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Welcome to Your Art Is A Spell, the podcast that ignites inspiring and transformative conversations about art as a magical practice. I'm your host, Edgar Fabián Frías—a multi-passionate artist, witch, therapist, and proud mutant shape-shifter. My art spells have reached audiences through social media, billboards, and skyscrapers and have even been placed on the surface of the moon! Join us as we explore how reclaiming your unique artistic voice and embracing bold creativity can transform your life and the world around you. Subscribe to the podcast and sign up for our newsletter at www.yourartisaspell.com to stay connected!
If you've been feeling stuck in your practice,
under supported, creatively restless,
or quietly scared that the next level of your life
as an artist may never fully arrive, this episode
is for you. If part of you has ever wondered
whether artist residencies are only for more
established artists, better funded people, more
traditional artists, or people who seem to know
exactly what they're doing. This episode is also
for you. A lot of artists are carrying the same
private fears. Maybe my work is too weird, too
interdisiplinary, too inconsistent, too spiritual,
too underdeveloped, too underfunded. Maybe it's
too late. Maybe I'm not ready. Maybe I don't even
belong in those spaces. And what I want to offer
you today in this episode of Your Art is a Spell
is not just a travel diary or an art world flex. I
want to offer you a map. Over the last few months,
I've moved through Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, and New
York in ways that deeply changed my art practice,
my sense of possibility, and the way I understand
what residencies can actually do in a life. I came
back from that experience with more clarity, more
authority, and more proof that these containers
can genuinely rearrange what feels possible for
artists. So, in this episode, I want to walk
you through why artists residencies matter, how
they can transform you, what has changed for me
through them over time, what was hard about this
recent artist residency, and why I still believe
they can change your life, too. And if by the end
you realize you want more support around artist
residencies, artist statements, applications, and
building an unconventional creative life. I'm also
creating a new home for that support through
Mutant Magic, my new ghost-based newsletter and
membership space. There will be a link here in the
show notes or in the description of this video.
And if you're already on my mailing list,
you're in luck because I'll be bringing
you over automatically and adding you to the free
tier, which is called Mutant Dispatches. [music]
If you've been craving a bigger life for your art,
but you're not sure how people actually get there,
I want to tell you something that has fully
transformed my own experience of being an
artist over and over again. artist residencies.
Not because they make you more legitimate,
not because they magically solve everything, but
because they can pull you out of survival mode,
out of repetition, out of the tiny frame your
life may have been squeezed into and place you
inside a different reality where your art gets
to become the center again. And if you've ever
thought that sounds amazing, but I don't
even know where to start. Or maybe that's
for other kinds of artists, not me. I made
this episode for you. Before we go deeper,
I want to ground us in something simple. An artist
residency is a container that gives you the time,
space, and some sort of support to focus on your
work in a place that it is not your everyday life.
Sometimes that means housing and a
studio. Sometimes it includes a stipend,
even travel support, research access,
institutional connections, or a cohort of
other artists. Sometimes it's rural and quiet, and
sometimes it's urban and intense. But at the core,
a residency says for this period of time, your
art gets to be at the center of your life. And
if you're someone who has spent years trying to
make art in the leftovers of your life after work,
between obligations, while dreaming, while dealing
with burnout, money stress, caregiving, selfdoubt,
or just a basic exhaustion of being alive right
now, that kind of container can be so profound.
It's not a fantasy vacation. You're still
dealing with logistics, with uncertainty,
and with real life. But it's one of the few
structures in the art world that can give you
what so many artists are starving for, protected
time, distance from routine, and permission to
take your own work seriously. And sometimes
that permission changes everything. [music]
If you're listening to this or watching this on
YouTube, you might already be feeling that pull.
