We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Grit. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Grit below.
Grit, 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.
Opening up a new business always involves some degree of risk. For a group of five 20-something artists, many of whom were enormously daunted by the world of number crunching and taxes, the decision to open up a teaching studio was especially intimidating. Taking Grit from a series of dreams and conversations to the full brick-and-mortar shebang is probably the scariest thing any of us have had to do up until this point! Fortunately, this was an endeavor we did not have to undertake on our own. The extensive process of planning, fundraising, searching for spaces, signing the lease, and building out the studio seems almost like an early 2000s girl power movie montage fever dream in retrospect, but looking back with honesty, it was really a very terrifying process from the starting line all the way up to where we are now. We had so much help from friends, family, and our community, which truly emphasized the importance of what we’re building together. A lot of little risks culminating into one big leap of faith has gotten us to this point, and now we are on the precipice of opening something that will hopefully be truly wonderful.
Grit, 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?
We are Grit, a women-owned and operated ceramics studio built with big dreams of meshing our collective love of clay with our collective love of community.
Each of us has been working in clay independently for years, but our many winding paths converged through the small world of the Atlanta art scene. Collectivizing became an amazing opportunity for us to create a space together, using the many different talents of our team to share the burdens of opening up a new business and push ourselves farther than we could have imagined going on our own. From the get-go, we wanted our studio to prioritize the student experience, for it to be a safe haven for taking risks, making mistakes, creating wild collaborations, and experimenting with personal expression. We are so excited to be opening up our doors to the public soon and cannot wait to see what adventures this huge next step will bring!
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
If there is one underlying theme we’ve been pursuing through this whole process, it’s been community. Seeking community is what brought us together, combining forces has made this all possible, and working towards creating a space to share what we love has given us our light at the end of the tunnel.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
On the small, local scale, showing up and showing off! It’s world-opening to see people come out to events and share art of their own. One of our favorite experiences to date as a studio collective has been having folks come out to our paint-your-own-pottery fundraising events and watching them create such beautiful art on the pieces that we’ve thrown.
It’s difficult to put into words how big of an impact it makes to have support from the community at your fundraising drive, or gallery opening, or studio build out. That boost of energy on even the smallest levels makes such a crucial difference in helping to validate what that artist is doing. Through this, we’ve really learned that art doesn’t have to be this intense, isolating thing, that everyone is capable of it, and that it is something that can be done and shared together.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.gritatl.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gritceramicstudio/?hl=en
