Infrastructure, Not Luck

For me, working in art was just a dream until I met my first mentor. That's the moment it stopped being an idea and became a life. Someone who was already living it took the time to usher me in. They shared the wins and the losses, and actually explained how money gets made in a creative career. Nobody had ever explained that to me before.

Before that, I was talented, I had grit, and I had a whole lot of "I'll figure it out as I go." In my early twenties, that meant living paycheck to paycheck. The 25th of the month would roll around and I hadn't made enough to cover rent, so I'd hustle up whatever gig I could find to get across that month's finish line. I always landed it. But landing it every single month, one month at a time, isn't a career. It's survival with good instincts. Nobody had trained me on how to make it sustainable, because nobody around me knew how either.

Twenty years later, working across institutional, commercial, and nonprofit settings, I've watched that same pattern play out in artist after artist. Talent, grit and hustle, with no structure underneath it. And I've come to believe the structure is the whole story.

The old formula was simple, because it was the only one anyone ever handed us. Get a studio. Get in front of the right collector. Get picked up by the right gallery. If that chain held, you had a career. If any link snapped, and it snapped constantly, you didn't.

I watched that formula fail people I cared about. Not because they weren't good enough. Because the entire structure of their support rested on one relationship at a time. A career built on a single point of contact is not a career. It's a bet. The same bet I was making every month in my twenties, just dressed up to look more permanent.

What actually works is far less romantic and far more durable. Not a benefactor. Not a single program. A structure, made of several things that only work because they're connected to each other.

The Ecosystem, Not the Program

Here's where I think the art world keeps getting it wrong: it looks for the next single fix. The next residency or grant, the next well-meaning collector or new gallery. Each one, on its own, is still just one point of failure with better branding.

What actually changes an artist's odds is when several kinds of support exist at once, in the same place, feeding each other. I've come to think of it as interlocking pieces. Remove any one, and the rest gets weaker, not just smaller.

Paid workforce development. Not a workshop about how to someday get paid. Actual paid work now: apprenticing beside a lead artist on a real commission, learning the trade the way trades have always been learned, with a paycheck attached to the learning. This is the piece that turns "emerging artist" from a permanent identity into a stage you move through.

Public art projects. A mural is not a lesser cousin of a gallery show. It's paid, visible work that exists the moment it's finished. No waiting for a collector's mood, no consignment, no maybe. A wall thousands of people pass every day builds a public track record a private sale never can.

Community engagement. The people who show up to a mural dedication, a night market, an open studio become an artist's actual audience, not a hypothetical one. That audience doesn't just admire the work. It buys it, commissions it, refers it, shows up again next year. You cannot manufacture that kind of trust with a press release. It has to be built in public, over years, with real people.

Large-scale community-based projects. A single mural changes a wall. A festival that shuts down a corridor and puts 150 artists in front of 10,000 people changes what an entire region believes is possible for the artists who live there. These projects create the public proof that convinces funders, civic partners, and the next collector that this ecosystem is worth investing in.

Subsidized residencies. Time and space. This is the piece that lets an artist do the work that isn't for sale yet: the work that eventually becomes the mural, the show, the body of work a museum notices. Without it, artists only ever have time to make what already sells. With it, they get to keep growing.

Equipment and materials access. A kiln. A large-format printer. A CNC router. The kind of fabrication tools no individual artist can justify owning, but that a shared facility can put within reach of dozens of them. I've watched artists turn down commissions they were fully capable of because they didn't have access to the equipment the work required. That's not a talent gap. That's a supply closet nobody built.

Contracts and legal literacy. Knowing what belongs in a commission agreement. Knowing how to protect the rights to your own image. Knowing the difference between a fair deal and a friendly-sounding one that isn't. I have watched artists sign away far more than they understood, simply because no one had ever sat down and explained what they were agreeing to.

Health and emergency stability. A broken hand. A studio fire. A medical bill that shows up the same month as rent. Artists working project to project rarely have an employer-sponsored safety net, and one bad month can undo years of otherwise steady work. An emergency fund and a real path to healthcare aren't extras. They're the difference between a setback and the end of a career.

Peer community and mentorship. Not a workshop. Just another working artist, a few years further down the road, willing to answer the question "how did you handle this." This is the piece I know best, because it's the one that changed my own life first. Isolation kills careers as reliably as any market downturn — quietly, over time, with no single moment you could point to and call the cause.

