Take 5 with Paul Bright

Paul Bright

Director of Art Galleries and Programming, Office of the Provost, at Wake Forest University

1. How do you define success for yourself? What has helped you to be successful?

I’m smiling. There’s a generous assumption in the question that I am “successful.” What a slippery term, like “leadership.” I was sort of a history nerd (among other nerdinesses) as a kid, and one of the things that struck me was that “losers” could become leaders, successful people, with a twist of the contextual dial. “Training” leaders doesn’t really work, in the same way you can’t really teach “creativity.” What you can provide are tools, ways of thinking from example or study—you can create an atmosphere where desirable qualities might manifest themselves. But you won’t know that it’s worked until you’re tested by circumstances.

Success depends on context, on your historical moment, on your personal situation (literally: where are you at a given moment), no small degree of luck or chance, and so forth. I know from the teaching and mentoring I’ve done that some of the things I impart to students don’t take hold or get reflected back until years after I’ve offered them, if at all. This will not show up in the holy metrics of the student evaluation. Some recipients need a signal, an event in their lives, time to have elapsed, to have my offering evoked, if it ever is. Of course it’s sometimes an offhand thing you’ve said or just something they’ve observed in you, which can make you self-conscious if you dwell on it. But often the most important things in life are not the ones you focus on or study directly or try so earnestly to impart; they’re the things that come at you obliquely and which you can’t control. You can only manage how you respond, when you are tested by life.

Extreme situations often elucidate what is happening in quieter or more normal, quotidian ways all the time. Think of how many cooks or mechanics or so-called “loser” 18 year-olds are displaying unanticipated levels of leadership and “success” in the ancient human saga of war in Ukraine, for example. And the cautionary tale is that their skills, so useful and essential now, may not always translate well outside of that horrible context. Their “success” may ebb and flow. By any measure, all of ours does.

Nobody works alone. I’m an artist as well, and I like my solitary studio time, but to have the work carried into the world, seen, and received takes lots of other engaged people, advocates, and institutions. I’ve “made” many exhibitions, both of my own work but also from that of others in my professional capacity—from original work and idea to fully formed exhibition—largely on my own, but even then you need to be offered space, you need an audience. You need others.

I’ve evaded your initial question because perhaps I don’t fully understand it. Is self-defined success accepted as “success” by the larger world? I think that can be answered by looking at where and to whom attention is paid. So you make your own measures, you build a keel for yourself. What are you doing to create an ethically defensible coherence in your life? Are you doing what you do for what you feel is its inherent rightness?. A tribe might be found that supports and resonates with what you do. It may even occasionally spread beyond that. But don’t lust after large audiences, because that idea of “society” and presentist conformity is unlikely to help you with creating that keel for your life and existence.

2. Think of a time that you faced a challenge, obstacle, or roadblock. How did you get through that and what did you learn?

So many challenges, and not always successfully surmounted. Again, it’s not always up to you; others have to agree that you should be supported in those situations, so even if you are “right,” without that support it may not matter. I have been offered advancement opportunities that were not fully supported, that were half-measures almost designed to fail because some thought they shouldn’t be offered at all. And I backed away from them in the ways I could, with a few others who helped me jump the hedge of that labyrinth. There is little chance for success in those instances, and lots of opportunity for great unhappiness. It may look to others like failure to not have achieved that “higher” level, but in reality you may have dodged a bullet. You don’t want to be “advanced” to a place, out on some creaking branch, where you are not really supported.

One of my great hopes when I was college-age was to eventually support myself with art-making. This was scaled back, pruned by reality (Iayoffs, life disruptions, not deciding soon enough to put more eggs in the life-as-artist basket, not creating the kind of work likely to achieve that goal), then reduced to hoping the work I made would at least support itself. And that itself was adjusted to just being able to find some time to actually make the work and have it shown on a fairly regular basis. So that’s where I am, after a series of strategic retreats. One advantage is that I can make the work I feel I need to make, without market pressures—which is no small freedom. What remained was the burn to keep making art as a response to the world.

