Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kristan Woolford. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Kristan, thanks for joining 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.
One of the most frustrating things I experience is seeing first hand some of the most creative people I know say they are not an “artist”. It grinds my gears because 1) I can see an old indoctrinated version of myself in them and 2) I know this is stemming from society’s treatment of creative people and supporting a toxic high risk proposition for most people that want to be creative. Especially in America, value is reduced to metrics and quantifiable data and if a person isn’t generating money with how they creatively express themselves then the sentiment is their creations are meaningless. This simply is not true as there is tons of research on the benefits of creating art for therapeutic purposes or engaging with art as a means of building social bonds for instance. I’m very aware that I have the privilege of being seen as an artist by the people I’m connected to. But it wasn’t that long ago I was on the other side basically begging for validation and holding on to what felt like a Peter Pan fairy tale that was fading to black in the face of having to grow up. In some ways I still am begging for validation. I’m not traditional. I’m not mainstream. I’m not formally trained by the art industry’s standards. If it weren’t for people like Masud Olufani offering me the opportunity to collaborate with him on an art piece he needed video support on, Greg Zinman creating space for me to be included in my 1st group exhibition, or Neda Abghari taking risks and putting her reputation as a curator on the line advocating for me in rooms I wouldn’t have access to otherwise, I’m not here being interviewed for this publication. I’m not filling out art grant applications and speaking on panels. I’m not popping on IG. I’m not making video art pieces archiving Black culture. Period. I’m literally a self loathing business analyst at The Coca Cola Company (nothing against them); I would’ve accepted a post internship job offer that I only turned down because I saw the slightest sliver of a possibility of a chance to keep creating and garner continued support for my non-commercially motivated interests and pursuits. There is a clear difference in my creative life before meeting these people I mentioned, who just asserted that I am an artist through their actions when everyone else didn’t see it or didn’t explicitly support. It shouldn’t so difficult to live sustainably as a creative in one of wealthiest nations of all time and I can’t help but wonder how many artists of my and previous generations gave up before even trying in the name of survival. I believe there’s an artist in most if not all of us. I’ve seen so many people completely shocked by what they were able to create once they sat down and committed to trying to create just for the sake of creating. Like so many other professions, with time and practice you can build up the muscle memory to do all kind of things. I’ve learned you just gotta take the risk of putting in the time in the metaphorical gym of creativity if it’s what you really want. So I try my best to share that spark that was shared with me to create, and pass that creative confidence along to others. I made the hard choice to double down and take the risk of refusing to stop creating and instead believe in the midst of racking up serious debt, getting divorced, being unemployed, and getting a handle on parenting a toddler for the first time all at once. Thankfully, it ended up being worth the risk. My story doesn’t have to be unique though, go forth, CREATE.
Kristan, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My name is Kristan Woolford and I’m a digital artist born in the city of Atlanta and raised in the suburbs. My path to being a professional creative was motivated by and continues to be fueled by my curiosity. I’m always considering how can a particular skillset I’m working on mastering be innovated and used in a way that it probably wasn’t intended. I think this comes from my relationship with Hip Hop, a culture that is built on making something out of nothing and remixing it until it becomes undeniable and inescapable. I started exploring video as a medium as a freshman in high school, all while having a front row seat to the birth of sub genres like crunk and trap music. After high school I took my talents to Hampton University on a full scholarship to study journalism, continued on to study film at Georgia State University as a grad student, and then dropped out to move on to and graduate from Georgia Tech with a Masters in Digital Media.
With a ridiculous amount of experiences, internships, theories, and a strong local network I set out to start a career that would be fulfilling, while not leading me towards the stereotypical starving artist lifestyle. I found education to be the perfect environment for me to continue exploring new modes of creative expression while having access to the most culturally relevant people, the youth! My students keep me feeling energized and inspired while also allowing me the opportunity to give back to the same community that invested in me in the form of a high quality education. I now work in the realm of education as a Teaching Artist with the non profit organization re:imagine/ATL, a part time Film Production instructor at The New School Atlanta, and a Professor of Practice at Georgia State University.
When I’m not in a classroom setting, I’m out in the streets of Atl doing pop up art installations and working on commissioned art pieces. I spend a considerable amount of time in my studio dreaming up fantastical ideas and building with the art and design collective I’m in called Wildseed ATL. My studio space has been graciously provided to me as part of Midtown Alliance’s Artist in Residency Program, in which I’m hosted by the Museum of Design Atlanta and architecture firm Perkins&Will Atlanta. As Artist in Residence I’m exploring the aesthetics and
products of Hip Hop visual & digital culture through the mediums of projection mapping, video collage, holographic projection display, VJing, and laser projection display.
As a creative, my video collage work relies on remixing and layering digital elements to document and collapse moments from the past and present using projection technology. As an element of my work, projection is meant to suggest a casting of alternate realities, and a call to see our current and future social climate through a nuanced lens focused on our country’s dark past to provoke healing and accountability. I am emphatic about being a digitally based artist considering we are living in the midst of the digital era. I believe the art must reflect that. I have much love and respect for painters, sculptures, etc and collaborate with them as much as I can, but I consider myself to be an artist at the forefront of ushering in a new age of art, and I am constantly working to challenge the image people get in their mind when they hear the word “artist”. I do it for the Black child growing up with incredible coding skills but doesn’t want to go work for a corporation, or the high school drop out that is an interactive design wiz that can’t get access to resources because they don’t check all the boxes. I’m here to put the pressure on traditional art institutions that have excluded so many creative brilliant minds for all the wrong reasons. I’ll gladly take on the criticisms of the validity of digital art if it will create some cracks that lead to opening up our collective consciousness around our understanding of art and how we assert its value as a society.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)
NFTs are cool conceptually in my book. Several issues have come to the surface around them, but for a digital artist like me when I first heard of them my eyes definitely lit up as they appeared to be a way to have authorship/ownership in a medium that’s basically built to be easily copied and mass distributed. I think most people make the mistake of confusing digital art with the actual function of NFTs. The hype around NFT’s has died down but at some point it’ll be realized that the intention for them is to have a means to form agreements that can’t be counterfeited, and not so much about pixelated apes for profile pics.
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 non-creatives may not understand that being a professional artist isn’t all fun and games, but rather hard work. In fact most artists are working multiple jobs, being exploited in the gig economy, and even if famous that doesn’t directly correlate to how well they are able to sustain themselves. We are surrounded by art and design yet somehow the creatives responsible are usually an afterthought and the least respected in the workforce. Take Georgia for instance, it’s a state that is home to Atlanta where many would consider the most important city right now in terms of generating culture (music, fashion, movies, etc) but it is the 2nd least supported state in the country in terms of govt art funding. Make it make sense?! 
Contact Info:
- Instagram: analog_detox
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristan-woolford/