Join Stove Works for Professional Development, a quarterly series of workshops led by visiting artists and professionals chosen for their expertise. Each workshop leader will give a short lecture, followed by breakout sessions that will be joined by artists who are in residence on-site. This series is designed for emerging and mid-career working artists who are looking to bolster their professional toolbox by starting with concrete skills & moving towards more abstract concepts like relationship building, emotional resilience, and professional etiquette.

Failure is an integral part of the creative process. It can also cause artists to shut down. Learning to accept and perhaps even embrace failure is an important part of moving through it. This workshop will focus on the importance of failure in your practice, how to deal with it, and how to keep going.

About TK:

TK Smith is a curator, writer, and cultural historian. His interdisciplinary research engages materiality to analyze art, identity, and culture. As a public scholar, he serves as a conduit between artists, ideas, and communities to produce thoughtful exhibitions, publications, and programs. He currently works as Curator, Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora, at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University. Smith’s writing has been published in exhibition catalogues, academic journals, and periodicals, including Art Papers where he is a contributing editor. In 2022, he was awarded an Andy Warhol Writers Grant and in 2024 he was awarded a Leo and Dorothea Rabkin Prize. He has been a visiting lecturer at numerous academic and cultural institutions, including Cornell University, where he taught undergraduate courses on cultural criticism. Smith is a doctoral candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware, where he is completing his dissertation Granite, Power, and Piss: The Transformation of a Confederate Symbol.

https://www.tksmith106.com/