Lac Seul artist featured at business of art conference

The business of making art was the focus June 17-18 during the Creating A Living: Your Art, Your Business conference.
“It’s about making income,” said Michael Belmore, an internationally-exhibited sculptor and Lac Seul band member who lives in southern Ontario.
He said art is about figuring out how to make a living from it and enduring the hardships. But ultimately, art is about choosing your own way.
His most most recent exhibitions include Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, an international exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art in Winnipeg, and HIDE: Skin as Material and Metaphor, at the National Museum of the American Indian – George Gustav Heye Centre in New York.
Belmore credited his upbringing in the Upsala area east of Thunder Bay and his mother’s teachings for keeping him on the path of making art.
“Our family has always been creative,” Belmore said.
His sistert is Rebecca Belmore, the performance artist who represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2005.
“My mother allowed us the opportunity ... to do what we want,” Belmore said. “She wanted us to be happy and that should be our goal in life – to be happy.”
Belmore said his mother stressed that being happy was not about getting a job or making lots of money.
“It was about making yourself happy,” Belmore said. “And that’s what she taught us. For us, we found art and we were able to excel at it.”
Being happy is about being persistent, Belmore said, deciding where you want to be, working towards that goal and holding on to it.
“It’s not the quick fix or the quick answer,” he said. “It’s about those long hard answers and finding them and sticking to them. For me, that was art. Expressing my art and being happy about that: that was important.”
Belmore opened the conference June 17 with his keynote speech, Is Business a Dirty Word?
Sponsored by WorkInCulture and the Ontario Crafts Council with the Thunder Bay Art Gallery as the presenting host, the conference also featured three other presentations: The Artist and the Business Brain; Business Planning: Setting Goals and Making Plans; and Vision and Reality: The Ever Changing Landscape of a Creative Practice.
Ten role models shared their secrets to sustaining their careers and six different business plan sessions were also held during the conference.
A panel session on Building Your Community was also part of the conference.