The OCD Artist

When people look at my resume, the first thing they ask me is, how did you go from art to business? I smile because while it may not by fully apparent by my resume—as much as I work to tell my story through it—my path has actually been such a perfect progression for me to get to where I’m going. I earned my BA in Studio Art and Art History from the University of Virginia, a place so beautiful and historic, that I simply couldn’t help but studying those passions. I still feel that I learned more about politics, history and human nature from studying art than I ever would have studying political science or sociology. My time at UVA gained me one of the best hard skills that a liberal arts degree can—to think. That, and my OCD, did the rest to lead me to full time roles organizing things and people.

Get a Job

My first job organizing international internships for students going to Italy, Spain, the UK, France and Australia introduced me to a boss in whose footsteps I’ve been trying to follow ever since. He has now encouraged me into the two best decisions of my life: going to Rwanda on a 10-day service-learning trip, and going to Thunderbird for my MBA. My next job at the Case Foundation taught me about social media and the importance of the everyday philanthropist—another tie into Novogratz’s book—while also introducing me to a group of people with big hearts and big connections for change. Once I landed at College Summit, I was ready to use my skills to see real change in the everyday of my work.

Change at Work

My time at College Summit exposed me to what a well run nonprofit can look like. Like any organization, is it not without room for improvement, but it has done a superb job of hedging mission creep with clear goals and measurable results. Metrics, along with the strong relationships built with students and between staff members, paint a clear picture of what a small group of passionate people with achievable goals can do—send more students to college who might not otherwise go. Ask any College Summit Peer Leader, and I bet their experience was life altering in the best possible way.

I felt the same way about my College Summit experience. While I was there, I fed my passion for International Development by leading a board for Indego Africa. It is a NY based nonprofit working in Rwanda with cooperatives of women who make handicrafts, import and sell the crafts in the US and 100% of profits return to the women for education and business training—social enterprise at its best. Through my involvement with both of these organizations, it became apparent that if I wanted to progress and lead in the International Development and nonprofit fields, I would need some deeper practical skills and understanding of the global landscape. My Thunderbird MBA has provided that in many expected and unexpected ways.

Dream On

As I prepare for my time in South Africa at ThinkImpact’s Innovation Institute, I am also reading Change by Design by Tim Brown.  He started IDEO, a design thinking consultancy now expanding even further into the social sphere under the leadership of a Thunderbird Alumna (we’re everywhere, if you didn’t know!).  One of the first things Tim mentions is the need for more “integrative thinking” and design thinking throughout organizations. He puts forth that the most effective thinkers will be those that can pull from multiple disciplines—artists with MBAs, as an example—music to my ears. While I don’t yet know in what ways my time in South Africa will change me and the people I work with, I do know that I will be well used and deeply moved as I have been so much this week. Because when dreams start to be lived out, you can do little more than jump in, enjoy the ride and shed tears of grateful joy that you are finally getting to where you were always going.

There is a can of paint in my car with lines of dried dripped paint all down the sides. There are rollers and brushes that were yesterday wet with paint, wrapped in bags and tape and fear of messiness and today are probably dried and ruined also in my trunk. There is a friend’s ladder, another friend’s paint rollers and any number of things that I should have attended to yesterday, but did not. And it was wonderful.

Yesterday, I biked along the river, sat in a new, thriving church, painted a wall, installed lights, sang at the top of my lungs with no fear of judgment, went to a movie I hadn’t researched the times for 3 days before, ate gelato and pizza and hung out with some great friends and did not check my email for hours at a time. One of them said to me yesterday, “you do too much.” I was torn between immediately agreeing with him and defending my over-saturated schedule.

To give a little background here: I tend to say yes to things that I think deserve my attention and once I am committed, I am committed 300%. Fortunately or unfortunately, I think a lot of things deserve my attention. Therefore, when I look at my 7 color-coded calendars to see what is coming for the day, I am excited. I get to play kickball, or Frisbee, train for my next triathlon or volunteer at church, indirectly care for women in Rwanda by being their voices here through trying to learn how to run a non-profit advisory board as its youngest member, install a photography show, work for a cause I believe in, and try to be a good friend to quite a few different groups of people all over DC and the world.