None of these nine pieces is optional if the goal is an artist still working, and still able to make a living from it, ten years from now. A residency without a pipeline into paid public work just produces a well-rested artist with no next step. A mural program without community engagement is decoration, not infrastructure. An artist with paid commissions and a subsidized studio can still lose everything to one bad contract or one uninsured medical bill. They are not nine separate programs that happen to share a building or org. They are one system, and the system is the point.

A studio, on its own, is just walls. It's a generous gift, but four walls and a door don't move a career forward by themselves. They never have. What moves a career forward is everything that happens because of the walls, not inside them: the commission that comes from being seen, the audience built through community engagement, the next opportunity that opens because someone made an introduction.

Space is where the work happens. The ecosystem is what turns that work into a career.

I've watched this click in real time, not in theory. In just this past year, I've seen a small collective of artists with genuinely different practices start sharing resources, hiring each other for the parts of a project outside their own skill set, mentoring each other through problems none of them had solved alone, and building a rhythm of learning together that no single workshop could replicate. Then I've watched that same group take what they built in the studio and carry it out into the world as a platform to share it, celebrate it, and leverage it into the next thing. Together, not alone.

That's the proof, and I hear it constantly, in almost the same words, from different people, in different years: I met so-and-so at your event last year and they've become one of my closest mentors. They hooked me up with my next paying gig. They introduced me to the collector who's now buying my work. Every time one of us has a project, we hire the other. I couldn't count how many times I've heard some version of that sentence. That repetition is the data. That's what an ecosystem actually produces.

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These days, I'm not the artist in the room. I'm the person trying to build the structure underneath the artists in the room, an ecosystem builder, if there's a title for it. And more than once, I've turned to other arts administrators I respect and asked the same question I used to ask my own mentor: how did you do this? How do I know I'm doing it right?

The honest answer, every time, is that there is no roadmap. We're making decisions off of values and belief, off of our own lived experience, off of paying close attention to how things are actually changing around us. A finger on the pulse, an ear to the ground. A lot of belief that we can do this better than it's been done before. Nobody handed any of us a blueprint for this. We're building it the same way the artists we serve build their careers -relationship by relationship, paying attention, adjusting as we go.

More and more artists I know are moving toward public art and murals, not as a fallback from "real" gallery careers, but as a deliberate, sustainable choice. That's not artists lowering their ambitions. That's artists, and the organizations built to support them, refusing to gamble an entire career on one kind of validation.

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Twenty years of this work has convinced me that recognition was never going to be the thing that saved anyone. Infrastructure is. And infrastructure, unlike recognition, can't be delivered by a single generous act. It has to be built as a system, with all its parts intact, or it isn't infrastructure at all.

None of it works as a single piece, chosen off a menu. All of it, together, is what artists actually mean now when they talk about "making it."

The old model asked an artist to find the one person who would say yes. The better model builds a system sturdy enough that no single no can end a career. And it only works if you build the whole thing, not the parts of it that are easiest to explain at a dinner table.

A Network, Not a Nucleus

The more I find myself in conversations across Los Angeles - rooms where culture is being mapped, funded, and discussed at scale - the more I understand why 11:11 has always been difficult to explain. For years, when people asked what we do, I would list it out. “Exhibitions, murals, events, youth programs, community building.” It was all true, but it never quite answered the question. Even people who had known us for years would pause when trying to describe us to someone else. Our board struggled to speak about us. We were referred to by the things we had produced, not by a clear understanding of why we existed. I could feel the gap every time.

I used to think that meant we needed better language. That if I could just tighten the pitch, land on the right phrasing, it would click. But what I’ve come to understand is that we weren’t struggling to explain our work. We were struggling to name the system we were building.

In 2021, Addy and I tried again to put words to it. We wrote that we were building a network of cultural oases - places that give artists the tools to create socially engaged, community-rooted work in public space. It felt right when we wrote it. It held everything we believed in. But when we shared it, it didn’t land. It felt too abstract, too expansive, too wordy. We had the language before we had enough proof.

Looking back, I can see that we had been building toward that idea long before we ever said it out loud.

In 2014, we were given access to a 2,200 square foot retail space on Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana. It had been sitting empty since it was developed. The local Chamber of Commerce and BID helped us secure it, but the terms were clear. We could be asked to leave at any moment. The goal was to find a paying tenant, and we were just filler. In the meantime, our supporters made a case that instead of letting the space sit lifeless, it could be activated. That art, music, and people might do more for the property than empty white walls ever could.

