The question: Why do artists need art? More importantly, how's that going for them in real life?

For this project, we wanted to address our core value of community by asking the artists we serve to think about why they need art in their lives. Since No One Way aims to identify the needs of artists and create projects that address those needs, we thought it would be wise to do a little learning on the topic and gather some resources for future projects.

Let's put a bunch of artists in one room for a few hours, and let's take a stab at answering some pretty big questions. We anticipated that there might be a gap between the vision that each artist has of his or her ideal creative life and the reality of trying to pursue that vision and show up for it every day; it was that gap that interested us, and we wanted to give participants the chance to discuss the issue freely as a group. We also wanted everyone to weigh in on some of the issues facing artists in the current cultural climate — for that, we scheduled a selection of breakout sessions.

For the first of what would hopefully be many ARTSummits to come, it was important for us to target a large group of artists at once. For that, we faced east towards what has historically been Artist Mecca — New York City. We met in a rehearsal studio at the New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts, centrally located just north of Union Square. Matt Gabor and Judi Jeroslow of Shack Productions agreed to videotape the proceedings so we would have a permanent record of the conversation.