What Do You Actually Want? A Guide to the Different Paths in an Art Career

Every single time I sit down with an artist for a mentorship session, the conversation eventually comes around to the same thing. Goals. Not in a corporate, five-year-plan kind of way — but the real question underneath everything: What do you actually want your life as an artist to look like?

Because the path to getting museum shows looks completely different from the path to selling work through an interior design firm. And neither of those looks anything like getting written up in Artforum. The art world is not one world. It’s a bunch of parallel worlds that occasionally overlap, and the mistake I see artists make over and over is trying to do all of them at once, or following someone else’s map when they’re heading somewhere different.

So. Let’s talk about the actual paths. What they look like. What they require. And how to know which one (or which combination) is right for you.