Our first show in the Tarzana Gallery was called Sudden Impact, and it lived up to its name. The space transformed immediately. We built a rhythm of monthly exhibitions, workshops, and packed openings. It became a place where people didn’t have to leave their own region to feel part of something larger and electric. We sold artwork. We built relationships. We watched a space that had never held life suddenly full of it and necessary.

We stayed for a year. Then we were asked to leave. A Verizon store was moving in.

It broke my heart more than I expected. Not because it was surprising - we had always known it was temporary - but because we had seen, very clearly, what happens when a space like that is allowed to exist. What we built was real. It just wasn’t protected. The Verizon store lasted maybe a year or two. Then it went back to sitting empty again.

That experience stayed with me. Not as a failure, but as a glimpse of something incomplete.

A few years later, we saw that same energy at a completely different scale. In 2017, during the second year of Reseda Rising Art & Music Festival, everything clicked. We shut down a quarter mile of Sherman Way - one of the largest corridors in the Valley. According to LAPD estimates, 12,000 people showed up for a one-night event. Two live music stages, a beer garden featuring seven Valley breweries, over 150 local artists, and organizations from across the Valley showing up with intention. At one point, Addy and I just stood there hugging each other, with tears running down our faces. We had spent years building toward something like that without knowing if it would ever fully materialize. And there it was.

What struck me then, and even more so now, is that none of that energy was imported. It didn’t come from somewhere else. It had always been here. What we created were the conditions for it to be visible all at once.

That realization connects directly to something I named in my last piece. In a region as vast as the San Fernando Valley, cultural capital does not naturally convene into a single downtown or centralized district. It exists in the margins. In garages, backyards, homes, classrooms, temporary spaces, and informal networks. It is dispersed across distance and daily life. Which means that if we want it to be visible, if we want it to compound, it cannot rely on proximity alone. It has to be connected.

That is what we meant when we named “a network of cultural oases.”

A cultural oasis is not just a building or a program. It is a place where the conditions exist for creativity to take root close to home. Where an artist has space to work, where community can gather without needing to leave their neighborhood, where ideas can be tested, shared, and expanded in real time. It is defined by access, consistency, and the ability to return. For us, one oasis created a moment. A network of them creates infrastructure.

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I met Shannon Currie Holmes in 2012. I was in my mid 20s, right after I moved into a tiny, dark apartment in the newly forming NoHo Arts District. It was walking distance to the Metro, a few bars, some scrappy venues, and one gallery. I walked in once, met her, and then just kept coming back. I was that eager curator-to-be who found something that made sense and refused to let go of it. Shannon and I quickly fell into platonic love.

Shannon owned Cella Gallery, focused on the New Contemporary movement. She had been building satellite galleries for years, activating underutilized properties as a way to support artists and contribute to community revitalization. We realized that one of the spaces she had activated was in the same building where we had started the Canoga Park Art Walk in 2010. We had both been drawn to the same empty property, for the same art activation concept, years apart, without ever knowing the other existed. It was a shocking coincidence and it felt like proof that the need was bigger than any one of us.

She lent us her gallery to host Refuse to Destroy in 2012. I poured everything I had into curating that show. We packed the space. And she saw something in me before I fully saw it in myself. From there, she became a mentor, a sounding board, and incredible friend. Someone who believed in the work as it was still taking shape. I went from showing up at her gallery years before to becoming her assistant as she held the role of Exhibition Supervisor at Brand Library & Art Center. I watched how she built exhibitions with the same care and intention inside an institution.

Years later, in 2025, I brought her on full time at 11:11. She stepped in as I was moving Third House from vision into buildout, helping carry it across the line into something real. And then, in the middle of a conversation that didn’t feel particularly monumental at the time, she said something simple: “What if we opened multiple Third Houses?” It wasn’t a new idea. It was a recognition.

Because in that moment, everything connected. The mission Addy and I wrote in 2021. The storefront in Tarzana. The energy of Reseda Rising. The years of building things that couldn’t last.

It was never about one space. It was always about a network.

In the summer of 2025, I opened Third House, a community-led art studio in Van Nuys. Self-funded, full of risk, matched with just as much belief that it was the right move. Within six months, it stabilized and moved into the black. Not because it is large or heavily resourced, but because it is aligned. A handful of resident working artists, one dedicated staff member, and a consistent rhythm. More importantly, it is not entirely ours to control. We create the framework. The community brings it to life.

