a pragmatic response to real circumstances
by Anne Focke

Anne Focke helped create Artist Trust, Bumbershoot, 1% for the arts, Arts Wire, and/or gallery, and myriad other tools for working artists. In this 2006 essay, originally commissioned and published by the Back Room, she recalls some of these projects and the habits of mind, mix of structure and openness, and rhythms of permanence and impermanence that mark the lives of artists and institutions.