A Website with My Name?
I blame it on the pandemic, on a Teaching Artists Roster panel I was on, and on the great C. G. Jung!
Photo, left: The Rinker Community Center at the Gates of Ballston community closed to the public when the lockdown hit. It’s where my studio, Studio PAUSE is located.
My Work
Studio PAUSE is a community space for art and stories, which I opened in 2013 in Arlington, VA. It’s where I work, make art, write stories and even some poetry, and teach PAUSE sessions too—inviting everyday people to make time to explore creativity and celebrate community. It’s also where they get to meet an artist and learn what we do in the community. I ask people—even random people—what their art is and then invite them to have shows here. Or attend receptions where they can be inspired, ask questions, and mix with different people. I invite them to share their stories so we can learn from them and change how we think and what we know. I even invite them to collaborate with me, and so much more. Children, adults, seniors, families, people who tell stories in languages I don’t know, and people who create art I cannot create… many hundreds have dropped by over the past 7 years and became part of the amazing Studio PAUSE community. They all had a hand in making me who I am today.
Then it all stopped. The pandemic hit and the building where I have my studio was closed to the public. The others who worked here were now working from home. The leasing office appointments were managed on the phone. Clearly their work was different from mine. But also what space for them was different from what space was to me.
My Other Thing
I also have another thing, other than my studio, a place I go to once or twice a week. It’s a space that is very dear to me, a space where art and stories first showed me a way we can learn about the world. It’s the museum where I was selected to be a docent in 1999. It was where I went every Wednesday in the year 2000 even as my perplexed client offered me paid work. “Why would you go there on Wednesdays rather than make money doing my work?” he had asked. I had laughed and told him, “It’s because I go there once a week that I can bear to do your work on the other 4 days.” He was not upset. He was perplexed. These were the DotCom boom days and he was right in the middle of it. So what was this other thing I did? Why volunteer? Why still study?
Among other things, the museum taught me about spaces and what I want from them, what makes me comfortable and where I am totally out of place. It taught me where I had power and how I could claim it. Like when I stood in front of the sculpture of the great Hindu god Shiva Nataraja, a gorgeous creation of the Chola Dynasty from 1000CE India. But only until somebody said, “That woman is so weird!”
It was at the museum that I had learned to work with that too. Now I walk up to the object warning the visitors on my tour that they were probably going to see something they have never seen before, something unusual and very unique to my culture. An object I adore for its beauty and story which I am going to share with them. What I had found and also not found at the museum had led to the work I decided to do. And so I created the space and the work for myself.
But the museum was closed too. And so I was left with the question: If I don’t have my Studio and the museum, who am I? And what do I do?
Work From Home?
At home, my husband had the basement office, my son was doing college from his room upstairs, my daughter was doing high school from her room upstairs, and our first-ever pet, a Doxie rescue we named Leia, had the living room for naps. In the first days of Lockdown I noticed how everyone at home was really comfortable with all this, and took breaks coming to the kitchen, dining room, and TV room as I moved from room to room with my laptop. I switched with my husband sometimes, and he would move his laptop upstairs when he didn’t have meetings. My daughter’s lunch break was at 10:30 so she came down for lunch and ate it while watching TV.
A few weeks after the Lockdown was announced, on May 11, I was a muted observer on the teaching artist grants panel for the Virginia Commission for the Arts. I watched the panel discuss how one artist didn’t have a professional website. Another didn’t have their teaching philosophy in the application. … I found myself making mental notes and checking off their check list:
Did I have a personal website? No, but the Studio was me! But now the studio was closed.
And where exactly could people see samples of my writing?
And nowhere on my Studio website did I talk about my work as a teaching artist. That was all in a folder on my computer called “off-site.”
And then, if the studio was closed, how would I sell any of my art? I didn’t have an e-commerce website. People bought my art when they came to the studio and saw it and heard its story. But the studio is closed.
Where could someone buy my art?
PAUSEr and poet Rana had always accused me of “hiding behind the Studio.” She wanted me to publish my writing somewhere. PAUSEr LouLou wanted me to publish a blog this year and share my stories which probably only she has heard. Was it time for a website with my name? Was it time to step out from behind the Studio? Then came a new studio member! Can her membership pay for a new website for me?
Hello, Me!
We are so many things inside, I often say, but how many of those do we practise? How many of those forms of us does the world get to see and be inspired by? The closing of the Studio and the Museum left me with nobody. As I complained how nobody was at the Studio I realized that somebody was there actually. Me. I was left looking at me. Who was this person?
