We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Birdie Busch. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Birdie below.

Birdie , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

To be honest, I work in such a variety of projects that they all carry different deep meanings to me. But I would love to highlight a project I just wrapped on as a lead artist that is ongoing in Philadelphia. The project is called Our Market, and it is a community-centered, multi-layered, multi-year public art project created and led by local artist Michelle Angela Ortiz. The project was developed in April 2019. “Our Market” is focused on supporting the (im)migrant vendors, business owners, and neighbors that work and reside in the 9th Street Market, the artist’s home for 40+ years. The Project invests in the 9th Street Market by offering creative community strategies to tackle the issues of gentrification, racism, displacement, and erasure. I worked in collaboration with Ortiz in creating a series of Our Market Ancestors Murals that honored ancestors of families with ties to the market and community. She painted the portraits of the ancestors and I did the surrounding framework. For anyone unfamiliar, Philadelphia’s 9th Street Market is one of the oldest outdoor markets in the country and is a beloved neighborhood in our city, rich with the stories and contributions of immigrants who have come from all over the world. This project continues to dig deep when we live in a world that can use information or lack of to divide us. This project rejects that easy way out, and unites people to build something beautiful beyond it all. In this era, being involved in a project of this nature feels deeply necessary. Personally, it was the biggest visual art project I have been involved in to this date, and was a period of deep growth and believing more in myself and my work.

https://www.ourmarketproject.com/

Portraits were painted by our Project Director and local artist, @michelleangelaortiz The frameworks were painted by artist Emily Busch @birdiebusch with assistance by Valentín Sánchez-Stoddard @littlesanchezstudio and Briana Dawkins @breeartiste Thanks to Roe Fabricators @roe_berryhomer for the installation work.

The Our Market Project is led by @michelleangelaortiz @fiera_studios with lead funding support from @William_Penn_Foundation and additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts, @LeewayFound, @PHILADELPHIA250 and in partnership with @MuralArts Philadelphia

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

When people ask what I do I can say a lot of things, so many in fact that people often chide me about it, to which I reply that I do not perform well on a sewing machine and don’t plan to any time soon!

I graduated college with a degree in creative writing and a double minor in Anthropology and Music History. I knew leaving college that while I didn’t have a clear idea of where I was headed that it would involve a less conventional path. After I graduated I moved back to Philly (I grew up in Collingswood about 10 minutes east from downtown across the Delaware river) and fell in love with its affordability, walkability, and passionate arts community that I have been deeply rooted in for the past 25 years. In that first year back I started to write songs and went about performing and recording them with other co-conspirators.

So if you ask what I do I can answer that I am an award winning songwriter and performer with many full length albums under my belt and music that has been licensed for tv/film.
I can say that I am a visual artist who has made original art for a variety of businesses, art organizations and institutions, as well as more personally driven projects.
I can say that I am a muralist.
I can say I am an educator who leads workshops and has facilitated creative nature based programming for children.
I can say I am a commercial designer, with original artwork made for both beer and wine labels.
I can say that I help people organize their homes and even corporate design departments.

What is the common thread amongst all of this? I would like to say it is that I pay attention, and have a zest for life through sound and vision and seek to infuse the world with my creative approach to everything. Over time I’ve been trying to hone this idea of myself as a creative house, similarly to how there are design and fashion houses, but mine is perhaps a bit more all encompassing and an emphasis on civic minded projects and urban green spaces. The ladder I have climbed isn’t vertical, it’s been a meandering journey full of odd jobs amidst my passions but the continuous thread of perseverance and conviction has led me to here, which is trying to be a full time creative within the fields of music and art. I want to stay open to that idea not being static and ever evolving as I care immensely about both.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I think that many non-creatives struggle to understand that just because something doesn’t yield a very concrete end result doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. I taught a semester-long creative song workshop at University of Pennsylvania years ago. It was for credits but not graded, and meant to be a kind of pressure valve for students in stressful majors in fields like medicine and science. One of the students wanted so badly to figure it out, to understand the end goal. And even if the end result was a song, now what?

Creativity itself is an end goal. We’ve been so programmed to believe that creativity in and of itself isn’t enough. I think it’s also led to people thinking it is somehow less valuable, or that it doesn’t require hard work. The musicians and artists in my life are some of the hardest working people I know, and creativity is vital to everything. I am very impassioned about spreading more awareness about these misconceptions.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Like a lot of other folks, the pandemic really proved to be a peculiar moment in my life. I was primarily focused on music and performance and of course a lot of that was off the table during the pandemic. I played some zoom concerts, including a women’s 40th birthday party where all the attendees joined the zoom, a computer cocktail hour of sorts. But it really hit us that performances, even when they started to slowly return, were less attended and fewer and far between.
With music being so dependent on gathering, I turned inward into my visual art in that stretch. While I could say at that point I was also a visual artist, it was less of a part of my public persona. But I pivoted in isolation to a daily art practice, and came out of the pandemic with a lot of ideas and inspiration through that discipline. I found that mural work, with its more solitary and fresh air locations, allowed for me to get some work when concerts came up short, and it really became a large part of my life and identity moving forward.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.emilybirdiebusch.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/birdiebusch/
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0IuTILt9CYAi0LgEGH93sD

Image Credits

“Our Market” photos (photos 5 &6) are taken by Arekusn for the Our Market project.