ArtStorming

ArtStorming the Art of Legacy

• Lili Pierrepont • Season 2 • Episode 1

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What if the most meaningful part of your story is the chapter you haven’t designed yet. We’re opening our new season by taking a clear-eyed look at legacy, grief, and the artful choices that can turn memory into something living. Welcome to Season 2 ArtStorming the Art of Remembrance.

Music for ArtStorming was written and performed by John Cruikshank.

SPEAKER_00:

Have you ever wondered what makes creative people tick? Where do their ideas come from? What keeps them energized? What kinds of things get in their way? Is their life really as much fun as it looks from the outside? Hello, I'm your host, Lily Pierpont, and this is Artstorming, a podcast about how ideas become paintings or poems, performances, or collections. Each episode, I'll chat with a guest from the arts community and we'll explore how the most creative among us stare down a blank canvas or reach into the void and create something new. In our inaugural season, Artstorming the City Different, we dipped our toes into the vast ocean of creativity with a focus on some of our favorite creators of Santa Fe, New Mexico. That conversation was enjoyed by artists and non-artists alike because it showed us how we can all benefit from learning how to generate something from nothing, dream bigger, charter new territories, and solve problems in new ways. In season two, we're going to take that concept of generating our lives with intention to the next level. This season, we're talking about legacy, art as legacy, and how the most creative among us tackle this rich and deeply personal subject. Welcome to Artstorming The Art of Remembrance. Welcome back to Artstorming. In this episode, I want to give you a context for our new season, the art of remembrance. But first, I want to start with a moment of quiet reflection. Because that's what this season is really about. It's about creating the space to think deeply about the things we often avoid. So look around you. Take a breath. And now consider one of the biggest questions of human existence. What do we leave behind? We spend our entire lives making incredibly intentional choices about who we are. The clothes we wear, the houses we buy, the careers we build, the values we champion. We are deliberate about how we present ourselves to the world while we are here. But when it comes to our final act, we often leave it to chance. We put off, or flat out avoid, the conversation about what happens when we leave our bodies. Focus is always slanted towards the hustle, the living, the doing. And this avoidance, I have learned, comes at a significant cost. We'll call it legacy drift. My own education in this drift was early, intense, and deeply personal. I had the dubious honor of becoming, somewhat accidentally, an expert on how to throw a memorial. Both my parents died when I was fairly young. My father died of AIDS in 1985 when he was only 50. My mother died nine years later in a skydiving accident right here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the age of 53. In the span between those two major losses, I suffered additional losses of family and friends, and I found myself organizing event after event, attempting to distill a complex, vibrant life into a single afternoon ceremony. And in those quiet, highly charged rooms, surrounded by grief and silence, I learned one thing above all else. No one was prepared. Not the person who died, nor the people they left behind. I was struck by the massive, terrifying silence about the topic of death. And this unpreparedness often led to logistical and even emotional absurdities. For example, both of my parents were cremated, and they were both very aesthetically oriented people. But at that time, the array of options were pitiful. Think like bronze dolphins and somber wooden boxes. That was just not going to cut it for them. My sister and I joked that Daddy, a dashing international fashion and interior designer, wouldn't have been caught dead in the hermetically sealed plastic box that he ended up in. In fact, that box lived for five years in my uncle's closet before a snowy Christmas trip led us to finally inter his remains in frozen ground with a few of my wedding photos thrown in haphazardly as a gesture of remembrance. It just was not right. Then nine years later, my mother's story was no less absurd. She was a rebel who loved Santa Fe, but her parents wanted her remains in the family plot back east. In the end, my sister decided to relent, sort of. She sent half the remains back, and because in her heart, she knew that mom wanted to be um here in the Santa Fe foothills. She took matters into her own hands and scattered the other half herself. Some years later, my grandmother and my aunt changed their minds, thinking that if Polly really wanted to be in Santa Fe, she should be in Santa Fe. So the ashes were sent back to my sister. The catch? Well, in that moment of high emotion during the first scattering, she sort of erased her sorrow and her memory of the exact location. She went out and I completed the second ceremony with a second batch of ashes. So mom is out there, all right, spread widely somewhere at the base of the Ski Mountain. The point of these stories is not the punchline. The point is that the vital question of meaning, the emotional and spiritual residue of my parents' existence, was relegated to a series of hasty, ill-prepared, and frankly comical decisions made by bereaved family members. So, what happens to the possessions that carry our stories? They're dispersed, they're tossed, they're occasionally fought over. The vibrant memory of us as the individual eventually fades. But what remains is the talisman, the object. We spend a lifetime crafting an authentic life, and yet we leave our final chapter to fate or to the$20 billion funerals