Conversation Series Sofa Issues Winter 2026
The Question Is The Practice
Peery Sloan in conversation with Yvonne Shortt
“I don’t want my board of directors to just be people. I want them to be the bobcat I see, the fox that travels along, the soil we’re using to make our instruments.” – Yvonne Shortt
I first encountered Yvonne Shortt’s work through one of her Be The Museum open calls in Forest Park, Queens, NY. It was and still is a radically transparent, artist-centered approach that flips traditional gatekeeping on its head. No juries, no portfolios, first come first served, and payment before arriving. Her Be the Museum, Be the Endowment, Women Who Build, and her Open Call projects offer artists practical alternatives to extractive funding models, treating money itself as an artistic material for creating sustained, autonomous practices.When we spoke this winter, life felt particularly precarious due to Donald Trump’s fascist policies and violent ICE enforcement. At this moment, Yvonne’s work of building rafts, teaching women to use power tools, creating tiny houses, and paying artists to simply exist in parks feels urgent. Her practice is about questions more than answers, small groups over mass movements, and the freedom that comes from understanding financial systems well enough to opt out of their more harmful aspects. This conversation took wonderful turns from financial sustainability to ethical structures and what it means to invite a fox onto your board of directors but always circled back to a central question: how can artists create the conditions for their own liberation?
Peery: Hi, Yvonne. It’s so good to see you. Thank you so much for talking to me. I wanna start by acknowledging that we’re having this conversation at a really precarious and scary moment. There have been daily attacks and killings. Before we talk about you and your work, I just wanted to check in: how are you doing? How are the communities you work with?
Yvonne Shortt: I think we’re okay. I mean, it’s pretty crazy. I think you just try to surround yourself with people who will help and who will be kind and gentle, and that’s an important aspect of it. How about you?
P: I’m really grateful for the community where I’m living right now in Portland, Oregon. There’s a really proactive resistance movement and that feels good to be part of. People are trying to take care of each other. With this reality, it feels to me like your frameworks of alternatives are that much more relevant right now. You’re building other ways of being an artist. Can you talk to me about your Open Calls?
Y: The reason why it started was because I was at A.I.R. Gallery and I was really aware of how it worked. It’s the oldest women’s gallery, started very early on to give women opportunity. But looking at where it was today, I was thinking, my God, it still feels like a hierarchy because we’re controlling who gets access through this open call. Most of the time we were giving like $2,400 for a year-long residency and a show. How many people are really gonna be able to afford to do that?
Daria, one of the founding members, the only founding member still part of that gallery 50 years later, and I started saying, “well, let’s at least name these things: there is hierarchy and let’s try different things to see what we can do about it.” We started being very transparent. Where’s the money coming from? A lot of the money for open calls goes to project coordinators & executive directors. Funding institutions want to fund a core person to administer the program, but they don’t give a lot of money to the actual artists.
We started with financial transparency. Let’s say how much money these calls are: you’re getting $40,000 from the Department of Cultural Affairs, $40,000 from NSCA, $20,000 from membership. At least we were starting with that. Then as we started experimenting with our own open calls, we were like, why are we asking people to spend so much time on an application? Let’s make it very simple: six questions. One of the open calls, we paid every single person who answered the questions. I think it was $50 if you submitted an application. We capped it at 50 applications and everyone who submits gets $50. At least we’re paying people for their time.
P: I appreciate that it’s designed to disrupt that gatekeeping and scarcity mindset. No juries, no portfolios, first come first served. I’ve been thinking about how even first come, first serve can favor people with stable internet, flexible schedules, no caregiving responsibilities. I’m not saying that to critique it, but I’m curious—do you think about that?
Y: Everyone in some way has some kind of privilege. If we make them quick, then people who aren’t looking at the internet all the time can’t see them. If we only put them online, then somebody who doesn’t have internet access can’t look at it. You cannot be everything. It’s just impossible. But at least if we’re exploring it and talking about it, then something can happen. If we’re not talking about it and not trying different things and not sharing what we’re learning, we’re not going to change it. There are definitely things in every single open call that are not accessible to every kind of person, but if you can talk about them and try to address some of them, at the very least, that’s something.
P: The fact that you’re paying people to answer the questions is so wonderful—it shows where your values lie. When I was part of Be the Museum, I was blown away that I was getting paid before I even stepped into the park. I was being valued and given free rein. It felt like permission to play, and it was such a different experience than any arts opportunity I’ve had. It gave me so much hope that things could be different. I think about adrienne maree brown and emergent strategy: we’re living in somebody’s imagined reality right now, somebody else constructed this. So if we flip that, there’s hope and power in thinking we have the same power to imagine differently. And you’re going past ideation and actually putting these things into action.
Y: Exactly! I received money to Be the Museum in a local park and said, let me split some of it and give it to other artists: I always believe in giving back.
