NIAD artists work – with few exceptions – every weekday of the year. Since 1982, artists have persisted in activating NIAD’s Community, Studio, and Exhibitions programs – several of those first studio artists are still practicing at NIAD today.

In general, this community’s continual, long-term search for what is sustainable leads us. What seems to work is to maintain creative dialogue – to navigate the tension between rage and hope, a held breath and the reminder to breathe, and to persist in building relationship between seemingly opposed feelings, tendencies, and perspectives.

But we can’t do it alone, and we can’t do it without rest. While NIAD seeks ways in our work this week to deepen rest and community care, we’re watching victory unfold for Lava Thomas’s Maya Angelou monument with the San Francisco Arts Commission, and Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman’s For Freedoms’ open a new chapter in support of public healing. 

As we make space for what’s to come, we aim to do so in inspiration and solidarity with these and so many other successful efforts to make equity, representation, and the work of dismantling racism central to our work as artists. Together, we can continue.

In community and in thanks for creative workers everywhere,

Amanda Eicher, Executive Director