What

Project Arts:365 (previously Project 25:365) is a network of artists from various disciplines embracing art as a way of being rather than a product-and-reward-driven endeavor by practicing daily artistic support and engagement throughout the year. I maintain a blog about the project as a whole that also includes my own work for the project and posts from other creators. I am directing this project in partnership with the Otherworldly Arts Collective at ALTR Gallery in Northeast Minneapolis, Minnesota. If you want to know more about me, please see the About page.

Why

Art in all of its forms is how human beings tell ourselves the story of our reality. Daily practices shape who we are, who we believe we can be, and what that means in relation to our stories. By engaging with art as a daily practice, we can embrace our agency in making our realities. By centering the deeply human practice of creating music, prose, paintings, or any other art, we can reclaim art as part of ourselves, rather than a product to be bartered for acceptance or admiration. While there may be a place for determining which art is bad and which is good, this is not that place.

For more information on the theories and philosophies informing this project, including the writings of Kant, Heidegger, Bandura, Foucault, and Kierkegaard, please see this page.

Who

Anyone. Really. Yes, that includes you.

People tend to have ingrained flinch responses to both pillars of this project: Calling themselves an artist and doing something every day.

Let’s address the first one first. The label (like all labels) exists only to serve the very narrow purpose of classification. You don’t have to hang your reality on the hook of this label. Call yourself what you will: A maker, a being, a creator, a dreamer, whatever. Call yourself nothing. The label “artist” is a narrative device in the stories we tell ourselves, nothing more. If it doesn’t serve you, let it go.

The second one second. There are a lot of things you do every day. I, for example, brush my teeth twice per day. Sometimes, I brush them as long as it takes for my smart toothbrush to make a smiley-face at me, which is the two minutes you’re supposed to spend brushing your teeth. Sometimes, I brush them so fast the devil toothbrush actually frowns at me in disapproval. If you are a human and are alive right now, you spend at least 30 minutes (but in actuality an average of 6 hours) every day staring at your little, medium, or big screens for entertainment and work. If you approach this project the way I approach brushing my teeth (sometimes you give it your all, sometimes you give all you can stand) and take a tiny sliver out of your other activities, you can find two minutes every day to bang on a drum, write a pun, or take a picture of a dog.

How

The first thing you have to do is decide what you want to work on for Arts:365. It doesn’t have to be baroque; it can be as simple as you like. After you’ve thought for a bit and determined you want to, for example, paint a portrait of one worm per day for the entire year, you can take the following steps:

1. Decide if and how you’d like to host your work. While this page is a hub, you will be responsible for housing all of your work. There are a number of free and simple options for hosting images, music, and video online. If you need guidance on how to set up one of these accounts, please see this page. If you’d like to keep your work offline because the internet is dead, the bots frighten you, or you loathe social media and website design (more sympathetic I could not be), please know you do not need to have an online presence to participate. You can also join the Discord to hangout with members of the project without the nuisance of additional bullshit (though we are known to participate in bullshit of our own making).

2. Filling out the form to join the Project is a formality that you don’t have to engage in, but it will let me add you to the email list, if that’s a thing you’re interested in. If you have a question that you would like answered before submitting, please see the Contact page.

To stay connected to the project, we will have a number of quasi-official meetings throughout the year at ALTR Gallery and a number of distinctly anarchic, free-form meetings wherever we damn well please. During these meetings we’ll discuss our own work, how we can serve the arts community throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul, and how we would like to showcase the work from Arts:365. It is likely that we will also discuss existential despair, shrimp, and worms. The events calendar for the project and in-person ALTR events can be found here.

Participation in this project does not require perfection. When the project began in January of 2025, the idea was to work on something every day, but that turned out to be too stifling for a lot of people. In the coming years, we’re shifting our attention to working on our arts and supporting our fellow artists in the ways that feel best for us. If that means you do something every day, awesome. If it means you’ll try to attend one of the in-person meetings or possibly post one poem in a year, also awesome. The original project included a hub page with participants, but we’ve found that the Discord works best for keeping everyone connected. Bonus: there are lots of pictures of pets.

If you have any questions, you can take a look at the FAQ. If none of your questions are addressed there, please feel free to email me directly. I would like you to know I specialize in existentialism and phenomenology, so if your question is about how you can feel better about the world, don’t ask it; my answer will just make you cry.