industry. So why don't we apply the same intense intentionality we use for our living life to our legacy? Why wait till the end is near? This is the question that defines my work now, and it's what has inspired the second season of this podcast, Artstorming the Art of Remembrance. What if you could actually choose your legacy object or objects or projects? What if you pre-selected an object that to represent you, acquired it now, and lived with it before passing it and yourself along? And isn't a piece of art the perfect vehicle for this? You know, art historically lives on well after we do, but it remains to tell the story of how we lived, how we dreamed, what we stood for. Art is fundamentally one of our most potent tools for memory. So this is the concept we're exploring for our new season. Art pieces as living legacy objects. This season I'm going to talk to artists about this unusually heavy topic because creatives are the cartographers of the unseen. They have a direct, active relationship with the field of possibility. They are trained to look unflinchingly at the world, to stand at the intersection of life and death, and to create something beautiful. They show us how to turn the inevitability of our end into a compelling work of art. And yet, we all have the power to take control of our final narrative. This season is about planning your artful exit. So how do we begin? The solution isn't just about a will, it's about a conversation. And I encourage you to begin this conversation with three simple acts. Number one, define a talisman. If you could choose one object right now to represent the core of who you are, your values, your voice, your vision, what would it be? Is it a piece of art? A family heirloom? A journal? Why not acquire it now, live with it, and prepare it for its future role? Something to think about. Number two, host an art of conversation dinner. These dinners, which I'll talk a little bit more about in a minute, have been designed to help you gather the people in your life that you want to connect with on a deeper level and support you to learn things about them that you never knew. And number three, end Legacy Drift. Stop avoiding the topic. Talk to your family, tell them which stories you want to live on, tell them what you would want in that moment of crisis. Stop scrolling and connect. And to support and inspire you more in these acts, join me every two weeks as I share in-depth conversations with creatives from all over the country as I ask them how they think about their legacies, how mortality inspires their creations, what memorial objects would they choose to represent themselves? I believe that there's so much we can learn from creatives who face these questions fearlessly and often. As we learned in season one, artists offer us a crucial shift of perception. By engaging with their courageous work and their philosophical approaches, not only can we get some great insights for how to avoid legacy drift, but we can gain new insights that can truly enrich our experience of being alive. And because we feel these conversations are so important, the podcast interviews are only the beginning. We are building an entire community around this idea of intentional legacy, and here are more ways you can engage. So, number one, follow our companion substack blog for deeper dives, written reflections, and behind-the-scenes thoughts on our themes. If they resonate, we ask that you subscribe, comment, like, share, etc. And as mentioned earlier, we've started a new initiative called The Art of Conversation. Because this topic is so rich and charged, it deserves thorough, deep human discussion. By hosting a dinner with this intentional topic, you'll learn more about people you thought you already knew and potentially develop some intimate relationships with absolute strangers. If there are people in your life you've wanted to connect with on a deeper level, these dinners provide a provocative venue for exploring compelling topics. We encourage you to host your own Art of Conversation event and share your experience with us as inspiration for others to join the initiative. We really want this initiative to go viral. So visit our website for details and learn how you can host your own. And then finally, later this season, we'll launch our companion virtual art exhibition called Remains to Be Seen. This will be showcasing the work of our guests and some other excellent examples of memorial arts, turning theory into visual reality. We'll have more information about that exhibition later in the season as it evolves. So keep checking our website for details. Okay, so I think that just about covers everything for season two. We have an incredible lineup of guests so far, but we want this conversation to be dynamic and inclusive. So if you know of anybody with a creative mind, either renowned or emerging, whose work deeply engages with this theme, please feel free to send us your suggestions via our website. We definitely do want your input. Okay, so let's get this party started. Where we end up remains to be seen. Thanks for joining us today. Look for us on your favorite podcast platforms or wherever you listen. Your subscriptions, likes, comments, and shares help us to reach more listeners and attract the support we need to thrive in these challenging times. If you love what you hear, please consider making a contribution. We rely on your help to keep these conversations going. Every dollar you contribute goes directly into programs that support our mission. And we've been offered a matching grant that will match every dollar that you contribute. That means more compelling stories, more in depth articles, and an even greater impact on our community. Please visit our website at www.artbridgenm.org and thank you so much for being an essential part of our work.

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Lili Pierrepont

Host