Meet queer, BIPOC, and women artists around the world as they discuss the gifts, costs, and redemptive power of pursuing a creative life
Is the all-encompassing quest to become a self-sustaining artist worth the sacrifices it often requires? Throughout her 20s and 30s, Stephanie Elizondo Griest could not help worrying if constantly prioritizing her writing over everything else—from postponing children to living nomadically to save on rent—was leading her to fulfillment or regret. After a break-up and serious health crisis in her early 40s, she decided to turn to other women artists for their perspectives on that perennial question: is art enough?
Art Above Everything introduces us to legendary writers, visual artists, dancers, and musicians across the globe, who talk intimately about their art, what it requires, what it gifts them, and what it costs them. Opening in a classical Indian dance village, Elizondo Griest goes on to meet 100+ artists in Rwanda, Romania, Qatar, Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, Cuba, and the United States. She discovers artists from Rwandan playwright Hope Azeda, who navigated ethnic tensions as she attempted to bring about reconciliation through theater in the aftermath of genocide; to Romanian painter Florica Prevenda, who got assigned to a provincial factory during Ceauşescu’s dictatorship but never relinquished her brushes.
Art is inheritance, dissent, devotion, revenge, celebration, and more. Yet though each artist’s relationship to their craft is different, their need to create in the face of economic hardship, misogyny, sexual violence, and family ostracization is wholly akin.
Bold and inspiring, Art Above Everything never pretends that the artist’s path is easy—but it illuminates the infinite ways we can wield creativity as a vitalizing force.
“This book is a must-read for every woman artist! It will affirm the decisions you have made, inspire you to get back to the page or the canvas or the studio, and clarify that you belong to a glorious and global lineage of creatives. In chapter after chapter, you will, as I did, travel around the world with Stephanie Elizondo Griest as she interviews ‘art monks’—women who have dedicated their entire lives to an art form. Her lucid and lyrical reportage, coupled with memoir, left me riveted and articulated for me the many ways that we navigate the ecstasies of making art and the practicalities of paying the rent. This is a book to devour and to give to your best friend!”
—Daisy Hernández, coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism
“Sensitive and gorgeously curious, Art Above Everything is a quest, a cascade of questions, and especially a celebration: of art, of lives dedicated to art, and of the difficult choices such dedication requires. This is required reading for anyone who is compelled to create.”
—Kirstin Valdez Quade, author of The Five Wounds
“Stephanie Elizondo Griest has travelled the world to give us Art Above Everything, and what a gorgeous gift it is, both a how-to for making art and a soul-steeling affirmation of this most essential human endeavor. In chapter after chapter, we encounter women whose stories and achievements testify to the miracle-producing power of grit, discipline, devotion, and sheer endurance, all told by an indomitable writer who has herself persevered through more than her share of challenges.”
—Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
“Griest’s rigorous and fascinating research both proves and enacts her book’s thesis: a life devoted to art is not only possible but a ringing answer to the powers that attempt to thwart such lives and work. A deep, moving, radical book that I want to press into the hands of every young artist.”
—Melissa Febos, author of The Dry Season and Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critic’s Circle Award in Criticism