On any given week, the space shifts depending on who walks through the door. A resident artist working through a mural commission design. A group of organizers mapping out their next public activation. Conversations that stretch longer than planned because people finally have somewhere to sit and think together. A small performance where someone tests something new in front of a room that feels safe enough to hold it. An exhibition organized by community members who need a place to tell a story that otherwise would not have been told.

It is not a venue in the traditional sense. It is not a program that begins and ends. It is a place where practice can take root and be shared.

That is the difference. That is the proof we didn’t have in 2021.

When I think about the next five years, I am not thinking about expansion in the way people often assume. I am thinking about continuity. About what happens if this doesn’t disappear. About what happens if there are more than one of these spaces, positioned across the Valley in a way that reflects how people actually live here. Spaces that are close enough to home to be used regularly, and connected through shared programming, shared artists, and shared intention.

A network of these spaces is not an abstract idea. It is the continuation of what we have always believed. When artists have the time and space to create, to collaborate, to stay in conversation with their communities, they don’t just produce work. They lead. They imagine different ways of living and being together, and they make those possibilities visible. When we build systems that support that work, the impact extends far beyond the walls of any one space. It reaches into neighborhoods, into public life, into the ways we understand each other. And in a region as vast and dispersed as the San Fernando Valley, one space is not enough to hold that potential. It has to be shared, multiplied, and connected.

If this vision resonates, you can help us build more spaces like this by supporting the work here.

Through Sherman Way

Written by:

Erin Stone, 11:11 Projects

Co-Founder/Executive Director

We used to flip a plastic trash can lid upside down, sit inside it, and push each other down the hill. It was a moderately steep residential street. Burning plastic under our legs. No supervision. Just gravity and asphalt.

From my house you could just see more houses. Stucco and driveways repeating themselves block after block. I grew up across from an elementary school, and that campus was my entire geography. As a kid, I played handball against its walls and skated in the parking lot. As a teenager, I snuck out climb the roof, and watch the streetlights hum over rooftops that all looked the same. One afternoon my dog escaped and barked outside my classroom door. Home and public space overlapped.

“Biking distance” in the Valley meant something different than it did elsewhere. It meant crossing major thoroughfares. It meant weaving through dense traffic. It meant Sherman Way.

I was never interested in the mall version of the Valley. The fluorescent caricature exported in the 1980s — the Valley Girl as shorthand for superficial suburbia. You couldn’t escape the strip malls. The malls were a center point. It structured the map whether you liked it or not. But instead of going inside, we drifted to the abandoned mini golf course behind it.

We sat on cracked concrete where the fake waterfalls no longer ran. We climbed over barriers that were meant to keep us out. We made something out of the margins of what was built for consumption. The mall was there. We just chose the edges. We were inventive and restless.

Long before subdivisions and arterial roads, this land was home to the Tongva and Fernandeño Tataviam peoples. It was a network of thriving villages connected through seasonal waterways, oak woodlands, and trade routes that tied the region into a broader Southern California system.

In 1797, Spain established Mission San Fernando Rey de España, reorganizing the land under colonial agriculture. It later shifted through the Mexican ranch era into American private ownership. In the early 20th century, the Los Angeles Aqueduct enabled annexation; access to water bound the Valley to the growing city of LA. After World War II, housing policy, freeways, and aerospace industry expansion transformed it into one of the nation’s largest suburban regions- planned primarily for residence and movement, not congregation. Places built this way do not automatically generate visibility. They generate neighborhoods.

Growing up, I didn’t know this history as deeply. I knew that when people wanted to participate in something visible and electric, they went “over the hill.” In the early 2000s, when I started making art, that pattern became impossible to ignore. In 2008, Addy and I went to a warehouse show in LA where I exhibited work and friends’ bands were playing. At some point we looked around and realized how many of us were from the Valley — the musicians, the organizers, the audience. We had all traveled away from home to be part of something that didn’t seem to exist where we lived. But it did.

The San Fernando Valley holds nearly two million residents. Entire neighborhoods here are larger than some American cities. And yet, we introduce ourselves to non-Angelenos as “LA-based.” Rarely “San Fernando Valley.” Over the last 20 years of doing this work, I’ve had the privilege of stepping back far enough to understand that this is not about a lack of talent. It’s about structure.

