Art Problems
Episode 106: Going from “I Can’t Do This” to “I Can Do This” with Artist Maggie Hinders
06 Feb 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to the Art Problems Podcast, episode 106. I'm your host, Patti Johnson. This is the podcast where we talk about how to get more shows, grants, and residencies. And today on the show, we have NEPHRC member, Maggie Hinders. Maggie, welcome to the show.
Hi, it's great to be here.
Well, it's very great to see you here. Now, I invited you here this week because last week you talked about your experience in network and I wanted to have you on because I thought that that experience was just so nice for me to hear that it would be nice for other people to hear too. And I think what brought it on was the assessment.
Chapter 2: How did the Netvvrk Navigator assessment change Maggie's artistic journey?
For those of you just learning about it, it's a survey tool and report designed to help artists identify exactly where they are in their career. I just did a podcast talking about the assessment last week. So if listeners, you haven't heard it, I encourage you to go back and listen to it.
And Maggie, I wondered if you could talk about your experience with the assessment, because that's something that William Bajira and I have been working on for close to two years.
Well, I jumped at the chance to do the assessment and the navigator because it was a new kind of way of, approaching being a member. I'll backtrack a little bit and say mostly what I found I was Using was the community aspect of it. I was very into like the crit sessions and the over 55 group, which was, you know, a lot about like various people's problems.
In addition to like the actual technical stuff was the real pleasure of being connected to other artists in a deeper way than I've been able to do just in my community in real life. Right.
And I think like just for our listeners here, the Over 55 Collective is a small sort of subgroup that we have inside the Netflix membership for members who are over 55. And the Crick Group, I believe, is something that Chris Moss runs, and that is about getting feedback on your work. So there are a lot of different ways that you can engage in the community.
And it sounds like you're saying that the way that you use the Netflix membership primarily has been to connect with other artists.
Yeah, that's mainly what I did. And I had started through going through the curriculum and I frankly just got overwhelmed. I'm like, I don't think I was quite ready for all of that information because I had just retired from my job and started painting much more frequently than I had been. And I really didn't have my feet on the ground yet.
So, but when I saw the navigator, I thought, I think I'm ready for this now.
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Chapter 3: What role does community play in an artist's development?
And I looked at it and it immediately made sense to me.
So I want to explain to our listeners that we actually named the assessment. It's called the Network Navigator. And part of the reason we developed it was that while most artists have a lot of missing knowledge when it comes to career building, if you receive all of that information at once, it might be worse than not having it at all.
It's such an overwhelming experience that it can leave a person too shocked to move forward. So we didn't want that. The assessment was a way of organizing all of the information that I had inside my brain about building visibility in a way that didn't involve every single artist needing to watch a million videos to get that information. Because you should never have to watch a million videos.
You only need to watch what's relevant to you right now. So not only do artists need to know where they should focus their attention, when, but that's going to vary depending on where you're at in your career. And our assessment solves that problem.
Right. And what the initial assessment for the navigator did was it put all the ducks in a row. It just made it like, okay, here's where you are. And this is what will be helpful for you. And so start here. And it was just the clearest path, like the name says, but it was just the clearest path to the information I really needed.
And each time I did something, and I mean, I've done the survey and I started on the William Pohida workbook material. But each time I took a step like that, I had a better sense of where I was. And what the next thing would be to do.
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Chapter 4: How can artists effectively manage overwhelming information?
So it's so organizing and orderly. You know, I have a brain that really thinks in terms of a web. So it just doesn't pull out a thread easily and start following something. So to have that all laid out was just priceless for me. It just made the difference between I can't do this and I can do this.
Oh, that's fantastic. I mean, one of the things that's interesting to hear you say is that your brain is sort of a little bit like a web. I definitely relate to that. So I think that's one of the reasons it was challenged. But also like the graphic that the network navigator gives you in terms of the assessment actually does show up in the form of a web.
So when you, the picture, it's not like a straight linear line, even though the actual instructions are like, do this, do this, do this. So you know what order to do things in, I think. And one of the reasons that we wanted something that was a little bit more organic looking was that within an artist's career, a lot of times, like it's not a straight linear path always, right? Right.
And so we wanted something that kind of indicated where you might be and gave you a way to track your changes. Now, you also said that the Navigator gave you some insight as to what your future life and future tasks might be. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Sure. When I got the response, I looked through all of the levels of a person in the art world. And I'm in an emerging kind of situation.
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Chapter 5: What insights does the Navigator provide about career levels in art?
But as I looked at the more proficient and the mastery levels, I thought, look at that. Now, those are those people's lives. Do I want that? If I got it, would I be happy with it? So it was really interesting to kind of see that outline of how life in the art world works. It just gave me an idea of what the end result of the work that I'm doing now might be.
And I got to understand a little bit more about that because I just assumed I would be doing what I'm doing with a little more money and more time at showers. That's not necessarily how it is. And that was really interesting.
Yeah. So yeah, there are different levels. And what your life looks like does look a little different at those different levels. And I think it's useful to understand what they look like. There's sort of two components to this that you're talking about. One is just the level that you are assigned based on
the scores that you give yourself, and score is probably the wrong word for it, maybe like rating or numbers or whatever, but basically when you go through and you take the navigator survey, what happens is you're asked to which statement in each section is the one that you identify with most. So it's easier to talk about both where you are and where you want to go.
Yeah. That was really, I really important to me just to understand what path you might want to, I might want to do.
