Artists Learn and Share: Erika Senft Miller

In the Artists Learn and Share series, NEFA connects with grantees to learn more about the impact of the grant on their work. Erika Senft Miller received a Public Art Learning Fund (PALF) grant in 2020 which supported her participation in Manship Artist Residency in Gloucester, MA. In this blog, Senft Miller describes her experience with the Residency program in 2020 and the resulting participatory art installation – The Net Works – which took place in 2024. We’re honored to share Erika Senft Miller’s PALF experience and its long-term effects in her own words below.

Public Art Learning Fund (PALF) grant aims to strengthen the field of public art in New England by providing professional development support directly to artists. PALF is accepting grant applications through September 16, 2024.

Applying for grants is one of the many complicated aspects of being an artist with a sustainable practice. I avoided applying for grants for several years. Partly this was due to insecurity: I did not feel that I would be seen as good enough by grants committees. Partly my decision not to apply was pragmatic: I didn’t believe that my work fit the established grant categories. It was thanks to the encouragement of Manship Artist Residency, where I was invited to be a resident artist, that I clicked “apply now” for the Public Art Learning Fund (PALF)  on the NEFA grant platform. 

The grant process, although it initially seemed a bit tedious for a learning grant, proved to be extremely helpful. It was early 2020 and the world was about to tilt. The detailed statement of intentions and the budget outline it required provided a clear structure to plan and work within. This clarity was especially important in the context of the tabula rasa created by the pandemic, which was followed immediately by social, political, and environmental challenges as well as technological advances at a new magnitude and speed. The grant, from application to monetary support, gave me a scaffolding that helped me orient my work and supported me in exploring, adapting, and expanding the multisensory site-specific work I do with the storied fishing community in Gloucester, MA.

Prior to my artist residency at the Manship, I had always worked in person, on site, in my home community in an inclusive and accessible way that brought people, place, and experience together. Since the pandemic coincided with the start time of the grant and my residency at the Manship, it quickly became clear that we were entering a more profound and long-term change to the world as we knew it. 

The structure of the PALF grant afforded me the occasion to slow down, step outside of my habitual process and pay close attention to the “time-specific” as well as the “site-specific” conditions to which I now only had virtual access.

This raised a series of questions for me as an artist and for my artistic practice: how could I work site-specifically at long distance? How might I deliver an olfactory experience in a safe and inspiring way? What would a meaningful immersive art experience feel and look like in this new world? The learning grant gave me the opportunity to carefully investigate my role as a white-middle-aged-European-female-multimedia-performance-artist in this new paradigm. What could I bring to the conversation? How, as a visiting artist, could I add a meaningful experience about and for this close-knit community whose world was rapidly changing and to which, until recently, I had been a stranger?

The city-wide resources being offered through the Manship residency provided me with opportunities to delve into the infrastructure of the Gloucester community which had both a deep history as a fishing port and a strong arts tradition. These resources allowed me to engage with and learn from cultural, business, and economic community organizers, whose unique perspective on what is intrinsic to Gloucester helped me to define and develop my approach, and to answer the critical question, “What would I actually do if it became possible to be on site?”

While I came to understand much about Gloucester, its working waterfront, networks, and mythology during this period of physical separation, I also learned that there is important sensory information anchored in the place itself that cannot be conveyed virtually and that there are groups in the community that cannot be reached digitally. For example, I was eager to connect with the fishing community to learn about their individual and deeply human experiences; the type of experiences that are too subtle to be captured in a film or a book yet integral to understanding the web of life in their community; I needed answers to questions like: “What does the place smell like? What does the air feel like? How do people move in their environments? Why do they move as they do? How do they deal with adverse and complicated circumstances in daily life?” And for my art to be truly resonant with the people of Gloucester, I needed to find my answers on the ground.

To establish relationships with groups in the community that were difficult to reach via email or phone, it was important that I showed up and that I showed up humbly, conscious that I was a guest in this tight knit community. And I needed to hear from members of these groups directly in person in order to truly understand what experiences would be meaningful to their specific history and circumstances. This need for direct presence underscores an important difference between making art with rather than about a group within a community, the latter of which might have been accomplished through strictly online research. Truly inclusive art asks me as the artist to expand and revise my thinking by carefully listening and demonstrating respectful curiosity, qualities of meaningful inquiry encouraged and consistently underscored by NEFA’s Public Art Learning Fund. By thoroughly documenting my process and findings, partly as a consequence of this grant, I was able to create a roadmap that will serve as an outline for my future practice, and that may be of benefit to other artists as well.

This past May, after more than four years of research and building connections in Gloucester MA, The Net Works, a multi-sensory art installation, premiered in a seafood processing plant on Gloucester’s working waterfront. This project, built with a team of 12, was a manifestation of a true collaboration of fishermen and artists. In addition, more than 60 people, including businesses, ship captains and families, both locally and some from my home community, lent their support for The Net Works installation. During the three weekends The Net Works was open, over 1200 people experienced The Net Works, a multi-sensory installation that invited visitors into the tender human moments at the heart of Gloucester’s fishing community. The project received additional funding from the Vermont Arts Council, The Bruce J Anderson Foundation, The Prometheus Circle of The Manship Artists Residency and Awesome Gloucester, a local non-profit supporting arts and culture in Gloucester, MA. Additional in-kind support for the project was provided by Intershell and Peter Waxdall.

The culmination of this project is a result of that moment of pause for reflection and learning that the Public Art Learning Fund provided four years ago. The final outcome was a community-driven and community-supported installation that I hope will lay the groundwork for many future public art collaborations.