By Kate Bell

Excerpted from the 11th issue of the TAG Quarterly

I’m here at Think Coffee near Union Square in New York City with Niizeki Hiromi, who goes by Hiromi.  The first thing I want to know, Hiromi, is how long have you been a Teaching Artist?

When I started teaching, that was in Tokyo, we did not have this name. But I believe I’ve been doing this same kind of business for a long time.  Thirty-two years.  Five years in Tokyo.  And then for my first three years here in New York, I did not teach.  I didn’t feel comfortable speaking English.  But in the fourth year, 1991, I started to teach again at The Children’s Museum of the Arts.  So, twenty-seven years here, and five years in Tokyo.  So, thirty-two years.

Great!  Wow.  I didn’t know you’d been teaching for over three decades!

I’ve always enjoyed teaching.  And it’s supported my life.  And now I’m only working for one organization in New York, Marquis Studios.

So, the theme of this issue is self-care.  What, in your mind, are the biggest reasons why Teaching Artists need to reflect and plan on self-care?

Well, as a Teaching Artist, why I’m in this business, is I want to maintain teaching and my artistic practice.  Not just teaching alone.  I want the balance.  The balance is very important.  You need to get paid, and you need to be healthy.  But also your mind, your creativity you have to maintain.

Is that easy to do?

Of course not!

(Laughter.)  So how do you do it?  How do you personally find the balance between teaching and making art?

Well, I also need to think about what kind of life I want, what quality of life.  I worked corporate jobs in the past, to get my green card, and I studied English, and really did all of these things to create my life in this country.  I don’t want to feel like I wasted everything, so I’m very serious about my balance in this Teaching Artist business.  And I’ve found that one thing I need to do is to live without a lot of money.  If I need less money, I use less time and energy to teach.  And I love to teach, I’m very good at doing it.  My students like me, and I like them, and I think this is great.  But I don’t want to stop there.  I need to make my own time, too, to keep working as an artist.  And I have my son. Only one!  And I think my husband and I are doing a great job, but it’s not so easy.  He’s eighteen now, and we’re looking into scholarships for college.  That’s what we have to deal with.  Education is very important.

Let me ask you this, how have the organizations you’ve worked for supported the self-care of their communities of Teaching Artists?

I don’t think many organizations really support Teaching Artists’ self-care.  Like we don’t get health insurance.  The best thing in terms of support for self-care from Marquis Studios is that they pay you to visit and observe other Teaching Artists.  And I use all of my observations, every year.  I get paid a little bit, and I choose a time to visit my co-workers and observe what they’re doing.  And this is self-care to me.  Because you work by yourself, all the time.  And I know that I’m very good at doing it, but because you teach and you go to the studio, you’re always concentrated on what you’re doing.  But someone very close to you could be doing something amazing too, a really big deal, and you may not really have a chance to explore that unless you take the time to go observe them.  And so you go and meet the person, and watch them teach, and then you get to introduce yourself to this other Teaching Artist as well.  I usually go for three or four classes to observe, a whole day.  So I simply relax and watch how the other artist communicates with children, how they create air in the classroom.  That may not be a very particular thing, but I enjoy being there as a student as well.  Because that’s something you don’t usually get.  And then you get paid your fifty dollars for a day of observation.

How do you think the organizations you’ve worked for could improve their support for self-care of their Teaching Artists?

At some point, Marquis Studios switched all of us from 1099 workers to W-2s.  And I guess that is one good thing.  I guess.  I think for social security, now they’re paying half of it.  And when you’re freelance, you can deduct more from your income taxes, but I still have my own business in addition to teaching, so I can still take advantage of that as well.  You have to learn all of the financial things.  What I’m facing now is I’m fifty-four years old.  And I’m learning that physically I might have pain, or I don’t see well now without glasses.  And sometimes I cannot remember many things.  And really this is happening to me, this realization of my aging, this year for the first time.  And I don’t think it’s going to get better.  I can’t go back.  So, I’m not sure how things work.  But I also hear from other Teaching Artists how they’re starting to think about making retirement work.  And Teaching Artistry is a new business, so we don’t hear much from the generation that came before us about how they made retirement work.

So you’re looking for more connection to other Teaching Artists who are in your age group…

When I talk to colleagues who are a little older, and they don’t say much, but I know they are worried about this next step.  What does retirement look like for a Teaching Artist?  And I’m an immigrant, and my husband is Japanese, too.  So we know we’re at a disadvantage.  And now that Marquis Studios has all of us on as W-2 labor, I’ve started to get those letters telling me how much Social Security I’ll be getting when I retire.  So maybe if I could get more of an education about what these letters mean, how Social Security works, maybe…I’m not that good with money.  (Laughter.)  And we’re first generation immigrants.  I know we’re not getting anything from Japan.  So getting Social Security from this country is everything.  So I opened an I.R.A. some time ago.  And I know I have a lot less in there than many other people, but I’m doing what I can.

Something is better than nothing.

If you think too much about this stuff, you can be sick.

If organizations offered a workshop about planning for retirement, that might be helpful, to a whole bunch of Teaching Artists.  And not just to Teaching Artists who are closer to retirement, but to all of us, right?

And I might not feel comfortable if I were in a retirement-saving workshop with people in very different kinds of business, but if I’m in a workshop with similar workers, other Teaching Artists, I would feel more comfortable. If there were a workshop about retirement for Teaching Artists offered to me, I definitely would be there.

It’s such a huge self-care issue!  So, what creative projects of your own are you working on right now?

For the last two years, I’ve been trying to apply for grants for projects, but I haven’t been successful.  And writing is a big weakness for me.  But I thought, I can do something!  So, two years ago, I started selling my art on the street.  And I’ve been documenting stuff, things that are thrown away on the street.  Especially chewing gum.

