Spring Campaign Feature: Timothy White Eagle
Published: June 10, 2021
Categories: Featured | Spring Campaign
There are only three weeks left to support our 2021 Spring Fundraising Campaign! Over the past few weeks, we’ve been highlighting artists from all over WA state, hearing their thoughts on what resilience means, what support artists need, and what has brought them hope in the past year. Today we’re hearing from Timothy White Eagle, a multidisciplinary artist based in Seattle. Read Timothy’s interview below and join us in celebrating and supporting WA state artists with a donation here. Thank you for your support!
On the resilience of artists and what has inspired him:
It’s like stretching a muscle; the crisis gives us a chance to stretch to shapes we might not have known were possible. The world is changing faster, I think, than most people realize. It’s vital we remember how to grow in new and changing conditions.
Having stationary time grounded in Seattle has been inspiring. For the last couple of years, my schedule got too busy. I was on the road touring 1/3 of the year, still trying to run two small businesses in Seattle, and trying to find time to create, so just slowing way down and breathing deep has been inspiring.
How he’s different from a year ago:
I am living more in the present moment, working on a daily basis to let go of the past and future and to be here in this moment now.
What support artists and artist communities need:
To be valued and paid. It’s frustrating to me that I can make more money driving for Uber than I make when asked to be on a selection committee or panel. It’s frustrating to witness large arts organizations take huge chunks of money as an organization and then get far less than 50% into the hands of working artists. In the future, organizations need to learn how not to be so large and get money to folks that are in the active process of creating. The act of creating, imagining, crafting, laboring, building, bringing into the world something new in action in a given time, reflective of the moments in which it was crafted, that action is vital, and it offers a different kind of historical record. A record not usually of facts and dates but of emotions and dreams. I am most interested in the history artists tell, less interested in the edited words of historians.
