The Answer is No: Recent Episodes
Alexis Clements
Creatives from across fields, from artists to writers to filmmakers, talk about sustaining their careers and staying sane by saying no to bad gigs in order to say yes to the good ones.
For the final episode of our first season, we’re turning the mic around and interviewing co-producer and editor, Ali Cotterill. A filmmaker and editor, Ali has cultivated and participated in a number of networks of peers in order to get a better sense of what gigs to take, how to get them, and what they should pay—information that can feel impossible to access in many areas of the arts. She also helped give Alexis a fair amount of perspective when they were both work on their first feature-length films around the same time.
In this episode we’ll dig into Ali’s path into film, which started in no small part because of her early start as a drag king, and we’ll also get into the realities of documentary film budgets, beyond the smoke and mirrors so many independent filmmakers are presented with when trying to enter a field that can feel completely financially inaccessible.
Our interview was recorded in September 2020.
Show Notes
Below you can find links to Ali’s work and some of the people, ideas, and organizations referenced in our conversation:
- Ali’s website
- Ali’s film, North Pole, NY
- Ali’s podcast, When You’re a Jet
- 2020 Hollywood Diversity Report by UCLA
- All Over Me – the 1997 film referenced by Ali in the All Over Me
- Brooklyn Documentary Club
- Video Consortium
Ali Cotterill is a filmmaker and editor based in Brooklyn, New York (formerly Canarsie and Lenape land). As a filmmaker, her films have screened at 100+ festivals around the world, won several awards, and been broadcast on Logo TV and Current TV. Her feature directorial debut, North Pole, NY, premiered at IFF Boston 2018 and picked up the Audience Award for Best Feature at the Indie Street Film Festival. As an editor, she’s edited 250+ short doc films for Fortune 500 companies and non-profits alike. She also edited and co-wrote the documentary feature United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, which premiered at MOMA’s Documentary Fortnight (World Premiere) and Hot Docs (Canadian Premiere) and won Best Documentary at the Milan and Pittsburgh LGBT film festivals. She was recently selected as an IFP/Gotham Podcasting Fellow for Winter/Spring 2021.
For the final episode of our first season, we're turning the mic around and interviewing co-producer and editor, Ali Cotterill. A filmmaker and editor, Ali has cultivated and participated in a number of networks of peers in order to get a better sense of what gigs to take, how to get them, and what they should pay—information that can feel impossible to access in many areas of the arts. She also helped give Alexis a fair amount of perspective when they were both work on their first feature-length films around the same time.
In this episode we'll dig into Ali's path into film, which started in no small part because of her early start as a drag king, and we'll also get into the realities of documentary film budgets, beyond the smoke and mirrors so many independent filmmakers are presented with when trying to enter a field that can feel completely financially inaccessible.
Our interview was recorded in September 2020.
Artists' journey are rarely predictable. For Lola Flash, as a young kid growing up in New Jersey, with a 35mm camera in her hands and a supportive mother who would soon set up a darkroom for her at home, she knew she didn't want to wait to become a photographer. But the path to seeing her work on the walls of galleries and museums wasn't so straightforward.
In fact, early on in Flash's career, the overwhelming whiteness of museums left her feeling they weren't a place she wanted to share her work at all. She also never imagined herself making conceptual work. Now, more than three decades into her career, she's shifting her perspective on many things, and is even undertaking her first series of conceptual photographs.
In this week's episode we'll hear more about the journey from snapping photos of her classmates in grade school, to a possible career in scientific photography, to a 12-year detour to London, and so much more.
Artists have been asked to share their work for free for just about as long as artists have existed. And artists have also been trying to resist this all too common practice for at least the past century. Sharing your work for free isn't always a bad thing, but when cultural institutions who receive money to display work don't also share that money with the artists whose work gives them their purpose, something is amiss.
Founded in 2008, W.A.G.E., or Working Artists and the Greater Economy, has been an important voice in the contemporary fight for artist's compensation for well over a decade at this point. They offer tools and resources to help artists negotiate and obtain fees when exhibiting or sharing their work publicly. And Lise Soskolne, a painter who has been W.A.G.E.'s core organizer since 2012, has been a key part of keeping the organization and its efforts going.
In this episode, Lise shares her perspective on the shifts in thinking about compensation since W.A.G.E.'s founding, and also on the realities of maintaining an art practice while keeping a small organization going.
Our interview was recorded in October 2020.
Our worlds are saturated in imagery these days, particularly with nearly half of the world's population using social media. This, along with major shifts in global media production, makes being a professional photographer a pretty challenging path to follow today.
And yet, it's also a time when many assumptions and biased business practices related to who is and should be behind the camera are being called into question. This week's guest, Josué Rivas, is not only a talented and thoughtful storyteller, he's also part of a few organizing efforts that are working to change the industry.
This week we'll hear how Josué went from hating his family's connection to photography while living in Mexico, to a period of houselessness, to sitting at the table with some of the industry's top photo editors.
A lot of clichés get thrown around about actors, however Becca Blackwell is anything but a cliché. They began their acting career in the 1990s at a time when being queer and masculine-presenting were not entirely welcome in the theater. Today, they are an award-winning actor and writer who can just as easily bring humor as pathos to their work, and who is riveting on stage and screen. Yet, despite receiving major accolades from Creative Capital and Doris Duke, it wasn't until receiving unemployment during the pandemic that they had a steady paycheck coming in for the first time.
From their childhood in Ohio to arriving in New York, Becca and I spoke about what it's been like trying to make a life in independent theater, when they started to say no to gigs, and what they've learned along the way.
When stories come up about museums unethically acquiring work for their collections, the plot often centers on things like art looted by Nazis in the early 20th century, or cultural artifacts from civilizations that have been raided by colonial armies. These stories are tied up in legacies of white supremacy and the ongoing desires of wealthy Europeans and Americans to assert their status by displaying these stolen items.
We hear less often about unethical acquisition practices when it comes to contemporary art. And yet, even today, it’s not always the case that museums are acting above reproach.
In this episode, we hear from interdisciplinary artist Fields Harrington, who unwittingly became one of a large group of artists whose work was collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art. It’s a story that’s wrapped up with national fights for racial justice that flared during the pandemic, and it’s also a story of how challenging it can be to resolve these problems once they’ve been created.
In the earliest moments of the COVID-19 pandemic moving across the US, dance and performance artists started getting emails and calls. Shows were being cancelled — shows that were already underway, were about to happen, and many that were scheduled for months out on the calendar. Little clauses in artists' contracts that few people pay attention to were being invoked - force majeur. The pandemic was being described in legal terms as "an act of God" and so the institutions who booked these artists were cancelling everything and declaring they had no further responsibility.
Along with Laura Colby, Sarah Greenbaum, Emily Johnson, jumatatu poe, Brian Rogers, Michael Sakamoto, Karen Sherman, Amy Smith, and Tara Aisha Willis, Yanira Castro helped to author what became "Creating New Futures: Phase One" — a 200+ page document calling for radical change in the field. And they pulled it off in just a matter of weeks.
In this episode I spoke with Yanira, an award-winning choreographer and interdisciplinary artist, not only about this collective call for greater equity in the fields of dance and performance, but also about her pathway into the arts, from an early childhood in Puerto Rico to building and sustaining a career in New York City.