Yes, I remember seeing your chewing gum work!  I loved that!

And now band-aids also.  And the chewing gum, any shape of hardened chewing gum stuck on the street, and I document it with my cell phone camera.  Especially when my son was younger, it was very difficult to find a time to focus on art-making.  But I thought, if I can make art now, while I’m pushing the stroller or walking around with my son on playgrounds…I know I have a good camera in my cell phone, maybe I can take photos of what I see there.  And it’s disgusting, I know.  (Laughter.)  But I’m using what I have.  And I want to start to print these photos on material, bags, T-shirts, usable art.  And I’m an immigrant.  That’s not always elegant. So this is my art. The way other artists write grants and get money, that didn’t work for me.  Or it hasn’t worked for me yet.  I’m still doing it, but I thought maybe I can sell my work as usable art.  I’m also working to open my own on-line store.  I am not a computer person.

You should send out a query to all the Teaching Artists at Marquis Studios and ask for some sort of skill share or trade, right?  So that if someone helps you to set up your on-line store, you’ll give them as many T-shirts with the gum and band-aids as they want.  Do a trade!

That’s right!  This is treasured information.

We need to help each other!  I know for myself, when I look at self-care, I think of how hugely resourceful we all are.  These communities of Teaching Artists do a lot of different things, so if there’s something that you need, you have all these things to give as well.  So it’s worth your time to ask for help, for a trade.  Because, in truth, we’re all sort of in the same boat, in terms of, we’re not making a lot of money, we’re all trying to balance a lot of different things.  You should ask!

I lost the person who was going to help me set it up, and then for the past two weeks, I keep going to the site thinking, maybe I can just do it.  And I’m almost ready.

I want to open it before the holiday season.  I’m putting pressure on myself.  This is my business!  And I’m still considering myself as a contemporary artist.  I am not considering myself a bag-maker.  No.  This is the tricky part.

Well, I think it’s such an interesting concept, because it’s calling attention to something that exists in modern society.  Our sidewalks are covered with gum.  Our sidewalks are covered with used bandages!  Right?  But then, there’s also beauty to be found in things that seem disgusting.

And many people may not see the beauty part…

But you do.  And to me, that’s a “fine art eye,” seeing beauty where others do not recognize it.

Those bandages were healing someone.  And then they fell down.  And I find them healing something else on the ground.  I wonder, what are you healing now?  I also take photos of condoms around on the street.  It’s a wonderful place for this sort of documentation in New York City!  Wonderful!  (Laughter.)

Yeah!  We’re trashy!  Our streets are dirty!  (Laughter.)  Let me ask you this…if you could change one thing about your life as a Teaching Artist, what would it be?

Oh…I don’t know.  What would it be for you?

Right now, I feel similar to you in thinking forward to retirement.  I’m forty-three and I’m thinking about the trajectory of my entire career, and I’m thinking about how I’m growing.  I guess I would like more opportunities to grow.  More support from the organizations I work for in terms of growing as an artist, growing as a Teaching Artist…having more agency in being able to say I have this relationship with this high school over here and what I’d really like to do now is…and I could propose a project.  Like there’s an international high school in Brooklyn I’ve worked with for many years, and I would love to collaborate with students on creating a web series about an international high school like theirs.  And it would be nice to have an idea and get the support to make it happen, as a residency project…and I understand there’s not a lot of money…

But so many things can be done at low cost.  You never know.

I think it is definitely a self-care thing that if you have an idea, or if you have something you want, or you have a need, or there’s something that’s stressing you out, as much communication about it that you can put out there…to other Teaching Artists, to your organizations, especially people that you really trust in those organizations.  Because, you know, some administrators are better caretakers than others, right?

Uh huh.  Definitely.  I’ve had some very hard times with organizations I work for.

We all have.  But continuing to dream and asking for help is…the two things at the same time, are really important.  But, I could use more organizational support.  In communicating about dreams and making them happen.

When Marquis Studios holds Professional Development sessions with all our co-workers, all the Teaching Artists, like I know I’m not very good at the computer stuff, the internet, so I want more workshops in stuff like that.  Like Photoshop.  I need it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah!

I’m trying to learn.  I don’t need to be a web designer.  I don’t want to be a designer.  But I need to use more tools…and I hope not to pay much to learn to use these new tools.  So I try to attend all of those workshops that Marquis Studios offers.  Especially for my generation, because we were not exposed to that kind of media early on…but still, I’m using it!

Are there any upcoming teaching or creative projects that you want to plug, to tell everyone to watch out for?  Either your own or of someone you know?

I’m teaching origami this cycle and during the last two cycles I’ll be teaching inclusion residencies, that bring together special education and general education students in one classroom for creative projects.

A District 75 school with a general education school?

Yes.  They are in the same building, the two separate schools.  But the residency puts students from the two different schools together in the same classroom and I’ll come to work with them, encouraging them to communicate using various visual arts tools.  This is the fourth year that I’ve done this kind of project, and that’s coming up.  From January on.  And that’s very interesting.  It can be difficult, two schools together.  But personally, I find it can also be very meaningful.  I want to do it.

Awesome, awesome.  And we should also all look out for your on-line store that’s going to be coming soon.

http://niizekihiromi.com/

I want one of your bags so I will be visiting your shop soon!  Thank you, Hiromi, this has been a wonderful conversation.

Thank you very much!

If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out the rest of the TAG Quarterly, here!

About the author: Kate Bell is a writer, theater maker, musician, and Teaching Artist in Brooklyn, NY. Kate seeks to understand the field of Teaching Artistry more deeply through her “I Interview Teaching Artists” series, which is featured in the TAG Quarterly, and on her blog: www.katebell.info.