And did you feel like you, did you feel like you knew what path you wanted to take or did you feel like you were just more aware of the past and like maybe better able to make a decision when you needed to?
it's more like that I'm more like better being better able to decide what to do and as I went along more like I'm not less like I'm shooting for something at a certain particular level I'm more like well I know what it's going to look like when I get there so I'll have a little bit of a I can anticipate like yeah yeah whether that's going to suit me or not
Yeah. That seems so important to be honest. Like you really want to know like whether the thing you're doing is even the thing that you want, you know, like these are sort of fundamentals. And we, I think often we assume that the thing that we're striving for is the thing that we're doing that because we want it.
But if we don't know what that thing actually looks like, we can get there and be like, Oh,
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Chapter 6: Why is developing an artistic narrative important for artists?
While it would be great to make money, I don't need to. I can survive on what I've got. It would be nice to do more than survive, but the pressure to do things and earn money is a little different. It does change what you think you have to do
in with your artwork to to succeed in a marketplace so you feel like it's a little less like I don't know maybe urgent or something because you don't have a you don't have a financial reliance on it yeah and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing I can't tell you it might be better to be more hungry
Well, I think it depends on your goals, right? Like if your goals, and I think that this is part of what we're talking about, right? Like the goal for all of us is not necessarily, I want to get into the Whitney Biennial. I want to make a living off my art, like all these things. The goal may simply be, I want to be the best artist I can be.
Yeah.
And what does that look like for me? You know, what gives me the most fulfillment? And that's really what we try to give guidance on because it should look different for everyone.
And that's another thing, like some of the prompts really gave me the direction to go look for that, okay, this word or this thing describes what I'm trying to do. And it just put me into a kind of a pool of thought that helped to kind of tease out what my work is really about. so that I can tell the story.
The part of telling the story about my work and that how important that is, is something I usually or previously always rejected. I'm like, my art doesn't need a story. It stands on its own. If you can't understand it, then it's not for you.
But I really got a lot more of a sense of the value of being able to tell someone else in words what I'm doing and how that is another way to include them in my thought process or to just communicate. And crossing that barrier for me from nonverbal to verbal is one of the big helps that I got out of just doing some of the exercises and listening to the modules on the positions.
Yes. So I think for reference, I think what you're talking about here is the first section of the assessment. We talk about audience and we talk about narrative. And I think one of the things that's very interesting about the art world is that your artistic narrative or your career narrative is, those to me anyway, are not words that we hear all that often.
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Chapter 7: How does understanding your artistic narrative impact visibility?
We might hear the word artist statement or bio or something like that, but career narrative is something that's not commonly used, but it's actually really important. Because what the career narrative does is it allows you to identify your values. It allows you to identify bits and pieces of your narrative. that may be relevant to building your visibility as an artist.
And because we don't talk about these things, because we don't talk about what narrative means, I think it means that artists are often handicapped at developing that. Because we literally don't even have the language, the common language and professional practices to, you know, to identify what the problem is. So that's part of, I think, like what that's trying to solve.
And I think what's exciting to me is for you to have taken that and, you know, within a couple of days, like of that being released, you had already benefited from it.
Yeah. Yeah. It was very grounding. I like that word for it because it just did make me feel like, oh, okay, there's a world and I have a position in it. I know where I am. And I could find myself instead of just feeling like some kind of floating particle, you know, that didn't really have a home, you know, or belonging. So that was, yeah, that was just kind of miraculous. And I'm,
I think that's kind of where I am with it. Just to take something that's so amorphous, and because my work is abstract, so that's even amorphous.
Right.
And then to talk about it, you get into all kinds of weird language that sounds like spiritual and, you know, consciousness and all that shit.
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Chapter 8: What are practical steps artists can take to clarify their goals?
I don't know. It just doesn't sound like anything to people, you know.
Well, I do think that that is something too that's sort of specific to your particular practice, but also I think something that is part of the cultural moment that feels really relevant right now. There is a kind of interest in the spiritual, whatever that may mean. But pinning that down can be very difficult.
And it's very easy also to slip into language that it feels not aligned with the art world and more aligned with the wellness world. And so when we try to position the work, I think finding the words to do so is a real challenge. That's part of the challenge.
Inside the membership, there's a diagram and workbook that William Pohida developed that has like a triangle that identifies, you know, sort of different important points in the narrative and how you can flesh that out. So it kind of gives you a framework under which to build the language that you need.
Yeah, I started on that and I could see the potential for just filling out. It really does just make you think about yourself in multiple ways. In the William Pajero thing, there's the example of the person first. the craftsperson from Finley, Ohio. And as you sort of start putting more details into that description, you think, first of all, okay, it's a woodworker. He's out there in his garage.
And then first, then you find out it's a woman and she's a weaver and she's a former teacher. And they put all that together. And I start thinking, wait a minute, what if that was me? You're like, what if, because I'm from Ohio also, but what if- That was my life. How would I say what I was?
And it made me realize that what you tell people is when you're talking about your artwork and who you are, it's like just the little tip of the iceberg. And there's all this stuff underneath it that you can kind of be aware of and let it feed your final little bit that you tell people.
So I'm looking at that information now and trying to go through it and find out what of this really crystallizes my art thinking.
Yeah. You know, it's really I just find it so fascinating that the parts of the assessment that that really resonated for you are also happen to be the parts of the assessment that are sort of things that we are like I'm working on publicly now.
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