Holistic Portfolio Development
Although you can use this service to apply for grants and grad school this service is catered towards you developing a deeper connection and relationship with your work as it pertains to your life path whether you will join or continue to participate within an institutional setting or not.
This service entails the following:
Examining reoccurring themes, undercurrents, and unexpressed modalities within your practice that may need more development or illumination.
Emphasis will be placed on ancestral reverence and what that has to do with what you are inclined to create or not create.
Manifestations of Yaya will help you view your entire portfolio and artist statement holistically
Discussions about what certain opportunities mean for your whole path moving forward
Strategy development and a unique plan of action that will help you with every opportunity that you involve yourself with in order to be in alignment with your highest good
In addition to these offerings, you will receive a 5-10 page report that includes resources, notes from our conversation, crystal ally guides to support you in your studio space, suggested animal ally guides that can help you when you feel lost on your path, visualizations and a tarot pull to help you continue to concentrate and focus your energies on your goals and desires.
Digging Deeper: Why I Offer This Service
This is not your usual studio visit to discuss one body of work for an upcoming exhibition or to help you figure out your grad school application submission. This service actually embodies a different format from traditional studio visits and academic settings and is usually needed when you feel like your creative work and life path is about to undergo a major shift in perspective or when you are feeling super stuck and cannot see the forest for the trees in terms of next steps and how to get back in alignment with the underlying themes within your creative work and journey. Our sessions help with finding the true core of what you were put here to do and speak truth to power about. This work is not easy and often times we will be battling outdated thoughtforms and projected expectations about what success should or shouldn't look like for you. This service aims to look at your entire body of work to date to identify threads, missing links, blockages, and barriers that are standing in your way. Through developing a plan of action we will help you find your stride again and uncover not only where you have been but where you want to go.
I offer this service because I have been teaching K-12 and at the college/grad level for 16 years collectively. I have participated in so many crits with fellow peers, visiting artists etc. If you have a really great studio visit you are so inspired to go back to the studio and do more and more. Yet if you have a negative one you have to sift through so many projections and heavy negative energy and this is especially true for BIPOC Artists! Of course, you can use these negative experiences to grow but I realized that so many opportunities are contingent upon folks doing a cold-read of your work and making assumptions within a few seconds or whatever the structured time allows. I will never forget an art critic coming to my studio and seeing my work about hair and asking me if I ever heard of David Hammons? In my head, I was like, "Duh he is an OG but he also does not own Black people's relationships to our hair!" I also have been asked randomly if I knew where my people came from. I returned the question to the person asking it and they were confused and said no one ever asked them that. Hegemony is a powerful thing and especially within these traditional structures of studio visits.
It is rare to have someone really sit and look at your entire trajectory and to help identify the underlying themes and what you have to say, not just where you are placed with the canon of your respective field or creative mode. Some may say that this is what being an artist is about and makes us rise to the occasion but I personally feel very empty participating in systems like this in which I am being summed up with seconds. I aim for viewers to really sit with the themes in my work that I have been pondering and digging into for literal years. I feel that if we slowly start to take this time it can shift scarcity mindsets within our creative fields and we can have more spiritual growth from the works that we experience and want to create.
Oftentimes people seek me out to talk about a one-time piece that they are working on and I simply am not interested in doing that because, in my opinion, it feeds into a fast-paced system of creating work without digging deeper into what you want the work to have the power to do in relation to your entire life's work. I understand that we have to make small steps forward but oftentimes the energy behind this is rushed and deadline specific with not much time for deep introspection. (Perhaps I will have to create a separate service for single project consultations later!) Now of course if we have already had a preliminary session and we are doing a follow-up and you want to show progress and a body of work you are starting to create then yes count me in! This is such a rare service and I decided that if I am going to offer it I want to be able to support folks' overall practices and trajectories at least from the very beginning of us getting to know each other. When I am wearing my professor hat the structure is set up for quick cold reads because the expectation is that you will be working with students for 2-4 years however during this time they may only have the capacity to take one or two classes with you, perhaps you saw their portfolio when they applied to the program but it may vaguely strike you because the system is set up to admit so many and to have a constant revolving door. When I am not wearing my professor cap and participating in the academic machine I want to take my time with folk's work and set up an actual system of holistic support for them. I do this within my academic work too but it can be like pushing a boulder up a hill due to the formula. By offering this service here at Manifestations of Yaya we can push the boulder uphill, watch it fall back down, crash into something, run and document that and see how the impact of the collision leads to this whole new body of work! I know that sounds crazy but it is my dream offer and why I wanted to create this rare opportunity to give holistic feedback and to co-create a plan of action for others.
Ultimately this service is here to help you make the bodies of work that you want to make in the future. It is set up so that you are so entrenched within your purpose that whatever you make next will be closer to alignment with your true creative path. With this newfound freedom you can shift how you approach whatever medium or mode that is revealed to you!
Holistic Portfolio Development Testimonial
"This experience made me feel fully seen, held, and given advice in a way that felt truly holistic. I came away from the session with a deeper understanding of myself, my practice, and ways to continue forward thru methods of support and interrogation.
The session gifted me with ideas and directions for continuing on my current path of exploring and discovering my artistic practice. I know that I will continue to revisit our session notes countless times as mantras moving forward."
View Ahn Lee's work here
Learn more about Kenyatta's art practice
Award-winning visual artist writer and performer Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle aka Olomidara Yaya has had exhibitions and performances nationally and internationally and is the recipient of several awards and fellowships. She is based in Berkeley, CA where she lives with her 8-year-old aspiring comic book artist son. She is the founder of KACH Studio in which she is a self-represented artist. Manifestations of Yaya is a podcast that aims to channel her wisdom from navigating various creative contexts into a more holistic and spiritually aligned offering for people who want to engage with the methods behind her work and the intersections of art and healing.
Please visit: www.kachstudio.com for more information about her practice and feel free to view her video on Intuition featured at SF MOMA .
Bonus materials: Listen to The Manifestations of Yaya Podcast Episodes #1 on Intuition and #5 on Fear if you are having trouble trying to figure out where to start or continue on your creative journey!
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