We recently connected with Megan Broughton and have shared our conversation below.
Megan, appreciate you joining us today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?
I’m almost a year and a half into my journey as a full-time artist and I am still building that financial stability. Jumping off the proverbial cliff into this career choice was and is an exciting decision and, thanks to a couple other decisions, the roadmap becomes clearer every day. Most importantly, I am learning that making a full-time living from my creative work involves much more than just making and selling art and that sustainable things take time.
Right now, I’m enrolled in the Center for Cultural Innovation’s Business of Art class. This 10 week class comes with a thorough workbook and an active online cohort of folks in similar positions as myself. What’s great about this class is that it imparts a broad swath of knowledge for building up your personal vision for your art business, the language to talk about it in a confident way, and practice speaking and writing effectively about yourself as a business providing a service. This focus has helped to take a lot of the anxious pressure of the “this all just depends on people liking my work” mindset, put it aside, and prioritize thinking of things more concretely and working on presenting and supporting myself and my career in a clearer way. It has also helped me to do some of the assignments twice: once for where I’m at now and once for where I would like to be in 3 to 5 years. The final assignment will be to present a business plan – at first this sounded intimidating, but the building blocks are appearing slowly but surely and I’m excited for how that will set me on a sustainable path.
I’ve sought out mentoring through programs for CalArts alumni and one through Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art. Both mentoring programs made it possible for me to have some honest conversations about where I’m at financially, mentally, and emotionally with this new career, and introduced me to new people and continuing mentorships for questions about a career in the arts.
I’m doing things like taking my time to figure out administrative nuts and bolts, and adopting some new rules like not applying to shows with entry fees above a certain dollar amount, focusing on local exhibition opportunities, developing a schedule for separating artmaking and admin, and hosting several print sales a year – trying a slightly different approach each time to find what sticks best. And on November 4th and 5th from 11am to 5pm, I’ll participate in my first San Francisco Open Studios, showing my work with several other artists at Intersection for the Arts (1446 Market St, San Francisco, CA 94102). This is a brand new experience that is necessitating a lot of prep – a big learning opportunity! I can’t wait.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I have been an artist my entire life, from crayons at three, to community arts programs as a teen, to graduating from CalArts where I studied fine art, arts pedagogy, and socially engaged art. I taught art for 13 years, during which I participated in The Arctic Circle Residency in Svalbard, Norway in the educator category. During the pandemic, this Arctic interest was redirected to my own art practice when the school I was working at temporarily shut down. The momentum from that time was so strong that I decided to become a full-time artist in 2022 and am making work about the climate crisis, loss, and transformation.
Tactility, exaggerated scale, the Arctic, geopolitics, and arts education influence me greatly. Childhood experiences of enormous playgrounds and children’s museums shaped a later fascination with all encompassing art of playful scales (Therrien, Serra, Eliasson, Sze). Past paintings dealt with heirlooms, gemology, tectonics and human connection. This led to experimental mark making about musical heritage influenced by bardic politics (how artistic traditions and treatment of land shape cultural identity) and communitas (feelings of social equality and solidarity). I have focused exclusively on work about the climate crisis since 2019 and look forward to expanding my practice in terms of technique, scale, and venue.
My current body of work is experimental etchings focusing on Arctic sea ice. I often allow the materials to interact freely rather than keeping them controlled. This creates similar alchemical and visual results as ice melting in water. Within three to five years, I plan to move into installations about the climate crisis, creating immersive and interactive artworks with which children can engage and play. My ideal venues for these are children’s science museums and/or museums with a strong commitment to public programming. These ideas have roared to life following a fantastic artist residency I did this summer, MaréMotrice, sailing on a 15 meter sailboat from Iceland to Greenland with 5 other people, sailing in the fjords around Tasiilaq, then back to Iceland. After a month like that, I’m struggling to picture my work existing on a sheet of paper and am really excited to work bigger in response to such a huge experience.
The immersive and interactive installations I am developing will provide contemplative spaces for people far from the Poles to concretely situate themselves within these critically at-risk systems. I want to excite kids about the world they live in and for participants to understand themselves in relationship with the Arctic. For people who might live through the death of glaciers, I hope to create inspiring bonds and memories to be used in the fight against that stark possibility. My current etchings and future installations are inherently political, with environmental citizenship, care, and hope at the heart of the work.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
There’s a few that come to mind. First, is that there’s nothing wrong with asking for help or asking people you know to connect you with their networks. Even if somebody is at a different career level than you, we’re all in the same boat and it’s much better to ask for help and reach out to people than accidentally self-isolate by not doing that and therefore feeling you don’t have a community. There is though, an important balance between fostering engaging and reciprocal relationships and just plumbing someone for information or opportunities; the latter feels frustrating to be on the receiving end of.
Second is that cultivating patience and taking breaks is essential. I can sometimes get agitated when I feel like something in the studio isn’t working or that I “wasted” my time on something. I start to feel like I’m losing theoretical money somehow, rather than just seeing a process through. It’s important to take a break at moments like this and come back fresh.
The third lesson I had to unlearn was an unexpected one, and came about as a result of the emotional soup I found myself in after leaving my teaching job. I’ve always worked really hard to not compare myself to others and to understand that everyone’s working with different circumstances and has made different decisions which set us all on different paths. And I feel like this is a really important viewpoint, as it preserves your own feelings of self-worth and also helps you enjoy your community and your own journey more. But when I left my teaching job and dove into artmaking full-time, all these comparisons started creeping into my head and I struggled for several months to manage them. It totally sucked! It isn’t helpful at all. It’s been helpful to seek out learning opportunities (two of which are classes I listed below) that have helped to plot the framework I want to achieve with my career in the future.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
There’s been some classes and webinars I found really helpful, as well as some books:
classes:
Center for Cultural Innovation: Business of Art (currently enrolled in)
Sustainable Artist Strategies, taught by Alice Wu at Kala Art Institute (this past Spring)
webinars:
free webinars offered by Sunlight Tax
webinars offered through Paddy Johnson’s Netvvrk program
webinars offered by Jen Tough
books:
Art and Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland
And then there are “the books on the shelf” that I pick up as needed and need to finish reading in their entirety:
Taking the Leap: Building a Career as a Visual Artist by Cay Lang
The Artist’s Guide to Public Art: How to Find and Win Commissions by Lynn Basa
Contact Info:
- Website: https://meganbroughton.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meganbroughtonartist/
- Other: https://www.artworkarchive.com/profile/megan-broughton
Image Credits
Macy Chadwick, Kelsey Floyd, Claire Frachebourg