On Art and Employment

Photo by Alejandro Escamilla on Unsplash.

A while back, The Billfold did a series of “every job I’ve ever had” posts — and today on Longreads, Carolita Johnson shares her own employment history, and the way her jobs helped and/or hindered her work as an artist:

I took every modeling job I was offered, and it felt wonderfully like pulling on the thread that unravels everything. By my third year at Parson’s, I was fully immersed in Fashion Design, more and more fluent in it. It’s my nature to persevere and succeed, even in things I don’t like. Taking a job in a design house upon graduation could too easily have turned into a forty-year rut instead of a brief pause. Every modeling job I did deprogrammed me a little more and brought me closer to my original plan: to take that BFA and run.

You might remember Johnson’s original Longreads essay about “the costs and benefits of love and cohabitation as a woman artist living in a patriarchy” (which we discussed here). I was hoping that this next installment might pick up where the previous one left off, but it’s more like the prequel. Luckily, there are still more installments to come.

I’ll let you read it on your own — and trust me, the ending is worth it.

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