You wonder sometimes: is it better to do an open call at all? Or do you work within a group you already know? Because inherently in the open call there’s always something you’re not giving to. But if you just pull from your local group, you’re never growing or finding different people. There’s never a completely liberating or free way.
What I get excited about is seeing open calls trying different approaches, stretching the boundaries, like ones where they say we only want you to use natural materials, only what’s in the park. I’ll email them and we’ll have this great conversation because we’re both thinking about this as artists, not administrators.
This year we’re doing it again for Be the Museum and giving out $3,000 to four artists. We’re wrapping in Be the Endowment: $2,000 for 40 hours at $50 an hour in a park, $500 for healthcare and housing, and $500 for your endowment. We’ll work as a community, set up our own brokerage accounts, figure out what we value and how we value, and let that help determine how we build our endowments for ourselves.
P: That’s so exciting and so human-focused. It seems like you’re really trying to use money as a material to help create sustained practices.
Y: When I first started getting funding from the Department of Cultural Affairs—taxpayer revenue in New York City—I thought, this is a much better way of getting it. But when you really dig in: who are these people? Some are getting their money from banks, technology companies, organizations wrapped intrinsically in the financial system. I was a little naive thinking money from the people wasn’t part of that system. It still is.
When I get money from Mellon Foundation or Creative Capital, they’re still coming from endowments and wealthy donors ingrained in that system. With collectors, we’re often not asking where did your money come from? But when you dig in, very few things don’t involve understanding how this funding machine works. So I thought, I don’t want to be naive—I want to understand it, from collectors to private foundations. And at the same time, have enough money so I don’t have to keep asking Creative Capital or Mellon Foundation for funding.
P: That’s a lot to hold: the system you’re working within and the one you’re trying to build. I also see you building things with your hands: rafts, harvesting clay from rivers, teaching women how to use power tools. Can you help me understand how questions and creating fit together for you?
Y: I think it always starts with a question and then it becomes whatever it needs to become. Sometimes the making can be physical or more mental. I’ll ask a question like, why is it that we’re often having to beg for money and it prevents us from doing something? That ultimately became Be the Endowment. But it started with a question—not necessarily physical, more with mental work and research and questions with other artists or institutions or financial people.
Then there are things like, we have this land—50 acres. We would like to give something back. While I was giving maple syrup to the farmer next door, I told him I was thinking about making a small wildflower garden, and he said, “well, I’ll help you.” The next thing I know we have one acre and he’s showing my husband and me how to use the equipment so we can till the land, plant one acre instead of maybe a 10 by 10 foot space. I asked my family if they would help throw out the seeds, and my husband’s like, let’s bring our camera and see during the night who comes. And we see this fox coming and the rabbits and the deer.
But it’s all just questions and things just kind of happen. I have no idea sometimes where anything is going. It’s just that we trust. We know it’ll be a beautiful journey because we’re trying to make sure that, at the very least, we have a certain foundation.
Even with the Women Who Build initiative: I was like, why do I not know how to use a miter saw? All these classes were costing $2,000 and you don’t even get the miter saw at the end. Forget this—I’m gonna get the miter saw and invite people into the studio and look at YouTube and we’ll figure it out. But then a woman shows up and gives us guidance. At the first meeting, 8 people came! The next thing you know we’re all cutting wood. Maybe we should learn how to frame a house because as artists, housing is really freaking difficult.
From these questions, all of these things end up happening, which is quite fun and exciting. Ultimately I think it builds a better community because at some point it opens up and it’s not just in my head. My husband often says, “it’s just your timing, it just happens.” I think that’s part of the energy around my community.
P: It seems very synchronistic, this imaginative place of asking what-if questions. It sounds like a democratic process—rotating leadership, shared responsibilities. But have you experienced when somebody dominates the conversation or doesn’t show up for their facilitation? How do you navigate it?
Y: The questions always start for me. Sometimes the people who made me think about the question come in and go out because they’re doing something else. So I only take on things that I’m really interested in seeing through.
With the tiny house, we ended up with 250 women, doing a 5K run to raise funding. People came in and came out—some were very excited and then we got to the build and they were outta there. Or they felt like their idea wasn’t being heard, maybe about the architecture even though they had no architecture experience. We had to pick and choose what directions we would go in. We really wanted to have a tiny house that would pass inspection, that we would’ve learned something from—how to install electricity, how to frame.
At some point if somebody didn’t know how to frame and somebody else said, “this is how you frame, I framed houses before,” somebody may get mad and not show up for two weeks. But we can’t please everyone all of the time. You try and maybe say, “I did this wrong, I’m sorry.” But ultimately the things I choose are things I’m committed to for a very long time: some projects are going on for 10 years. It has to be something I’m committed to, because people do come in and go out.
P: How do you handle groups without creating hierarchies that maybe you’re trying to avoid?
