The Beauty We Love
We celebrated five years of being in business in the best city in the world, in a sun-lit room, surrounded by community. Thanks for being with us, friends.
Field of Practice was incorporated as an LLC on February 1, 2021, after two months of moving and grooving to figure out a path forward from the chaos of 2020. Five years later, we’re still going strong. So we threw a party about it! It was a great reminder: community is everything. We are each other’s harvest.
Photos by Khalid Ibrahim
PARTY WITH PURPOSE
Mary Foyder once counseled us, during our first big project together, to lean into the slow season. Try to enjoy the change of pace, use the time to get creative, to check in on what’s working and what could use a little love, and prepare for the inevitable pick-up. With invoices slowing down last summer, we—maybe counterintuitively—took a chance and invested in ourselves.
We hired Lindsay McMenamin for the quarter to help us get our house in order. We created a powerful operations workbook, complete with quarterly and monthly projections tabs, a month-by-month project map, as well as expense and tax planning tools, so we could easily understand our financial health alongside our creative capacity. She helped us plan and redesign our website, with custom code sorcery from our long-time collaborator Nate Beaty. We developed a beautiful intro deck, rich with updated case studies and copy, and with Lindsay’s steadfast encouragement, sent it to everyone we knew.
We put ourselves in the way of the people we want to work with, and the spaces we want to be in. We’re still learning to get comfortable with that—many of us have been programmed to shrink ourselves, to believe that asking for what we want is too presumptuous, too aggressive, too much. It’s been vital to our practice to find the edges of our comfort, and push through them together.
We do this work because we love it. We get to do it because of our people—everyone who’s ever spoken our name in a room of opportunity, who’s mentored and counseled us, who’s put their trust in us, who’s sat with us over dinner and tea for real talk about the trials and tribulations of building a creative, abundant life. We get to do it because of our community. And boy, did our community show up to celebrate.
We gathered at Starling by Duo, a “fourth-space” founded by a pair of siblings in Chicago’s historic North Lawndale neighborhood, a neighborhood that fought and won to remove an old racist’s name from the local park and rename it in honor of abolitionists Anna and Frederick Douglass. A neighborhood that has invested in community health and safety, to extraordinary impact.
For three hours, we hugged and buzzed about in a beautiful room, with a feast spread over a long table, lovingly prepared and arranged by Seedo’s Levantine Bakery, with Monday Coffee keeping the good stuff flowing, and free zines fanned out across sideboards and shelves. We went risograph, naturally, printed by Matiz Press, and had a real good time doing it. Five Years in the Field features the full On Our Shelves archive, a bunch of bite-size invitations, poems, and provocations, and 4Ls on year five. It’s a small, sweet record of our existence, a love letter to experimentation. It was a gift to create, and to share.
Photos by Khalid Ibrahim
There is simply nothing like making cool things with your friends. Parties, companies, breakfast, agitprop—let’s all make everything we can, together, as much and as long as we possibly can.
If you couldn’t make it, but wanted to, your spirit was present. It was such a beautiful morning.
We’re mailing out zines to friends everywhere this Spring—these puppies are heading across the continental U.S. and into Canada, Germany, and Dubai. We’re going global. We’re full of love. It’s not to late to get one, if you want. Thank you for being here.
PARTING THOUGHTS
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
— Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, from A Great Wagon
