We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Josh Stein a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Josh, we’ve been so fortunate to work with so many incredible folks and one common thread we have seen is that those who have built amazing lives for themselves are also often the folks who are most generous. Where do you think your generosity comes from?
I grew up working poor; my parents managed for us to have a house, but for many years there was very little in that house. I learned how to make pretty much anything because there was no money to buy most things. Most of the people I grew up around started off with more money, things, whatever, than I had, and it seemed like they just always wanted more. I guess I’m a different kind of person. I just always try to share whatever I have. I made my peace with never having much, and I just refuse to fight over scraps. I would rather be remembered as someone who gave than someone who took. Having more as an adult was never going to give me back what I didn’t have in the past, and that’s what made me who I am and how I do things. I am certainly not perfect, but I can live with myself, and I can look myself in the mirror to this day. So, if I’m OK with who I have become, then I also have to make my peace with how I got there.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
Having just concluded my first museum solo — a nine-month double show at the PoCo Museum in Estonia — and just received my MFA from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan — information about the on-going social practice-based Giving Project created for my thesis is available at thegivingproject.art — this is a key moment in time for my practice because by necessity, not choice, I am an American bricoleur, a shaper of whatever comes my way. I make art because it’s fun to fuck with people’s heads, to push back against yet hopefully leave a lesson for a world which mostly ignores my existence. I make artworks in metallic and fluorescent acrylics and industrial plastics because it’s even more fun to have people realize I am playing with them and then want it to continue, and these are the best tools to those ends. What magician doesn’t want a willing, incredulous audience and a stage conducive to transformation? Along the way, I take mostly disregarded industrial materials and elevate them into works which demand attention on their own terms. The goal is the substantiation of imagination: fooling the eye into seeing things it never imagined could exist, and then going beyond to ask for willing participation in a different way of seeing the world around us, externally and internally.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
As I noted already, I started with very little, and so I think a key quality has always been not just curiosity, but creative curiosity, meaning that whether I was aware of something already existing or not, I was always willing just to iterate and see where it took me, whether that was in a classroom or in the real world, and certainly before I really was in either one of them as a young child just trying to survive.
Equally, a second trait, which has always been very necessary to me has been patience because money doesn’t just solve problems but acts like a time machine and allows one to move faster through the unpleasant parts to get to the “good stuff.” I learned how to “starve slowly” as Ursula K. LeGuin put it, and that’s just patience, applied very literally to the body. I managed a total of five degrees, including four advanced degrees, having started with very little because of that same patience.
The third thing that has been really key to surviving the ups and downs and keeping myself moving forward has been to try to remove all expectations of anything whatsoever. That may sound like a stance, a bit of bravura, but I mean it very literally. Once I stopped hoping or expecting or anticipating anything positive or negative and simply did what seemed best at the moment in time when I had to make a decision, I made a lot more forward progress in all areas of my life. Without expectations, there is very rarely a sense of either regret or disappointment. I just try to do what I can where I can with what I have, and then the chips fall where they may. I think of this as my adaptation of Warhol’s demand to just make and make more and then make some more again and let other people worry about anything else.
In terms of advice, it’s a mistake to think of what we do as a journey because the implication of that for most people is it’s like a race where they have a start, they go for however long they go, and then they stop. That’s not how this works as the commercial used to go. That’s not how any of this works. Instead, while the metaphor of a race is useful, it’s better to think of it as laps around the track because it only really ends once — unless that is one has lots of money — but if that’s not the case, and it certainly has not been for me, then how one imagines the bigger picture of what one does really impacts expectations, energy levels, self analysis, etc.
One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
As with many creatives, there are different facets to my practice. As a painter and sculptor, I have been a member of a number of collectives and group endeavors over the years, and so I am always happy to have conversations and see where things develop with any creative I come across. I also, though, am a podcast producer and host, and so I am always actively looking for creatives in whatever field who want to come onto our podcast and be guests. The easiest way to do so is to send an email to hello@nuacollective, and include in the message that you want to go on the podcast as a guest and heard about doing so from me. We’ll then reach out and take it from there.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://steincreates.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/steincreates
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshsteinnapa
- Other: https://thegivingproject.art/
