Art Above Everything: Book Signing and Q&A w/ Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Join us for an evening with acclaimed author Stephanie Elizondo Griest as she celebrates Art Above Everything, her new book exploring the choices, sacrifices, and rewards of the creative life. Griest will discuss the book and the questions that inspired it, followed by an audience Q&A and book signing. Whether you’re an artist yourself, trying to make room for creativity in an already-full life, or simply curious about the lives we build around the things we love, this promises to be a lively and thought-provoking conversation.

In Art Above Everything, Griest travels the world to meet women artists who have made their creative work central to their lives, asking big, complicated questions about ambition, love, family, money, freedom, and what we’re willing to give up for the work that matters most to us.

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 Ceaușescu’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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

STEPHANIE ELIZONDO GRIEST has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, Latina, and Travelers’ Tales. As a national correspondent for The Odyssey, an educational website for kids, she once drove forty-five thousand miles across America, documenting its history. She now runs an anticensorship activist organization called the Youth Free Expression Network out of New York City. Visit her website at www.aroundthebloc.com.