PAUSEr Ruben Villalta, had introduced me to Carl Gustav Jung when he was the artist-in-residence at the Studio in 2017. I decided to finally read the books he had donated and even take some courses. There was nothing else going on after all and I had been trying to go back to school and that hadn’t worked. So this would be my Pandemic School, I decided. As I studied, I learned a lot about our personalities. For example, how they led to the kind of work they did.
On one website, I found this: Jung believed that introversion and extraversion were present in everyone, but that one attitude-type is invariably dominant. When external factors are the prime motivating force for judgments, perceptions, affects and actions, we have an extraverted attitude or type.
The extravert’s philosophy of life and his ethics are as a rule of a highly collective nature with a strong streak of altruism, and his conscience is in large measure dependent on public opinion. [Ibid.]
Another friend said with a smile, “Sush, you have so much advice and wisdom for us, always inspiring us to go on and do the things we really want to do. To be brave.” I looked at her. It was true. It’s what I had said to so many over the years. It was also on video, in an interview I gave when Arlington County gave me the Woman of Vision award in 2018.
“I think it’s time for you to take your own advice,” she said.
A New Website
Over the 21 years I have been in the US I have created many websites as my work evolved and changed as I did. The first one was all about my work as an art director in the advertising industry, my portfolio, as www.SushmitaIdeas.com. My husband was taking a web design course and I gave him the design to program. Today I checked and nothing exists except the homepage. After I quit that work I created www.HandmadeStorybooks.com in 2007 when I launched myself as a self-taught writer and book artist. I bought iWeb, the website design software for $79 and that was my investment in a new career. The career took off but I eventually lost that website when Comcast stopped hosting it and iWeb went obsolete. When I decided to open Studio PAUSE, I asked a friend to teach me how to make a website and over lunch at Busboys & Poets in Shirlington, she showed me WordPress. Since that day in 2013 I have maintained www.StudioPuase.com on my own and got great feedback on it.
Now it was time for a new direction, clearly.
So I talked to the PAUSErs and paid attention to what they knew about my work and what they didn’t. I figured out what they liked about my art. Read about it here on my Artist page.
I wondered about my writing and decided to add a Writer page.
Then I looked at my notes from the VCA Teaching Artist panel. What did the panelists want to know about a teaching artist? I would add that to my Educator page
Professionalism
Evidence of collaborations: photos seeing them in action, testimonials
Pedagogy and certifications: a resume is better than a marketing flyer
Evidence of ongoing work
Visible community connections and experience
Showcase all talents
Describe experience in detail
Recognized by outside world and published on other sites?
Committed as teacher
Share philosophy on teaching style and artistry
PAUSEr LouLou had a great experience with SqaureSpace and led me to it. Everything was new—the system, the e-commerce—everything! How would I do this? Should I pay a website designer? I emailed one and never heard back. Is this what Jung meant by synchronicity? I bought the domain and paid to have the site. But the designing took forever. I had to talk about me and my work. It was hard.
The work I had done for the courses in Jungian Psychology had taught me a lot as I had to write and write and write reflectively about myself. Then in December I wrote 2 poems, The Silent Grey Bird and Shells. They made me look at myself. I saw the me I was now. Did I want to introduce her to the world?
And then, one day during my son’s winter break I asked if he wanted to earn some money. He was excited as his usual work was gone. I told him about my new website. I asked him to help. He was a sophomore at George Mason University studying for a BFA in Computer Game Design.
The Past Leads to the Present
As my first experiences with art were in the advertising world and as a docent/educator in the museum world, I come to myself as an artist from a different angle! And in between those two huge things was another huge thing— that I left my home in India and immigrated to the US. I did not come here to study or for a job. I came here to marry my sweetheart, settle down, raise a family.
When my son at age 4 shook my foundations by telling me that he was not Indian but was American, I had no idea he had sent me off on a journey to explore who I was now. Today as he nears the end of his sophomore year in college I have some answers and am putting them on this website with my name on it even as he is my tech help! His easy energy and expertise in the virtual world with websites which he navigates daily and complex video games powers me on. As he watches the website emerge, I feel like he is helping bring me full circle, my advisor readying me to submit my research for all to see.
If my work has been about being useful to others, be it at the Studio or in the Museum, can I now learn to be useful to myself? And so, here I am!