Art in the Valley is not absent. It’s decentralized.

It’s in garages and backyards. In storage units where bands rehearse. In immigrant households layering tradition and adaptation. It doesn’t announce itself through tightly packed arts corridors because the region wasn’t designed for clustering in that way. It’s dispersed and in the margins.

Funding models often favor compact districts with clear boundaries. Cultural tourism follows walkable nodes and transit lines. Investment compounds where visibility already exists. The Valley’s scale and layout operate differently. Our neighborhoods are expansive. Our corridors are long. Movement here has historically depended on cars and distance.

That doesn’t make the region culturally empty. It makes it harder to see. As a teenager riding through Sherman Way traffic, I felt like we were constantly searching for something to plug into. Now I understand that feeling differently.

If artists left to build careers elsewhere, it’s because recognition accumulated in other parts of the city. “Los Angeles” carried more weight than “San Fernando Valley,” because cultural capital tends to gather where institutions, media, and philanthropy are already concentrated. For years, I watched artists from the Valley cross the hill for opportunity, for visibility, for legitimacy. I did it myself. That migration made sense. The infrastructure we needed existed there.

But the landscape is shifting. As the city grows more expensive and centralized districts become less accessible, more artists are staying in- or returning to- the Valley. Not as a fallback. As a practical and creative choice.

This is the moment that matters. The ingenuity has always been here. What hasn’t always been here are the systems that allow it to anchor.

The work now is not to rebrand the Valley or compete with downtown. It is to build connective tissue for what already exists- across long corridors, across neighborhoods that function like small cities, across communities that have been making culture without formal scaffolding for decades.

I grew up riding through traffic looking for somewhere to belong. Now I’m committed to helping build the kind of infrastructure that makes belonging visible- here.

If this is a moment of possibility, then clarity matters. A meaningful cultural presence in the San Fernando Valley will not emerge organically from momentum alone. It requires deliberate structure:

1. Permanent, artist-controlled space. Short-term pop-ups generate energy. Long-term real estate builds ecosystems. The Valley needs secured cultural hubs: owned or protected spaces where artists can work, exhibit, gather, and remain without displacement cycles resetting progress every five years.

2. Distributed infrastructure, not one arts district. Because the Valley is geographically expansive, tt requires multiple nodes connected through programming, transportation partnerships, and coordinated calendars — a network rather than a nucleus.

3. Funding models that recognize scale. Traditional grant frameworks favor compact, walkable districts. Valley-based cultural investment must account for our distance, car-dependency, and decentralized visibility. Metrics should include regional reach, school-based engagement, and corridor-based public art — not just foot traffic density.

4. Professional pathways that anchor artists locally. Residencies, apprenticeships, public art commissions, teaching opportunities, and paid administrative roles must exist here. When artists can build full careers in the Valley, cultural capital compounds locally.

5. Civic alignment that treats culture as infrastructure.Public art, creative workforce development, and artist-led programming should be integrated into economic development plans, transit corridors, and neighborhood revitalization strategies. Culture should not be an afterthought added once construction is complete; it should shape planning from the beginning.

6. A shared narrative.Visibility compounds where identity is claimed. The Valley needs artists, institutions, and residents who name where they are. Not as a subdivision of somewhere else, but as a cultural region in its own right.

7. Regional recognition proportional to reality.The San Fernando Valley is larger in square miles than the rest of the City of Los Angeles and holds roughly half of its population. It is not peripheral geography. It is half the city.

As Los Angeles prepares for the World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, systems are being built to move visitors through venue corridors and into surrounding neighborhoods. Sepulveda Basin will host events. It sits at the 405 gateway at the threshold between the Valley and the rest of the city.

If the Valley is treated only as a venue site or pass-through zone, the pattern repeats.

If it is recognized as a co-equal cultural region with mapped arts destinations, coordinated programming, and investment along transit corridors, the moment becomes catalytic. Otherwise, we are left with hundreds of thousands of displaced locals who make up over 2 million visits to the Sepulveda Basin per year.

Visibility follows infrastructure. Infrastructure follows recognition. The Valley must be planned as part of the whole, not adjacent to it.

None of this is theoretical. It is structural.

The Valley does not lack creativity. It lacks alignment, permanence, and reinforcement.

And those are solvable problems.