3. Who are your people (either by name or role) who help you to be successful/confident/intentional/reflective/any other descriptor you want to use? And how have they helped you?

“My people” are pretty diverse: artists, professors, students, military officers, wine merchants, restaurateurs, immigrants, or their children, students – former and present, often makers and not just thinkers or academics, constructors and builders of things, observant people with intelligent hands. They have engaged me on different levels and in varying durations. They have all added something to my life and my understanding of it. One early role model of mine had been a logistics officer in WWII. Hated guns, but understood the immediate need to move them, other supplies and soldiers around Europe to eradicate a far larger problem. So his stance was ethical if complicated; it was a principled compromise for a greater good. It also demonstrated something I heard from a friend years ago and occasionally have had to re-learn: that a rigid, arbitrary consistency can leave you with only that, having achieved nothing else. I think it’s always good to ask what the larger purpose of your position serves, and if adhering steadfastly to smaller “consistencies” for their own sake is actually serving that larger (ethical) purpose.

Another example that’s served me well was that of a mentor who always said “you need to develop a philosophy,” which, in my understanding, meant that you need to find the ideas that underlie your work/life and that connect all of your activities as an artist/human. Imagine the artworks you make are mushrooms; your “philosophy” is the vast mycological web and structure, often unseen, that supports and gives rise to them, and which the visible caps feed with with their own life and demise. This is broadly applicable. What have you found to be durable and fundamental to your life, and what various things have emerged from that? How are they connected?

4. How did you find your people?

I really try not to have preconceptions; I try to encounter situations, experiences, and people initially without expectations. There will be time later to consider, form opinions and ideas, but initially I want to just pay attention. When I sit down across from a person the first thing I notice is that they are human, that we share a common, complicated condition. I hope I remain open to receiving as much from the person across from me as I tend to project onto them.

But people will find you as much as you find them. I still prefer the actual, unplanned, organic encounter, the intuitively correct connection over mutual interest or through a mutual friend, the shared meal or glass of wine.

5. What advice would you give to Wake Forest students as they look for their people?

This will not answer your question, really, except in the broader sense of what might be understood or examined in order to be receptive to “your people” when they arrive…so you have the presence of mind to recognize them.

Wake Forest students, and perhaps their generation more broadly, are often very process-and-goal oriented, sometimes as if preconceiving and proper planning can shortcut or replace certain kinds of necessary but unplanned experiences. This desire for a “recipe” to execute is perhaps understandable. Students of recent years have had their worldviews formed by 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, the Obama presidency, Trumpism, Covid-19, BLM, Me Too, the current instability of economies and the precarity of democracy, huge wealth disparity, social media conformities and oppressions, and now an erosion of rights. Every generation has its traumas, and the ones of the last 20 years or so have many students almost secretly hunkering down while maintaining a positive outward demeanor. It’s unconscionable not to be deeply concerned in our moment, at both the personal and “global” levels. It’s ok to reflect this.

Mostly, I would ask them to ask themselves what seem to be the hardest questions for them: What. Do. You. Really. Like? Outside of how you’ve been scheduled and programmed with busy-ness, how do you want to spend your time, your life? What really matters to you? Answering these questions honestly may put the student in conflict with parents—who are trying to justify the enormous cost of their humanities-glazed education as seen through a future-potential-earning-power lens—and peers, and certainly with elements of society. I would encourage students not to gloss over difficult things and their complicated responses to them, to not forsake informed candor for pleasantness, to question the roles of money and affluence, class and status in their lives and how they are so often a distorting factor. To understand that the tools and discipline and interests developed through study and experience as university students are a prelude, a basis for being an engaged human, a methodology if you must, for the rest of their lives, and hopefully not something just to complete or endure to get on the high-earner train.

As an old-ish person, I can see the void that students’ over-planned, over-scheduled, heavily-surveilled young lives has created. I would hope they—that all of us—could recalibrate, and understand that many of the issues they face (always-on, always-busy lives dictated by devices, for example) are not naturally occurring phenomena. These are the result of individual and collective choices. We can work to make other ones.

Is there anything else you would like to share?

Oh, I think that is probably enough! One could go on, of course…