership and vision. After a particularly eye-opening meeting with the interim team forming the new mission for the organization, the next day I found myself walking in to this place I loved with a letter of resignation in my hand. I had no plan to take my art business to be a full time gig and no real idea how to do it. But I realized I needed to make a change away from the day job and the art was something I was already doing. I am fortunate that I have a family and support system that could support that decision financially and emotionally. In retrospect, it was the best decision for me, but at the time I felt like I was letting people down and I had failed that community. I didn’t have goals or a business plan or any idea how to start and that was pretty overwhelming.

The biggest thing I learned from that experience: I don’t work if I don’t find the work. And that comes back to that idea of risk. In the first few months I was on my own I applied for absolutely everything I could find that would get me and my art out there: exhibitions, teaching gigs, shows, art sales, grants. I applied for things that were out of my comfort zone. I emailed every contact I had and said “how can we do something together?” Every one of those was a risk. Would all of the time I put into writing the grant proposal or putting together the class sample mean I would get the gig or would those hours be wasted? I learned to get comfortable with taking those risks every day and that they were necessary to getting to do the work I wanted to do.

Becka , 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 like to label myself as a teaching artist because those two concepts are really central to what I do.

There was never a time in my life when I wasn’t making art. When I was a kid, my two favorite places in the entire world were the local hobby & art supply store and the craft book section at the library. I designed bulletin boards for teachers at my mom’s school and illustrated the newsletter she wrote for an organization she belonged to. My first job was working as the costumer and cast member at a local theater. My college work study job was in the paint shop in the theater department. Ironically, I hated painting, but the college I went to only offered painting/drawing and printmaking as art media so I never wanted to study art because their definition of art didn’t include textiles or paper, which was what I was really drawn to.

So, instead I got a degree in education and decided I was going to teach math. Yes, you did read that right. I don’t think numbers are really all that interesting, but making art with sewing and patternmaking uses a LOT of math. It was something I was good at and I thought it would be easy to get a job. Fast forward a few years and I found myself working as the education coordinator at an art center that specialized in fiber and textiles. One of my jobs there was to be the back up or substitute teacher for basically any class we offered. So instead of being a specialist with a signature style, I became really a generalist and I think that’s one of my strengths. I see connections between art forms and techniques because I have learned and taught so many of them. I am not afraid to try new things and be a beginner and I think that helps me teach beginners.

It’s difficult to support yourself as an artist by doing only one thing, so I have three main facets to my art practice: making, showing & teaching.

For almost 20 years I’ve had an Etsy shop where I sell work that I make. The shop has changed its look over the years but it has always had a theme of fiber art geekery: craft kits, handmade tools, and puns and parodies of all flavors of fiber art. I design and print all of the fabrics I use for my pieces, so everything is quirky and unique to my shop. I also sell these pieces at local knitting & fiber festivals and shows. One of the most difficult things about selling your work is finding the right customers and I really think my background with all the different fiber arts really helps me connect to that niche audience.

My second focus is to show my work. I think many makers think about everything that they do in a transactional way where everything is a potential side hustle. I like to have the opportunity to make art that isn’t that. So part of my practice is dedicated to making art for people to interact with and experience. That might be at an exhibition at an art center or online. It might be for a book or article. It might just be something I show on social media. I write grants and find partnerships to help support the costs of making and showing that work.

And finally I teach. I love teaching people to make art. I love working with beginners. I love sharing a space and making things together with other people. I teach both in-person and online classes. One of the unexpectedly amazing things that came out of the past few years is people’s willingness to try online classes and think about different ways of teaching and learning. I think that has made a lot of things more accessible. I also teach a lot of business and technology skills to other artists as more and more technology (like a website or an Etsy shop) has become necessary to an art practice.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Building an audience takes a lot of work. I think not enough people say that out loud.

Everytime I hear a podcast or webinar from a “successful” artist, they already have a social media follower count in the tens of thousands and they make it sound like it just happened overnight. There is an entire industry around teaching artists how to gain audience in three quick, easy steps. It’s hard to not get sucked into that.

I think the most important part of your audience isn’t the number of followers but how engaged they are. You want people who are looking forward to your posts, who want the thing that you are selling, who comment on the photo, who know your dog’s name is Stanley. The social media algorithms are maddening, but they do respond to engagement. If you gain 100 followers because you gave away a free something and then those people just scroll right by all of your posts forever after, the algorithm is going to see that as people who aren’t interested and therefore you must be uninteresting. Quality over quantity.

My strategy for social media is to be authentic. I do not curate it, style it, or schedule it. You get just as many posts about my dog as you do about my art, because I think it’s important to see the artist behind the art and to remind and validate that I am a person and not a company.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

One of the biggest pivots as an artist was the year 2020 and I am still figuring out how my business works again. When I went in to that year, I had something like 35 shows, classes, and events that I had booked which all got cancelled. And then the same thing happened in 2021. My entire year’s worth of queued up work and income completely vanished and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

I got to a point when I would see an email come in with a subject line of “I’m so sorry, but…” and I knew it was another cancellation and I would just shut my laptop and go play with my dog. I wasn’t sure how my business would recover from that.

My pivot was to just say yes to some things I had always said no to in the past because there never was time. I designed some websites for some artist friends because those were some skills I could use. I illustrated a story that my niece wrote and printed a book. I started taking online classes in book arts. I learned how to use video editing software and spent hours learning how to light my studio table and capture sound so I could make video classes. Without being forced to put everything else on hold, I don’t know if I would have invested the time to learn those skills. And now I can’t imagine *not* knowing them and using them every day because those things have now taken over the majority of my work.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.beckarahn.com
• Instagram: @beckarahn
• Facebook: @beckarahn.fiberart
• Other: Skillshare: @beckarahn Etsy: beckarahn.etsy.com

Image Credits
Becka Rahn, Andrew Rahn