Maybe you've been feeling stuck in your artist
practice. Maybe you're making work, but it's
happening in fragments, in the margins, in the
little bits of energy left over after everything
else. Maybe you've been wanting more seriousness,
more spaciousness, more support, more connection,
more proof that your life as an artist can
actually expand. Or maybe you're carrying a
quieter fear that you want too much, that it's a
delusion to want a creative life with more depth,
more travel, more recognition, more resources,
more room to breathe. I really want to name all
of this because a lot of artists, especially
the weird ones, the interdisiplinary ones,
the workingclass ones, the queer ones, the
neurodeivergent ones, the people who don't
fit neatly into the mold are not just navigating
logistics for us. We're navigating internalized
disbelief. the disbelief that your work could
really be held, that you could really be chosen,
that you could really belong in that bigger room.
And one of the reasons why artists residencies
matter so much is that they interrupt this
story, this disbelief. They create thresholds.
They [snorts] strip away distraction.
They connect you to new people, places,
and possibilities, and they begin to change how
you see yourself. There's something so powerful
about being given keys, a studio, a stipend,
a research appointment, a teaching invitation,
a plane ticket, a reason to be somewhere because
your artwork matters that much. That kind of
recognition doesn't just help you resume. It
recalibrates your self-concept. It moves you from
I hope I get to do this someday into I'm already
becoming the kind of artist who does this. [music]
I want to share a few earlier examples from my
own life because I think it helps to see how
residencies can create ripple effects over time.
One of the first major artist residencies that
really changed things for me was the Tulsa Artist
Fellowship. It was a two-year residency with a
stipend with housing and a studio space. That
structure gave me the stability to make work,
produce solo exhibitions, and apply to
graduate school. During that period,
I also applied to UC Berkeley's MFA art practice
program, and I got in. That mattered not just
because I made more work. It mattered because
the residency changed the material conditions
around my practice and because of that it
changed my future. Another important artist
residency was with the Coaxial Artist Foundation
in Los Angeles where I created a video work that
eventually ended up on the Salesforce tower
in San Francisco. I did this residency while
I was living in Berkeley and it resulted in
one of the biggest spaces my artwork has ever
been exhibited. And then there was the residency
with the Philosophical Research Society in Los
Angeles which led to a solo show that
Hyperallergic named as one of the top
10 exhibitions to see in the city that month.
Again, the residency created the container and
the effects kept unfolding beyond the official
dates of the residency. This is one of the most
important things I want you to hear. When you
apply to a residency, you're not just applying
for a temporary experience. You may be applying
for the chain reaction that follows it. [music]
So, now that I'm back in Los Angeles, I want
to bring you in to this most recent threemonth
stretch because it's one of the clearest examples
in my life of how an artist residency or a
fellowship can act like a portal. In a relatively
short period of time, I found myself moving
through Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, and New York. I
was invited to teach at an artist university. I
accessed sacred archives, participated in a ritual
near a river in Poland, and was flown out by a
major museum during Frieze week in New York. And
on the surface, yes, that sounds glamorous. But
beneath that, what was really happening was that
my practice was being stretched, complicated,
and initiated into a new level of depth. And I
also want to say this clearly, this portal opened
up at a moment when I was feeling stuck. On paper,
I had a lot of accomplishments, but internally,
I felt financially strained, creatively hungry,
and in need of a new relationship to my work. So,
if you're listening from a place of
frustration, numbness, or uncertainty,
I want you to know that being successful on paper
and still needing a portal is very real. [music]
In Berlin, I entered the fellowship with the
Akademie der Künste with a fairly specific
intention. I wanted to work with the Humboldt
Forum and its ethnological archives, especially
a collection of Wixárika artifacts, including
Nierika, portal-like objects that function as maps,
shields, and technologies of vision and world
building. I thought I knew the direction that
I was headed in. I expected something related
to communion, transmutation and connection,
things that already live in my work. But what
happened was heavier and stranger. Visiting
the archives began to affect me intensely. I
started to have nightmares. I felt drained,
sad, guilty. Being around sacred objects that
had been acquired under questionable conditions,
sometimes even looted, was not neutral. At
one point, museum staff members asked me
if I thought that these objects were alive or
dead. And I realized that by interacting with
them as technologies, I was participating in
a kind of reanimation that really changed my
work. Instead of staying only in a language
of healing, joy and transformation, I found
myself moving towards ghosts, hauntings, bogs,
zombies, still water, reanimacy, what is buried,?
what continues to emanate after violence is gone?
Berlin made me a much more complex artist because
it asked me to hold both healing and harm
in the same frame. And for anyone listening,
this is also part of what residencies can
do. They do not always give you a version
of yourself that you are expecting. Sometimes
they take you deeper. Sometimes they reveal the
Warsaw is swampy. It is ancient, maternal, thick
with history. By then I had begun to orient to
German enough to navigate in Berlin. So arriving
in Poland where I knew no Polish at all created
another layer of dislocation. Even the trip there
was uncomfortable. The train was hot. The windows
had been bolted shut and my body really felt the
strain of the transit. And then when we landed
in this completely different rhythm. River banks,
islands, between rivers, solstice rituals, foggy
meadows, animal sounds, local food, group cooking,
foraging, salt boats, long evenings outside,
shared time with other artists and curators.
It felt beautiful and eerie at the same time.
And what I realized was that artist residencies
don't just change your career, they can also
change your nervous system. New languages,
new weather, new rituals, new social dynamics,
all of that can interrupt default patterns and
make new emotional and creative states available.
That is one of the hidden gifts of displacement.
your body starts to pay attention differently.
And for artists, that shift in attention can
become a rich material to work with. [music]
And I want to go back to the middle of my artist
residency when I was invited to Vienna to teach
at the University of Applied Arts (dieAngewandte) in the
TransMediale Department. I was invited to
teach about my practices, divination, cartography,
indigenous futurisms. And in that classroom,
I felt something very important. Authority, not
performance, not a brittle need to impress. I
mean, the kind of authority that comes when your
work has matured enough that you can guide others
from inside of it. I designed a cartography
workshop where students mapped memories,
bodies, feelings, relationships, and
inner geographies. The room was alive.
This experience helped me really initiate into
another role. Not just artists, but teacher,
guide, witness, someone who can hold space
for other artists in their own becoming.
And if you're listening because you want a
bigger artistic life, that's another thing
residencies can do. They can widen not only your
opportunities, but your identity, your sense of
self. They can reveal roles you are ready for
before you fully know it yourself. [music]
Another
branch of this artist residency portal led
me to New York through the Museum of Moving
Image and their collaboration with the Tezos
Foundation. I was a part of an FA2 fellowship
where I learned about smart contracts and
NFTS as conceptual forms. I made a project,
applied for a small grant, won it, and then
found myself invited to New York during Frieze
week because the curator connected to the
museum was excited about the project I was
working on. This felt really surreal because
I had only visited New York for the first time
very recently in my 40s and quickly fell in love
with the city. I had told myself that I wanted to
return and suddenly I was being flown back from
Berlin to New York as an invited artist. Moving
through the Whitney Biennial, the New Museum and
a totally different sense of proximity to the
city. That is what I mean by timeline jumping.
Residencies and fellowships can place you inside
realities you never would have been able to
plan from your couch. A river ritual in Poland,
an archive in Berlin, a classroom in Vienna, an
art week in New York. Each context invites out
a slightly different self. And when you return
home, you have to integrate all of them. [music]
Now, stepping back from my own story, here's
what I think is actually happening underneath
all of these experiences. The first mechanism
is displacement. You leave your routines,
your mirrors, your usual roles, and your identity
loosens just enough for something new to emerge.
The second is uncertainty. Residencies often
place you in periods of not knowing. You may
not know why you're there yet, what the work
is becoming, whether you made the right choice,
or what all of it means. That uncertainty
can be deeply uncomfortable, but it is also
often where new material lives. The third is
entanglement. people, places, meals, archives,
landscapes, rituals, conversations, all of
it enters your imagination and continues
working on you long after the residency
ends. And the fourth is a cascade effect.
One residency leads to another opening
which leads to another invitation,
another connection which leads to another
version of you. This is one of the reasons
I care so much about supporting artists around
applications. Sometimes the application is not
just paperwork. It is a doorway to a chain of
events you cannot yet see. And that matters,
especially if you've been underestimating what
one brave application could set in motion. [music]
I also want to keep this honest because I don't
want to romanticize artist residencies in a way
that leaves people unprepared. There were
periods of loneliness. I missed my husband.
I missed my friends. I miss being able to
speak easily or being known or grounded
in a familiar context. I'm pretty introverted.
And although solitude can be generative for me,
there were moments when it felt confronting. There
were logistical and institutional challenges too.
delayed money, travel stress, missed connections,
program shifts, cultural misunderstandings,
parts of the experience I had to process mostly
on my own in my journal or with people that I
trusted. And energetically, the work with the
archives was heavy. Sitting with histories of
extraction and sacred dislocation had a cost.
I had to wrestle with what it means to enter
into those spaces, what it means to make work in
relation to them and how to do that ethically.
So no residencies are not just pure fantasy,
but I think that's part of why they matter.
They are real life intensified and even with
the complexity I would do it again. [music]
I'm speaking here to the artist that feels a
pull towards artist residencies but isn't sure
that they belong. The artist who has been told
that they're unrealistic. The artist whose work
is conceptual, interdisciplinary, digital,
spiritual, messy, experimental, or difficult
to categorize. The artist who worries that they
don't have the proper training, the proper polish,
the proper lineage, the proper kind of work.
I want to say clearly, you do not have to fit
a mold to be invited into transformative spaces.
What residencies can give you is not just a line
in your CV. They can give you a container where
your art gets to be the main character for once.
They can give you time to research, to experiment,
to wander, to follow those weird threads deepen
your process and experience yourself differently.
They can give you community, language, visibility,
new self-concept, and sometimes major external
shifts where your work goes next. If you've been
needing a sign, this may be the one. And this is
one of the reasons why I'm building Mutant Magic
because I know that there are so many artists,
weirdos, multi-passionates, and dreamers who are
trying to build real creative lives without a lot
of clear support, insider language, or sustainable
containers. They have a vision, but not always
access. They have talent, but not always guidance.
They have ambition, but not always a place where
their full complexity makes sense. Mutant Magic is
my new newsletter and membership space on Ghost,
which is a nonprofit and opensource platform.
There will be a free tier called mutant dispatches
where I'll share occasional updates, events,
workshops, and other offerings. And there
will also be paid tiers for people who want
deeper access to my process, behind the scenes
breakdowns, and more direct support around the
kinds of things that I'm talking about here.
Residencies, applications, statements, art
practice, and building a life that can actually
hold your work. So, if this episode is finding you
at the right moment, I'd love for you to join
me there. The link will be in the show notes,
if you're listening to this on a podcast or
in the description of the video on YouTube.
And if you're already on my existing mailing
list, you don't need to do anything. I'll be
moving you over to this new platform and adding
you to the free tier, mutant dispatches. [music]
If you take one thing from this episode, let it be
this. Your art deserves to have a container. Your
practice deserves more than whatever scraps
of time and energy, capitalism, exhaustion,
and self-doubt leave behind. And one of the most
tangible ways to create a container is to apply
to an artist residency. You do not need total
certainty before you begin. You do not need to
feel fully ready. You do not need to become more
of a conventional artist. You may just need one
aligned application, one deadline, one act of
belief that opens the next portal. So, here is
your next step. Before the end of this week, find
one residency that feels even slightly aligned and
put the deadline on your calendar. That's it. You
don't have to solve the whole application today.
Just mark the threshold. And if you want support,
come find me over at Mutant Magic. I'll be
sharing more there, including resources and deeper
reflections for artists trying to build bolder,
stranger, more supported lives and practices.
And if this episode has been supportive for you,
I would love to invite you to share this
with an artist friend. Leave me a thumbs up,
a comment, ask your questions, and also
leave us a review. It helps more artists
like yourselves hear these episodes. And so
for now, I just want to say that your art is
a spell and it will change your life and the
world around us. See you soon. Bye. [music]
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