If you’re under the age of 35, you should not be applying for any kind of residency or grant or institutional acceptance. Unless you are already really wealthy or well connected, you have not built up the creative experience to be able to receive any kind of grant or residency. You will only become more and more frustrated with how long the application process forces you to put off growing your creative practice as you get more and more rejections.

I’ve never, ever, ever gotten any residency or grant. Well, I got one but it was a scam. It was really a teaching position that was minimum wage but they presented it as a residency.

And that’s the danger too—when you’re young, inexperienced, and not connected, a lot of the “opportunities” available for you are not going to be real opportunities at all. They’re going to be scams. They’re going to exploit you and your creative labor so that another white institution can benefit off of you.

If you’re under the age of 35, nothing you make should be credible for an institution that is only interested in tokenizing and fetishizing work that does not actively challenge the status quo. You’re too good for them. You don’t need them. They need you.

If you’re under the age of 35, your creative practice must also be self sustainable. This is a big one. Why do people apply for grants and residencies? It’s money and access to resources. Don’t take their money. The more you take their money, the more your creativity becomes disciplined in a way that will only allow it to communicate to gatekeepers and not to people. The way you think about your creative practice will be shaped by the question of how you can sustain it.

A self sustainable creative practice means that you must figure out how to earn a living or at least enough money for a side hustle by doing the creative work itself. It means that the first step of developing a creative practice cannot be buying materials or space or time. A self sustaining creative practice means that you don’t buy art supplies. It means that you don’t rent a studio. Doing these things buys into our commodity culture and the real estate market. A self sustaining creative practice means that, whatever you are learning through and growing through, you must find a way to charge for it in a way that keeps it accessible.

You can crowdsource for technology needs if you need a computer. I don’t love crowdsourcing as a way to fund the entirety of your creative vision. Your creative practice should not be donation based. Your creative labor has value and you should be able to ask for a return on that value as you work.

Stop applying for residencies and grants. If the institution offers enough money, then they’re going to give it to someone who doesn’t need the money anyway. If they give it to you, then it’s only going to hold you over until you need more money. You will always need more money as long as your creative practice is not self sustainable. This is an addiction process.

Committing to making your creative practice self sustainable is not easy. First of all, finding a way to make money from your creative work is not easy. Second of all, the ways available to do so will have nothing to do with institutional prestige. You need to walk away from the lure of institutional prestige if you want self sovereignty. You need money to be creative. There are no institutionally prestigious ways of making money.

You will have to get rid of the assumption that art and business must be incompatible if art is to be interesting to be self sustaining. The entire category of conceptual art developed in relationship to the emerging business world. The idea that you cannot make money from your art by yourself in order to keep yourself morally pure creates an illusion that you can somehow bypass capitalism as an artist. You can’t. You are complicit in capitalism and will always be complicit in capitalism if you are to survive. You deserve to survive.

You will have to get rid of the project based way of thinking that residencies and grants force you into. Your creative life is not a series of projects. It’s a living process. It will not be contained in a book or by white walls.

If you are a young creative and you have a couple tabs open with potential grants that you could apply to and are in the process of rewriting your statements to appeal to those gatekeepers, consider not doing that. Instead, put your time and energy into figuring out exactly what your creative goals are and how you might be able to meet those goals while making money from your creative labor outside of any institution. These goals will not be met today or tomorrow but putting in the effort to figure out how to make your creative practice self sustaining will mean that you don’t need any gatekeeper’s permission to meet these goals.