Where We Live: a Conversation between Roya Amirsoleymani and Jared Williams

We invited Roya and Jared to discuss their motivations for creating physical spaces for artists to develop their work. Roya Amirsoleymani has begun OAK HEAD ARTIST RESIDENCY: supporting artists, writers, and musicians of color with time, space, food, nature, and shared resources. Jared Williams is part of the team that runs THE FIELD CENTER: an educational center for contemporary performance, dance, and interdisciplinary arts.

Logistically, sharing is not easy—especially not on the scale that these projects propose. Yet, Roya and Jared keep choosing to share space, land, ideas, and resources in order to cultivate a sharing economy. Each created a space to uplift process and support artists. While OAK HEAD and THE FIELD CENTER have different aims, both are evidence of our community’s need for transparent, accountable, curious spaces for artistic development—a need that other community members (such as Roya and Jared) feel called to meet.

—Londs Reuter, CC Co-editor

This conversation has been edited for the purpose of publication.

Jared Williams

Being an artist is often so lonely. It feels like––and this is a generalization––most people’s lives are filled with grant writing, which mostly looks like testifying to how poor you are, how much you need help, and that you matter. And you do that all the time. Which is tough.

Because most of our workshops and residencies are not attached to a performance, there isn’t this pressure hanging over you about having to produce something by the end. One opportunity that’s afforded in our space includes allowing for a person to say, “This is what I think I need, and this is what I think I’m asking for.” And then they come and it becomes this emergent experience.

Roya Amirsoleymani

I completely agree. Permitting yourself to be human, letting the creative process be elastic, and taking time without the pressure of turning out a product, or presenting a thing, or meeting a deadline.

When we have artists here, I remind them that they can truly use this time in a self-directed way. They don’t have to know beforehand what their days look like. They could have a plan coming in, and then that all goes away because once they get here, they realize that’s not where they’re at. All of that’s fine!

They might have to work through their own shit to give themselves permission. I think of someone in the recording studio, not having to worry that it’s costing money every hour that passes to rent it: having a brief respite from the way that the arts economy is structured, which is all so transactional, because it isn’t a sharing economy in the way that it could be.

Even though it doesn’t solve the bigger problem, we can offer a temporary break from the constant financial pressures attached to the opportunities artists are given.

I don’t know much about your new project, Oak Head.

That’s the name of where we live.

Would you tell me more about it?

Room available to artists at Oak Head with panoramic view of the Hood Canal. Olympic Peninsula, Washington. Sculpture hanging from ceiling by Portland-based artist Molly Alloy. Photo credit to Roya Amirsoleymani. — Photo credit to Roya Amirsoleymani.

I could share where I’m at today. I was a curator and artistic director with Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) in Portland, Oregon for about 12 years. I left in part because my life shifted personally: I’m in a three-person relationship and my partners were up in Washington while I was in Portland. It had been almost five years of long-distance commuting. That prompted me to think: what would I do if I relocated? I had thought I was going to be in Portland forever. I’d really made my adult home and career there. I didn’t want to make a lateral move, to just find another job that was similar or identical to what I was doing at PICA, where I would probably inherit a lot of the same stressors.

My partners—who are also both artists—and I live and pay rent on property that belongs to one of my partner’s family. So it’s settler property on indigenous land and it’s important to us to look at what we have access to, even though we don’t own it. What does it mean to steward this land, to have a house, a guest house, and a music and recording studio? What are we going to do with that? And it was so obvious that we wanted to support other artists.

We wanted to start by doing it without formal funding or grants because of the inflexibility that that can lead to. What would it mean to fundraise in the style of mutual aid and establish something that would be within our own capacity, that we can manage? A system that could be responsive and quick?

Then we took a deeper look at our values and decided to serve artists of color specifically. Two of the three of us are people of color so that felt important, especially given the limited access folks of color from cities can have to nature and land. We’re on the head of a peninsula overlooking the water. It’s 14 acres, mostly forested.

Music and recording studio on the grounds of Oak Head. Designed, built, and operated by Ahamefule Oluo, artist, musician, and Oak Head host. — Photo by Ahamefule Oluo.

That’s rad. It’s such a big shift in so many ways.

Maybe all we can offer is a moment to remind yourself why we do this and who we are? Because our field[s] can be so competitive and transactional, I think it’s a success if people simply come away from a few days or a week here with a feeling of; “I know who I am. I know why I’m doing this again. I know it matters. I’m ready to re-engage with the systems.”

Totally. If our nervous systems are calmed, as the administrators, producers, curators, or directors, then it does something for the artists. You talked about letting artists be humans; I think about how so much of what we all contend with is the imposter syndrome and the questions of: Am I good enough? Am I enough of an artist? Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing it the right way?

Some people were shocked that I would leave my job as a curator and questioned why I would give up that opportunity.. But I needed to know that I had value outside of the cache of a curatorial title with an institution, and that my work mattered regardless of where it was situated. I think artists need that too. To be in a healthy residency space, I think they need to be validated as a maker while also not having that identity define their existence.

I’m inspired by how you were describing the expansive and extensive connections that artists have with each other at the Field Center. All of these circumstances that allow someone to just be, are a real gift and yet still just a temporary phenomenon inside of this bigger thing that doesn’t slow down. But still, if someone can step away and then deal more easily with the rest of it all, that’s a goal for us.

Dancers in the main studio at the Field Center sit on the edges and witness. Photo credit to Rosa Wolff. — Photo credit to Rosa Wolff.

