Offering: “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity”

Tenant Alia Bisat wanted to share the following offering from her friend (Kyle Fincham)
of this donation-based explorative support for artists:

“Subject: Dear Artists

I am offering three months of support to artists in a project called The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity. This offering is an emergence of understanding the necessity to nourish artists and their struggle for truth, authenticity, and integrity. It comes from a calling I feel to support artists in their powerful and necessary endeavors. Though I’ve participated and moved through various artistic fields, I am not a professional artist. Although I went to college for theater, I don’t have knowledge of art history or many specific skills in various artistic fields. What I do is facilitate. I listen, participate, and dance. I don’t, and can’t, do the digging to find anyone’s truth, but I do create and hold spaces where people might find their own unique shovel.

This offering is for all artists, such as (but not limited to) painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, poets, writers, storytellers, hairstylists, mixed media artists, martial artists, chefs, architects, interior designers, digital artists, filmmakers, animators, photographers, magicians, comedians, actors, graphic designers, potters, bakers and illustrators. It is not limited to those who work professionally in an artistic field. If art is a hobby, passion, side-hustle, or casual interest, this is open to you equally and as well.

This offering is not a promise of answers or advice. There is no promise of an outcome. It is not guidance or mentorship.

This is an offer of listening. It is an offer of support while you navigate an artistic process, transition, or block. It is an offer to create and hold containers with the intention of allowing you to discover and unearth what you need, not what I think you need, and perhaps not what you think you need. It is a promise of a skillful and co-created “I don’t know”, a controlled accident. There is no script or syllabus. We might talk, dance, meditate, play, write, or walk. We might hold a ritual or ceremony. I might just be a sounding board for your ideas, breakthroughs, heartbreaks or frustrations.

This is a three month offering of support for you, as an artist… a human. Everything will be on-on-one, not in a cohort. The commitment, and promise, for both parties is for three months (September-November 2024) of two phone/Zoom calls per month (approximately 1 hour) and an in-person meeting once a month (from 1-4 hours). During these checkins and meet-ups we will navigate and play with what is present. The location of our in-person meetups will depend on what we’re playing with. It could be a park, cafe, dance studio, rooftop, or anywhere else that fits the necessary exploration. The 1-4 hour duration for the in-person meetings is intended to allow for whatever amount of time is necessary to navigate what is present.

Please submit this Google Form no later than August 15. Although I would love to accept everyone for the first round of this offering, it will depend on how many submissions are received. Filling out the form does not guarantee participation. I plan to work with 5-6 people for this first round. Various factors will go into choosing, such as availability, necessity, and “right fit”. So, please take the time to fill out the form thoroughly and thoughtfully, as it will give me a lot of information to consider when choosing who to move forward with. If there is an abundance of interest, I will work to find a way to make some version of this offering available to as many people as possible in one form or another. Please only submit if you live in New York City, or can plan to visit for our three in-person meetings. I will contact you directly shortly after all submissions are received.

This is a donation based offering. You can choose how much you would like to pay. The amount you plan to donate will not be a determining factor in your participation.


Finally, here is an excerpt from The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity by James Baldwin:

Most people live in almost total darkness… people, millions of people whom you will never see, who don’t know you, never will know you, people who may try to kill you in the morning, live in a darkness which — if you have that funny terrible thing which every artist can recognize and no artist can define — you are responsible to those people to lighten, and it does not matter what happens to you. You are being used in the way a crab is useful, the way sand certainly has some function. It is impersonal. This force which you didn’t ask for, and this destiny which you must accept, is also your responsibility. And if you survive it, if you don’t cheat, if you don’t lie, it is not only, you know, your glory, your achievement, it is almost our only hope — because only an artist can tell, and only artists have told since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad. Hymns don’t do this, churches really cannot do it. The trouble is that although the artist can do it, the price that they have to pay themselves and that you, the audience, must also pay, is a willingness to give up everything, to realize that although you spent twenty-seven years acquiring this house, this furniture, this position, although you spent forty years raising this child, these children, nothing, none of it belongs to you. You can only have it by letting it go. You can only take if you are prepared to give, and giving is not an investment. It is not a day at the bargain counter. It is a total risk of everything, of you and who you think you are, who you think you’d like to be, where you think you’d like to go — everything, and this is forever, forever.

Please feel free to respond with any questions on this offering.

Once again, here is a link to the Google Form for submission.

Take care,

Kyle”