Recently I asked another friend in semi-seriousness, “How do you know when you are doing too much?” He responded, “When it gets in the way of your life.” The things in the paragraph above are my life, very purposely and passionately so, but I think he meant that it is too much when your activities begin to define you and control you. Therefore, how do I gain that sense of freedom I had yesterday which paralleled the freedom I felt in jumping on a plane to Peru a week after buying a ticket or during my job search (more on this later as to why I was the happiest I have been in a long time while unemployed…)? Do I plan less? Care about fewer people? Leave more open space in my schedule? Draw more boundaries? Or less? Or do I just keep moving forward surrounding myself with people who nudge me when I have become too confined by my schedule to throw it all away for a day and just have an afternoon of spontaneity?

In fact, I think I will just have to move in with said people. My friends who made my blissful Sunday possible, are my soon to be roommates come September, and I look forward to ditching my schedule more often and telling you the resulting tales.

So, this post is not meant to depress you, but to show that there are people doing great things in the midst of incomprehensibly challenging hardship. Regardless, this is some pretty tough stuff, so be warned.

Yesterday I spent my morning catching up on the 700 articles from the 74 blogs I follow in my google reader. I had neglected it for a week due to the aforementioned week-swallowing job search. The better part of the morning I spent on two sites that you should visit:

First, The Places We Live is a site that has an interactive photo feature which takes you through some of the most incredible slums in the world. I use incredible in the real sense of, it is so hard to believe we live in a world where people have to live like this. Jonas Bendiksen has used his powerful images to show these slums with a stark beauty, dignity and truth. The exhibit is now on display at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway. Thanks to Patrick James over at GOOD Magazine for bringing it to my attention.

Second, click on “the story” section in Falling Whistles for a very moving PDF which is well worth the 5-10 minutes it will take you to read/experience. With beautiful, compelling design, Sean D. Carasso tells the story of meeting 5 boys who had just escaped from two of the rebel armies in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This story is so hard. It is not fair. It evokes anger. Hopelessness. Helplessness. Pain. But Sean does well what any advocate of peace and justice does well. He tells the boys’ story. He gives a voice to those who have none, and the voice that he lends is one of urgency, eloquence and love. Make sure you read to the end where he talks about the Congolese artists who are pulling boys like these into a community of rehabilitation.

The way these artists use these horrific stories to spread the truth and point others towards rehabilitation and reconciliation give me hope.

I spent 2 powerful weeks in Rwanda, a country that is a model of progress and reconciliation after the genocide there in 1994 in which around 1 million lives were lost in about 100 days. Even with much progress and healing, there is a long way to go. There will be many more posts here about Rwanda, my short, but clearly life-changing time there, and how it has shaped my world today. For now though, check out Indego Africa, another beacon of hope for me. They blog here. Their work is to help to create cooperatives of women who make handicrafts, import those goods for sale in the states and send 100% of profits back to the women for education and training purposes. Nothing helpless about that.

I give thanks for these tangible places where we can fight against these atrocities by building up strong communities turning with hope to their future. What places and ways have you found to address these issues?

I assisted with his project in which we taught kids in schools surrounding Charlottesville (I chose Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind to utilize my budding Sign Language skills) about Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. From the story, music and language, they would create what they thought Puck’s love-causing flower would look like.  These flowers were collected from the participating schools and combined on pages of the manuscript placed side by side on a large canvas for the final installation.

What struck me though was the installation that accompanied our creation, which for years I have remembered as Color of Happiness. However, as I wrote this I finally went back to research more about this piece to find that it is in fact called, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (after Harriet Jacobs). My theory is that I was speaking to Rollins about the piece and asking the significance of the multicolored ribbons that literally flow off of the page to curl into a heap on the floor, and he answered that it was to represent the color of each person’s happiness as they worked on the piece. I have always admired Rollins’ approach to art and engaging inner-city kids in what was surely a thankless and unique approach to learning about literature and art, but this was a new level for me. How might we represent our happiness? I like the idea that happiness can be represented in a color unique to each artist, captured in an (inadequately) vibrant ribbon, which has such length and weight that a canvas cannot contain it, so it simply rests on the floor in abundance, intermingled with its neighbors.

I hope this blog will attempt to represent my happiness (and sorrow and confusion and every thought and emotion that may end up here) in the same feeble, yet poignant way, which hopefully flows in abundance to tumble into other’s words and ideas.

So to begin, what color is your happiness?

Mine is green—a vibrant, life force of green which is both calming and energizing all at once.

Photo from University of Virginia Art Museum.