It's Good to Be Here
This is the first is a series about the idea of appointing yourself the artist-in-residence of something. You can read much more about this idea right here.
Longtime readers of this newsletter might remember that in 2018, I declared myself the unofficial artist-in-residence of Washington Park, just down the street from my house in Portland, OR. I wrote about it on my blog and in my newsletter at the time, and a reporter from the local paper interviewed me about it in 2020, when everyone was in lockdown and looking for ways to pass the time.
A few months back, I wrote a note here on Substack about how the director of Washington Park asked me if she could use sketches from my unofficial artist residency to make notecards as thank-you gifts for their board of directors. I was happy with this nice, low-key outcome for a decidedly low-key project.
What happened next was definitely not low-key! Hundreds of people liked and shared my note, and many very cool artists wrote back to say that they’d like to declare themselves the artist-in-residence of something. For instance:
