Four Ways to Cultivate Creative Resilience

THE GROOVE

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Resilience is a word that points at your capacity to recover. It is the individual effort you make to achieve good outcomes despite serious threats to adaptation.

If you are resilient, you often develop the quality of being creatively engaged with your surroundings. That is, the ability to take the good, the bad and the ugly and use it positively to create art, products, or services, find solutions to new problems, and above all, avoid the sensation of being stuck.

The active principle of creative resilience is to remain engaged even if you feel initially overwhelmed by fear, sadness, or anxiety.

I found four qualities that are consistently present in people who possess this trait. If you think about them, they aren’t so difficult to adopt.

Jacob Lawrence was the first African American artist who gained wide respect and recognition in the art world in the United States. He became extremely successful critically and commercially.

While alive, he represented the United States in the Venice Biennale, had large solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, The Seattle Art Museum and the Whitney Museum. The year after his death in 2001, he had a retrospective at the Phillips Collection that traveled to the Whitney, the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

But his path wasn’t rosy. Imagine the racial issues of 100 years ago. On top of that, in 1924 his mother put Lawrence and his two younger siblings into foster care in Philadelphia and moved to New York.

These events can cause traumatic distress in a child who could become part of the at-risk-youth in society. But not to a creative, resilient person like Lawrence. When he was 13, he and his siblings moved to New York to reunite with his mother. By his own account, moving to Harlem was the best thing that could have happened to him.

As soon as he arrived in New York, Lawrence, who was artistically inclined since his preschool years, met Augusta Savage, Charles Alston, and Norman Lewis -three key artistic figures in the Harlem Renaissance.

These mentors encouraged him to continue painting, even when he had dropped out of high school, gave him direction and praise, helped him find free arts programs and enrolled him in special projects that required people with his skills so that he could get paid.

Adding to the difficulties, this was 1929 and the Great Depression was starting to deplete people’s coffers around the world. Lawrence felt the effects of this time, yet he was resilient and surrounded by a community of people who believed in him. He in turn used everything that was happening around him as an opportunity to develop his talent.

When bad stuff happens, people tend to quit everything to dwell in misery. While it is normal to feel anxious in the face of uncertainty or to mourn a loss for a period of time, creative resilience calls for a more active stance.

In 1946, Lawrence was invited by Josef Albers to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Upon his return to New York, he grew depressed and in 1949, he checked himself into Hillside Hospital in Queens, where he remained for eleven months.

What did he do at the hospital? He painted every day and produced his Hospital Series, works that placed a focus on his subjects’ emotional states as an inpatient. Lawrence recovered from the experience and his career continued burgeoning. In fact, following his stay at the hospital, critics noted that Lawrence's work became more sophisticated and subtle with a more varied palette.

In 1968, he was teaching 21 hours a week at Pratt Institute, The New School and The Art Students League (that’s not counting the time spent preparing the lessons before and reviewing and grading assignments after) and that still did not affect his output of paintings that he continued producing, exhibiting, and selling like hot cakes.

Being grounded in doing the work allowed Lawrence to remain unstuck and flowing even when things seemed to go south or when there was so much on his plate, he could barely handle his commitments.

Regardless of what you do, if you are fueled by excellence and ambition, the desire to succeed grants you creative resilience when you experience a failure or encounter obstacles along the way.

You are here to feel that passion and desire and to allow that force to move you along the way.

That impulse is what motivated Rose Blumkin (known as “Mrs. B”), a Russian immigrant who lived in the worst conditions before she finally fled Belarus with her husband to the United States in 1917, eventually settling in Omaha, Nebraska in 1919.

After trying her luck with a couple of small clothing stores, she started her own furniture business with $500 she borrowed from a brother and opened her business in the basement of her husband’s shop in 1937.

Nothing was easy, but Blumkin was creative and resilient: she purchased goods and only made a 10% profit on them instead of doubling the prices like her competitors did. Soon enough, everyone was buying carpets, sofas and tables from her.

Regarding her business operations, she once said in her broken English: “Up to 1942, nobody would sell me nothing — the leading lines. I wasn’t good enough for them. And the banks never loan me a penny. So I was so smart, I outsmarted the bankers. Anything the manufacturers didn’t sell me, I went to different towns.”

What was one of her creative, resilient tactics? She asked her own customers to lend her money, because they knew her and trusted her.

She was driven by passion, not necessarily about home goods, but she was obsessed with the business itself. “I want to do all the business I can and get every customer I can. Business is like raising a child – you want a good one. A child needs a mother, and a business needs a boss… My hobby is figuring out how to advertise, how to undersell, how much hell to give my competitors.”

Blumkin grew the company to become the largest indoor furniture store in America.

This caught the attention of Warren Buffet. In 1983, Buffett purchased a 90% share of the Nebraska Furniture Mart for $60 million. To this day, he still praises her grit and resilience.

If you express gratitude for what you have, whether that is in a journal or out loud, consistently, and earnestly, you will experience creative resilience in abundance.

Both Lawrence and Blumkin had a refreshing sense of gratitude for the circumstances of their lives.

In a long conversation with art critic Carol Green, Lawrence expressed gratitude, more than once, to his mentors, patrons, Edith Halpern (the gallerist who put him on the map), his students and to the continued opportunity to teach.

As for Blumkin, she said, “the people who were born in this country don’t appreciate all these wonderful things, like those who [like me] came from out of the darkness. I love the United States since the day I came here.”

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