The mission and evolution of Rupture
It has been a while since I wrote directly to you, and I wanted to take a minute to catch you up from a more personal perspective. First, thank you to everyone who has been following my journey since I started writing these newsletters back in 2007 as I embarked on my career in professional skiing. It is incredible, but true, that my life in PSIA (The Professional Ski Instructors of America) truly gave me the tools I would need to survive, thrive and persevere in difficult times. Rupture would not be standing today if it weren't for the training, discipline, love, friends and supporters I gained through my time in skiing. While I miss the slopes and the community very much, the spirit of my time in skiing lives on through Rupture.
Rupture, as many of you know, was founded during the pandemic as a response to a question one of my Tutors at the Royal College of Art posed to our Critical and Historical Studies class way back in October of 2020. He threw out a challenge, he said: "The art world is broken. It has become a commodity-driven asset class rather than a home for the generative. There is no force for the new, for nurturing or challenging artists; artists are not in charge of their destiny, are largely invisible unless they are owned by a huge corporate machine. This always becomes the case, and it is always overthrown during times of great crisis. It usually happens when artists come together to form a movement. This is one such time. This is an epoch. What are you going to do to change the art world? What does the art world need right now?"
I had no idea. And Rupture was born out of those questions, and continues to evolve in its mission to answer them. What we have found in our nearly five years of operations is that artists need patrons, art spaces need benefactors, artists need to create work in absolute solace and silence, artists need to lift their heads up and find non-hierarchical multi-disciplinary community to talk with in between disappearing down the deep well of Practice. And mostly, emerging artists need help understanding what Practice is, how to make one that is authentic to the person, how to stop valuing their work by how much it sells for, or if it sells, and how to stop seeking external validation before they can "start."
This is a very similar understanding to the one I came to when I was skiing. When my goal was to "get on the team" (Our PSIA National Alpine Team), I was focused on the goal, as opposed to my development. I had a hard time trusting myself, my skill set, and enjoying the process for a long time. About halfway through my quest, with the help of some incredibly talented industry veterans, I learned to worry less about whether I was good enough and focus more on the process. The result was that I grew into a stronger, more focused, less frenetic person. I became more sure, less apologetic. I found more joy and less struggle. And though I came down with a case of the cancers which kept me from my final shot at the Team in 2018, by that time, I had been hired as an Examiner for PSIA-RM, and had learned to trust my feet, in every way.
Here I want to give a hug and a shout-out to my mentors in the ski industry, especially Weems Westfeldt, who passed away in May last year. He kept me sane, grounded, and laughing even when things were confusing, scary and expensive. Mike Porter kept it real, gave his time endlessly, and never pulled punches. Megan and Katie Ertl showed me it could be done, taught me how to overcome obstacles I threw in my own way.
These are the lessons and impulses I brought to Rupture, which was a bare concrete pad, a ramshackle antiques warehouse with a leaky roof, no running water and no electricity when we took it on in the winter of 2020. That you have to fight for what you believe in, but you have to take that fight to yourself, with a sense of radical responsibility, as my friend Curt Cronin would say (who I met in Tom Crum's Magic of Skiing in Aspen, where I was lucky enough to be a coach for years and years.) That radical responsibility means turning to the mirror and asking over and over again where you are complicit, what can you reveal to yourself, how can you own it, grow through it.
And so, over the course of the years, Rupture has struggled and flourished, grown and contracted. We've tried this and that. We nearly lost the studio a half a dozen times. We actually put in back on the rental market once, only to be saved with two hours to the deadline by a private investor... one who I met when I was teaching skiing. Through these trials and errors, sticking doggedly to our ethos, mission and purpose, we have evolved into a home from home for artists who want to expand, question and develop their practice. This is the heart of the artistic life, this is our purpose and where we live.
Rupture operates at a loss, and our goal is to survive to continue our mission. Figuring out how to support artists while still paying our bills is one of the trickiest balancing acts I've been through. And I'm proud to say we've come to a place where we can see ourselves near to cash neutral by this coming fall, without compromising our ethos, our mission, or our movement.