Y: What I’ve learned over the years is to have smaller groups. Women Who Build was the last time I had a project with 250 people—I learned so much, but I also learned I wanted intimacy. More openness, more creativity, less power dynamic.
As groups get bigger it’s harder to get things done. When it’s small and personal, we end up working together in ways we wouldn’t otherwise. Sometimes even if we think someone’s wrong, it’s like, well, we’ll fail together and we’ll fix it. They’re not gonna fail and just leave.
COVID helped change that too. I started to realize each project should be smaller, so that everyone knew each other and we could commit to something and work on it. There’s more care and kindness in a small group. In big groups, if somebody doesn’t show up for three sessions, you’re like, I didn’t know them very well. But if you’ve only got five people and someone doesn’t show up, you’re gonna call them—hey, are you okay? You may find there’s something going on and end up with a whole other project because you wanna help with that.
We were socialized to believe bigger is better and it’s very hard to come away from that. The frameworks I use aren’t for everyone. I’m just sharing things I’m working on. Oftentimes these things have all been done before. I’m just synthesizing and changing it up for the question I’m asking myself, then seeing, hey, is there anybody else out there asking this question? Maybe we can go through it together in a small group and learn from one another and be each other’s support system.
P: There’s a lot of care involved in that way of thinking. I find it really tender and generous. With those frameworks, the Open Call, Be the Endowment and Be the Museum, they’re open source, designed to travel and for other people to mutate them.
Y: They’re open source. You use them and modify however you wish.
I made the Be the Museum card because I was sick and tired of paying 20 bucks to museums. We’re artists, why are we paying so much, especially if you can’t afford it? My daughter went with me to the New Museum and we got in-it was a hoot! I shared it out and people adopted it in different ways. My friend at the Brooklyn Museum said, “I get to go for free, so you can come with me.” I was like, but what if I just made that part of my museum and have a card for contemporary artists? I put my face on it and tried it at MoMA. We got into so many museums and it was so fun.
Museums aren’t something non-Indigenous and Western cultures invented. There have been museums of many different kinds, not in these Western spaces. Now we’re bringing the two together in different ways. It felt very empowering sharing that out and people adopting it in different ways; it caused me to rethink it too. I finally started to say, I don’t want my board of directors to just be people. I want them to be the bobcat I see, the fox that travels along, the soil we’re using to make our instruments. When we think about them as being just as important, we open up the framework in many different ways. That only came from being in conversation with others, and that helped me to change it for myself and others to adopt it however they wanted.
P: It sounds so fun, like you’re just bursting open the framework and there’s so much play involved.
Y: Totally, in so many ways. These are all ideas and most things have been done before. If you realize you are just part of the energy, you’re already adapting it in your own way. I remember somebody saying, “oh, somebody’s going to take that idea.” I was like, “That’s awesome! I’m sure somebody else had this idea before me anyway.”
I would like it if you make a museum and Be the Museum inspires you, that you tell me, because it makes me feel good. But you don’t have to. If you come in and we have a conversation, you may grow and I may grow, and that’s the exciting part. Hoarding an idea or being afraid somebody uses it in a way you don’t like—I just don’t subscribe to that. All ideas are open.
P: By sharing our ideas we can create more than we could have imagined. Before we finish, what do you wish more people understood about your work or about being an artist right now?
Y: There’s no one way to be anything. No one way to be an artist. If you just have a wide open mind and try what works for you, and try not to be influenced so much by how others perceive what you’re doing: be open to the many different things that could come at you and play with them.
And you only need a few like-minded people to help you grow. The internet can be a crazy, horrible place, but it can also be amazing for finding people: one person willing to play with an idea in a certain way. I’ve met a couple of people from all over the world and it’s really opened up my mind, and I’ve opened up theirs.
P: Without the internet I never would have found you and your way of thinking. It’s giving me so much excitement: a sense of possibility and hope, especially in an art world that preys on external validation. I feel like I just got handed a miter saw.
Yvonne Shortt is a visual artist working at the intersection of public art, social practice, and financial systems. Her frameworks include Be the Museum, Be the Endowment, and transparent Open Calls which offer artists practical alternatives to extractive funding models. Based in New York, she teaches women to use power tools, has cultivated a relationship with her landscape and animal neighbors, builds rafts and tiny houses, and thinks deeply about how artists can create sustainable, autonomous practices.
Peery Sloan (she/they) likes to dig, sometimes literally, to see what’s beneath the surface: worms, bones, histories, the things we’ve learned not to notice. Through gatherings, workshops, and small acts of collective noticing, she explores how meaning surfaces through shared attention rather than finished products: what’s within arm’s reach, what touches skin, what gets missed when you’re moving too fast. She thinks of this as tending, or maybe just a lifelong need to be barefoot and looking closer; she is pursuing an MFA in Art + Social Practice at Portland State University.