Project spotlight: Karina Vahitova + Void Academy

This month I'm spotlighting another "sister-project," by which I mean, a creative, artist-centered, sustainability-oriented entrepreneurial project by an artist who seems to see the world much like I do! KARINA VAHITOVA is a poet, movement artist, and co-founder of VOID ACADEMY. She says, "Artists cannot depend on institutions and so we are helping them to find ways to have thriving careers outside, or at the very least alongside, the kinds of support institutions can sometimes provide to them."

Karina Vahitova

Karina! Inquiring minds want to know about your creative and professional practices. What do you do in the world?

I am a poet and movement artist! But I use other forms of making to get at the thing. Sometimes I make sculptures to have physical contact with the energetic I will later write about. I paint blobs to look at color because colors are the doors leading me out of the abstract. But in final form things are always either dances or poems or lyric essays — these autodidactic forms which teach you how to understand them as you’re reading or looking at them. 

I’ve been working on a book of words about Soviet queerness for a couple of years now. It’s been a long and tumultuous process since each piece of research just brings up more and more trauma to sift though, and sometimes I just don’t want to do that work. I’ve been trying to take a sabbatical from trauma in all of my work, but it seems to follow me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have a long-standing project called Epigraphs in which I write lyric essays and send them directly to people’s inboxes. You can read one and sign up on my website karinavahitova.com 

What is The Void Academy and how did it come into being? 

The Void Academy is an organization I co-run with two of my close friends and colleagues Siena Oristaglio and Noah Blumenson-Cook. Our mission is to help artists learn how to build thriving communities and make a living from their art.

We used to work together at an arts non-profit and saw a lot of really devastating economic injustices in the arts during that time. So, we decided to do something about it. We sat around in a room everyday for a few months doing heaps of research into why artists suffer so much economically when virtually everyone participates and / or benefits from art in their lives. 

We looked into the work already being done to help artists and then used our skillsets to come up with original tools for artists that we thought would be helpful. 

It was a life-changing process for us all, I think. To see a problem, identify the sources, and come up with solutions. 

Void Academy co-founders Noah Blumenson-Cook, Karina Vahitova, and Siena Oristaglio. (Photo by Asher Torres.)

Why is Void Academy needed right now? 

I think a Void Academy has always been needed, but particularly right now because: THE INTERNET. Whenever a new tool is invented, like the telegraph, or the telephone, or the train, or even the printing press! — it has this explosive effect. Suddenly, the whole world flips and working class people are sort of at the mercy of that change and not really in control. And even the people who own the tools, who invent them, never really know what the total affect is going to be, and so often they don’t care as long as it makes them money! 

The thing about the internet being a relatively new tool is that it is free (at least for now) and it is perhaps the most powerful communication tool we’ve ever had. It’s not going anywhere either (even if Net Neutrality ends) which means for as long as it is available to us we need to learn how to take advantage of it and organize using it and find each other through it. 

Whether people know it or not, everyone is learning how to use the internet right now. And I mean this not in the you teaching your grandmother “How to google something” way. I mean that we are learning how much emotional labor goes into existing multidimensionally, how far can emotion travel, who can we pull closer, what can we commune over and how, what does a dollar mean if there are millions of us all meeting on the same https:// link? 

So that’s where we come in. 

We teach artists how to navigate the wormhole that is the internet because no arts high school or BFA or even MFA program is really talking to artists deeply about what the internet can do for their careers, or how it can impact their sense of self worth negatively, or what it means to build a career solely on community support and have people buy artwork directly from you and not through a third party.

That’s the part that really gets me about art school — that virtually no programs teach artists how to create a community around their work, how to actually feel seen and have people other than presenters, and academics, and gallery scouts be a part of their lives. The worst part of it is that the institutional systems of support are not only not enough as compared to how many artists there are (just in the the United States), but so often such a deep bias is at play that the money is simply not available to artists who are anything other than white, cis, and able-bodied. 

Artists cannot depend on institutions and so we are helping them to find ways to have thriving careers outside, or at the very least alongside, the kinds of support institutions can sometimes provide to them. 

How does Void Academy fit into the effort by artists to do their work and build community in an economically sustainable way?

Thanks for this question. I really went all sophist on you up there! 

Pragmatically, we create online courses, teach workshops, and do one-on-one consulting with artists on the topics of Web Presence, Ongoing Income, Community Funding (aka crowdfunding), Mailing Lists, etc.

Learning how to effectively do any of the above can seem like a pretty bleak task to an artist, but when they see the impact a good website or an effective mailing list strategy has on their ability to feel connected and supported, it becomes worth it pretty quickly. 

How can artists take advantage of all of these valuable resources?

We are super excited right now because we’ve figured out a way to switch over to a membership model that costs just $9 a month (with a week free in case you’re like “wth this is so not a thing I like”). It gives you access to our current five course curriculum (and all future courses), weekly office hours, forums, resource library, discounts on one-on-one consulting and more!  

We also have a super fun mailing list folks can jump on and an online journal with interviews with artists about arts business. 

All of it is on voidacademy.com :)