I have always kept a page nestled in my website title “Friends” that lists the links to the portfolios of my peers from school and beyond. I think that community is the lifeblood of any artistic endeavor, and so I make small motions to help nurture that sense of community, to convince myself that I am a part of it. This site is the third or fourth iteration of my website since I first made one after graduating from college, and I’ve carried that friend list the whole time. I haven’t updated it in years though, and the list is in sore need of modernization.

Earlier I decided to click through some of the links on the list. A sad but unsurprising fact is how many of the links are dead, directing to abandoned URLs. So many people I saw as friends are 404s now. I have been thinking of how to update my website during my winter break, and I’m not sure what to do with the list. Should I remove the dead links?  A part of me feels like it’s a monument, though to exactly what is hard to say. Do I leave the link to say, “I knew them then”? To memorialize a time when these people still believed in art enough to pay for a domain? To make sure I don’t forget their names, our conversations, the influence we might have had on one another?

A sculpture professor in my program, Phil Listengart, told us on multiple occasions that only a quarter of art school graduates continue to make art in the years after leaving their programs. I have felt this factoid haunt me ever since, a specter on my heels, making sure that I don’t become a statistic. Positive reinforcement is a wonderful tool that I advocate for, but it doesn’t seem to work that well on me. For now, fear is the primary motivating force for me. Hopefully I’ll figure out a new fuel.

I have a bachelor’s in fine arts in Sculpture, yet I work with cameras and lenses and lights every day. It’s a struggle sometimes to even feel like what I’m doing is art, but I have to do something. I can’t join the 75%, not now, not after all this time.