In my experience, everything has become about relationships. Working with marginalized communities of any kind, especially communities of color and indigenous communities, these relationships take enormous amounts of time. Cultivating this feeling of slowness and confidence that something is going to happen, whenever it’s going to happen––not based on a calendar, not based on when we have availability, not based on the 2025 season––but based on what emerges inside of this relationship at its own pace… that is something that I’m really grateful for. I didn’t work on the institutional side the way you did, but I have experienced that time-based frenzy while organizing Lion’s Jaw, trying to get faculty confirmed by February, and so on. I am really grateful to let that go.

There’s also this opportunity, to really face rupture when it happens––which inevitably will happen when living in mixed spaces where we’re being open and honest about our feelings and needs––and to let those conversations be emergent too. To stick with the conversation long enough to get people’s nervous systems into a place where we can actually work through that. This is actually something that’s happened here a few times, and the common component in resolving the rupture that I saw was that people––if they didn’t leave––had time together to co-regulate, express what they needed, physically move together, and process in the time that it takes, rather than having some shitty experience happen in a performance, or during tech, or in an awful email from a producer, and then being just left with that. So that’s another aspect of residential or process-based spaces that is so rich.

How did you decide to start the Field Center?

My story is different, but has through-lines. Around 2011, I started looking around for teachers that weren’t in the Boston area. I ended up bringing in teachers to stay in my extra bedroom with the intention to get some free teaching, free education, and dance. I really didn’t know anything about dance. I just researched people. And then I started asking them if they wanted to come, and I somehow ended up facilitating a workshop every month for two years.

Sarah Mae Gibbons, another producer, and I ended up starting New Movement Collaborative, which eventually led to the creation of the Lion’s Jaw Festival. I soon realized that this is the only thing that I want to do. Being around artists and watching the ecosystem emerge when everybody was in space and teachers were sharing their material.

I’d never seen teaching like this: People talking in circles, figuring out what people’s access needs were, working through it, stopping to talk as long as it took, working carefully through technical material and talking about and having improvisational spaces. It all felt so exciting to me. And I loved the emailing. I even loved the marketing. I loved all of it. Pretty quickly I was like, “Is this a thing, is this a job?”

During the pandemic, I met with a colleague, Nuria Bowart, who’s an Axis Syllabus teacher I’ve known most of my life. She was having dreams about a community space and some land-centric space. We got to talking and both decided pretty quickly to sell our houses, which is an important point of privilege: owning a house. We bought this vacant inn on 40 acres of land in Vermont in February 2021, which had been on the market for a couple of years and felt much cleaner in terms of displacement. But also, like you said, all land is land and has history.

A dancer's head and neck are supported tenderly by a swath of other dancers. Photo credit to Rosa Wolff. — Photo credit to Rosa Wolff.

I feel similarly to how you were imagining the next stage of your life and having a hard time picturing how that could be ethical or how you could avoid having to contend with some of the same problems you were already dealing with. That prompted me, too, to rethink. How do I shake this up and still try to maintain the core of what I believe in with this work?

I had both an exhausting and exhilarating experience working on the commissioning, development, and presentation side of the work, but I found myself feeling more connected to the smaller moments where artists were in dialogue with one another, or we were in dialogue with them, and relationships were being formed. Ideas were germinating and trust was being built. The hard questions were being figured out in real time and the mistakes were being made. The process felt tangible.

Yeah, I think you hit on something really important, which is that we live in a society that prioritizes product over process. If you’re lucky, by being an artist and being around artists, you realize how little you actually see in the end product; so much of the material is happening while people are talking and gathering together, during the walks, in the dressing rooms, etc.

I became more interested in process, even though it’s a financially suicidal idea!. I hear the same thing from you: this desire to support and protect artists. What does that look like, really, beyond just producing show after show?

Two dancers at the Field Center sit in contemplation. Photo credit to Rosa Wolff.

It’s interesting to think of budgets, scale, capacity. I’m curious how you imagine the Field Center’s future. Would you want it to grow or sustain or scale down? Do you even know?

I would say we’re close to where I want to be in terms of the physical facility. I think the piece that’s missing for me right now is a larger dedicated performance space: I miss curating performance. We do perform during many of these workshops and events but though the public can come, they rarely do. Performances are mostly done just for us, by us.. I would like to be able to help and hear more from the local ecology about what they need and want because, unlike you, we are not 35 miles from town––we’re about 10 minutes away. So there is a desire to build those relationships with the town, have more financial stability, and certainly pay our incredible team more: Anya Smolnikova, Lilianna Kane, Julianne Cariño, and Nuria Bowart who are all doing incredible amounts of work for very little. There are financial goals, but I feel like growth is something I interrogate a lot––this desire to get bigger and keep fixing things up––in the same way that I interrogate this idea of something needing to last forever.

How about you? Do you feel like building more buildings is something you want to do?

I’m not sure yet. We’re in this very soft launch pilot phase. We certainly want to make some small modifications that would make all of the facilities more conducive to a range of practices. But we’re reluctant to jump into formal fundraising. It might be that we never fully incorporate, but that we take baby steps toward eligibility for more funding or donations, such as fiscal sponsorship. But before that, I’d like to gain a bit more structure. Following our first few residencies––which essentially amount to a season of activity––we’ll be able to assess how much we can do with X amount of money.

If we have limited resources available in a given year, then we do what we can, and we don’t question if it’s not doing enough but know that it’s making a difference. Even if it’s small.