My 8-year-old daughter had a revelation recently. She said, “Mom, back in the old days, women didn’t have a lot of options for work if they didn’t want to be a teacher.”
It’s a conversation we’ll have to revisit sometime and get into the complications of everything that meant for our female forerunners. But women have long still found ways to thrive and flourish.
Stephanie Elizondo Griest explores the art of women and non-binary artists in her new book “Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life.”
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Why focus on women and non-binary artists here? Is it like what my daughter was thinking, I think, was there’s this unique or maybe increased set of challenges for women pursuing art?
Stephanie Elizondo Griest: Absolutely. All artists struggle. It is so hard for everyone. Women do struggle differently. And I have known that in my bones since I was 6 years old.
My father was a drummer, and he worked at Melhart Music in Corpus Christi, Texas. And he used to park me halfway up the stairwell while he was teaching drums in the second floor studio. As a little girl I got to watch all of the musicians march upstairs, and so I just started envisioning myself playing the electric guitar. I just thought you had picked one up and “Aqualung” would just spill forth.
And so once when he went out for a call, I snuck inside his studio and reached out to touch the electric guitar. And I looked up and realized the entire studio was plastered with images of women in bikinis, like kind of falling out of their bikinis. And it frightened me and also made me feel like, “oh, I should not be in this space, and the electric guitar is absolutely not for me.”
But because my father had had this incredibly glamorous life as a jazz drummer for the US Navy band, he had seen the whole world. So I had that deep aspiration myself, and I was able to find it through writing.
You describe a global journey that you got to take yourself in this book. So where did you find your answers to your questions about women pursuing art?
So basically for the last decade, I have been on a global search for women I call “art monks” – so women who have, similar to me, basically renounced everything and chose art at every crossroads. Certainly, when one does that, it feels different to do so at every decade.
And by the time I reached 40, after having done it consistently throughout my 20s and 30s, I realized that, by virtue of constantly choosing art, I had not yet started a family, I had never married. I was nomadic for a lot of this period of time. I didn’t have health insurance, and I really began to be quite frightened about my long-term future.
So when I finally was able to stabilize myself through academia, I then thought like, “what does it take to just continue at this?” And so that is how I started traveling around the world. And over the course of 10 years, I traveled to 12 countries.
I found art monks everywhere I traveled. So I started off in India at this incredible classical Indian dance village called Nrityagram, really famous dance troupe. They live in a state of dance from sunup to sundown. They dance all day, every day for decades.
And from there, I went to Rwanda and I met these incredible theater performers who have used their art, their theater as a way of attempting to rebuild and create reconciliation between the Hutu and the Tutsis after their tragic genocide in 1994.
I went to Romania and I met women who made abstract art as a way of imbibing dissent during the long dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Each country that I went, I found women who created art against all odds.
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Were these women making sacrifices or making choices for art in all the same way? Or were they balancing sort of different choices? I imagine some probably were mothers.
Oh, definitely, yes. Yes, some were mothers. But it’s very interesting to see what countries you can actually be a mother and still do this. So, you know, Iceland … all the writers I met there did have children. And also Iceland has state grants that you can apply to and it basically pays a minimum wage.
It’s like the state pays them to be a writer, so they all had kids. You know, they were able to sort of live that type of lifestyle. In countries where there aren’t as many resources, fewer women had kids.
What does it mean for you, as an American, to talk about art above everything when federal funding for the arts has been challenged here?
It’s devastating. And academia is also being really quite threatened. So that is a great fear I have, “what will happen if academia does decide to eliminate the arts and the humanities?” That will be the end of art as we know it, because the reality is that all writers teach.
Even Joyce Carol Oates has been publishing one major novel after another, consecutive years for decades on end. She’s still taught at Princeton. Toni Morrison taught. Luis Alberto Urrea. Like all my heroes, all the heroes, they all teach.
So academia has essentially been subsidizing the literary industry with the exception of a few bestsellers. It’s that way in all of the arts. It’s that way in music; it’s that way in visual arts, theater, dance. But also what I’ve realized through writing this book is that artists always find a way.
I was going to ask you who your book is for. I imagine for sure it’s for artists, right? Or anybody who identifies that way, just needs that next bit of inspiration to keep going when things are hard.
Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, it’s not a guidebook. Like, I’m not giving this to people saying, like, “here, go do this.” That is not it. It’s more a prayer for people who have done this. And I just want them to realize they are not alone.
Sandra Cisneros has this great quote who’s also featured in the book – I have a chapter about Sandra Cisneros, the author of “The House on Mango Street.” And she once said something like, “being an artist, it’s like being a nun and a convent of one.” So, yes, but we actually have a global congregation.
Well, the other thing is there are these “art monks” and these people who find their drive through art. And then there’s maybe the rest of us and a lot of our listeners who are saying, ‘well, I love enjoying your art’ and thinking about the true sacrifices that people make to do the entertaining or to share their deepest passions. I think it’s important for them as well, right?
The term “art monk” initially was a joke when I was living in Querétaro, Mexico. I was living in a room, a house actually, full of other artists, and they just did not get my process of really locking myself up, holding myself for the entire day behind a computer, like, “what are you doing?”
And so they started calling me, you know, a monk and a nun. But then I was really lucky to go to Lebh Shomea, which is a Catholic house of prayer in Sarita, Texas. You actually have to take a vow of silence to stay there. And I was really fascinated by the fact that there were two canonized hermits.
I began to think, “wait a second, what is the difference between how they spend their day and how I spend my day?” They’re in their cabin praying for the souls of the world. I’m in my cabin writing for the souls of the world.
Thinking about art as this sort of spiritual path, spiritual journey, I think has really resonated deeply with me. So now I own the term “art monk.”
