“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. 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. INTRODUCTION     When I was a kid growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, I took an art class taught by Lonnie Holley. At the time, he went by the name “the Sandman,” after the sandstone-like material that inspired his first artworks and into which he carved faces, figures, and forms. Holley was like no one I’d ever met. Warm, wise, wildly imaginative, rings on nearly all of his fingers, and driven to make in a way I’d never witnessed before. Best of all, he took us young people seriously.   Holley presented us each with a block of sandstone and challenged us to carve something from it. We knew what his work looked like and not much else, but we set about our task with gusto, filing away our blocks until we were happy enough with what we made. The idea was not for us all to become artists like Holley, or to make sculptures that looked just like his. It was to try on a way of working for a while, to gain a momentary glimpse into the materials and ideas that inspire him to make art.   I haven’t carved sandstone since, but the experience stayed with me. Holley expanded my world. He showed us his singular way of looking at our shared surroundings and finding potential in the most humble bits of material. This was the first of what would be many interactions with artists in my life, each of whom showed me there were vastly different ways of perceiving the world and manipulating the physical stuff around us. As I went on to make my own art and hack a path toward a career in art history and curating, I treasured each moment when an artist shared their time and perspective.   It didn’t take long to see that not everyone felt this way. “Artsy,” I learned, was a dismissive term. Found-object sculptures like the ones Holley made were “junk.” People who tried to sell these things were “scam artists.” If the art was minimal or abstract, well then, “I could do that.” This world of people and things that was so precious to me, was “pretentious” to many others. But I understood why they felt that way. By the time I became a curator in an art museum, I’d seen plenty of the money-fueled art world that gives all art a bad rap. I wanted to do what I could to bridge what seemed like an enormous divide between the art world I knew and the one most people encounter when they visit a museum or gallery. Writing wall labels and organizing exhibitions from within those museums and galle