You Are an Artist: Assignments to Spark Creation Spiral-Bound | April 14, 2020

Sarah Urist Green

★★★★☆+ from 501 to 1,000 ratings

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“There are more than 50 creative prompts for the artist (or artist at heart) to explore. Take the title of this book as affirmation, and get started.” —Fast Company

More than 50 assignments, ideas, and prompts to expand your world and help you make outstanding new things to put into it


Curator Sarah Urist Green left her office in the basement of an art museum to travel and visit a diverse range of artists, asking them to share prompts that relate to their own ways of working. The result is You Are an Artist, a journey of creation through which you'll invent imaginary friends, sort books, declare a cause, construct a landscape, find your band, and become someone else (or at least try). Your challenge is to filter these assignments through the lens of your own experience and make art that reflects the world as you see it.

You don't have to know how to draw well, stretch a canvas, or mix a paint color that perfectly matches that of a mountain stream. This book is for anyone who wants to make art, regardless of experience level. The only materials you'll need are what you already have on hand or can source for free. Full of insights, techniques, and inspiration from art history, this book opens up the processes and practices of artists and proves that you, too, have what it takes to call yourself one.

You Are an Artist brings together more than 50 assignments gathered from some of the most innovative creators working today, including Sonya Clark, Michelle Grabner, The Guerrilla Girls, Fritz Haeg, Pablo Helguera, Nina Katchadourian, Toyin Ojih Odutola, J. Morgan Puett, Dread Scott, Alec Soth, Gillian Wearing, and many others.
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Original Binding: Hardcover Paper over boards
Pages: 256 pages
ISBN-10: 0143134094
Item Weight: 1.4 lbs
Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.9 x 9.4 inches
Customer Reviews: 4 out of 5 stars 501 to 1,000 ratings
Praise for You Are an Artist

“In her new book, You Are An Artist, [Green] hopes to take the elements of fear and decision-making out of art-making. . . . The projects, thankfully, can be done in isolation and shared virtually.”
—NPR.org

“There are more than 50 creative prompts for the artist (or artist at heart) to explore. Take the title of this book as affirmation, and get started.”
Fast Company
Sarah Urist Green is the creator, curator, and host of The Art Assignment, an educational video series produced in partnership with PBS Digital Studios that focuses on the creative process and the act of making. She is also the former curator of contemporary art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. She holds a master of arts in modern art history from Columbia University and a bachelor of arts from Northwestern University. She lives in Indianapolis with her husband, the author John Green, and their two children.