Blog / 2025 / Community-supported for 10 Years and Counting

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

It was 2015, and I was looking for the words for how to explain why I’d be asking you to send me monthly donations automatically through Patreon, a platform that, at the time, was brand new. I started out by talking about how terrible people are at asking for help in general.

“I think that most of us would just rather that the people in our lives somehow just sense that we need help and guess what exactly it is that we need and just give it to us without ever mentioning anything.”

And then I showed the making of this lion painting, which I called Protector, because I was asking people to protect my art by pledging to support me on a monthly basis. I was asking you all to be my protector.

And you have been.

For ten years now, you’ve helped me to carve out a space for my art. You’ve roared your approval for the work I do with your regular financial support. And that support changed everything for me. In the last decade, you’ve helped me make almost six hundred artworks.

Some of it has been in series, like Empathetic Magic, which is about the way we hide our differences from each other and how we celebrate them too. And then there was this group of portraits, called Friend Request, which I describe as my analog Facebook. The only way I could make this series was by leaving social media, and you were the ones who made that possible.

Some of the art you helped me make became books. In 2020 there was Baby Sees ABCs, which is both an alphabet book and a word search. And in 2024 there was Everything’s Fine, which was a series of paintings about mental health which became a coloring book as well as a free high school art lesson plan.

You also helped me make public art. The Doors of Make Room was a project commissioned by an affordable housing advocacy group that brought together a bunch of artists from across the country to make art in DC in 2018. And then there was the self-commissioned piece of public art that I made more recently, pasting bandaids and rainbows on a pedestrian bridge near my apartment to cover up the hateful vandalism that was carved into the wooden banisters.

Most especially, your support helped me keep my center when some of my political art was censored by a public library, and that censorship was featured in an article in Newsweek that contained errors about how things went down. There were moments in the months between when that article appeared and when the outlet finally published corrections that I thought I’d need to do something besides art to make my living, but your support brought me back to myself.

In the last ten years, my art has had lots of high profile adventures. It even appeared on two book covers, one released by the Oxford University Press and the other by Cornell University—and that one had my art in it too. My work was also part of a documentary shown on Belgian public television. The three days of filming for Queerying Nature were surreal and so affirming, both as an artist and as a genderqueer person, since the film is about how thoroughly queer our planet truly is.

Which brings me to this painting. It’s a remake of the Protector piece from 2015, in much larger obviously and also with a twist.

It’s called Protector(ess), with the E-S-S added in parentheses, and it’s a painting of a lioness because some lionesses have manes. They roar and mount other females while also mating with males. We’ve only fully confirmed the existence of maned lionesses more recently, but they’ve probably always been there, hidden by our limited ideas about gender.

It’s a pleasing kind of callback to remake this beautiful cat profile ten years into asking you to protect my art, and it’s why I decided to turn this painting into a special thank-you for Patreon supporters.

Your automatic donations—even the ones that are just a few dollars—combine with everyone else’s to make a powerful difference in my world. Together, you help make my life as an independent artist more stable by giving me a source of income that I can count on. Thank you.

If you’re not already one of my protectors, you can sign up at patreon dot com, slash G-W-E-N-N.