How Can Women Thrive in Vancouver?

A conversation with JAMIE SMITH, Founder of THRIVE STUDIO.

What is THRIVE? What is THRIVE's Mission?

Being an artist is important but often lonely work. Our mission at THRIVE is to support female, gender queer and non binary artists. We do this through THRIVE Mastermind, our community of visual artists who meet monthly and provide each other with support, accountability and motivation. THRIVE Talks, our Podcast and our speaker series, where contemporary female artists and women in the arts tell their inspiring stories. We also offer THRIVE Art School the education you needed but never got in art school.

How has VMF partnered with THRIVE? 

VMF has always been generous and supportive of our work at THRIVE. We've loved being able to partner with VMF and your generosity around providing information on painting murals with our members has been greatly appreciated and one way you've gone the extra mile! 

Last year's THRIVE Talks with VMF was awesome! The event was held in the Mural Festival HQs and we invited seven of the amazing female artists painting murals in the festival to open up to us about their artistic journeys. It's so important for contemporary female artists and women in the arts to tell their stories in their own words when they are often left out of conversations all together. It was great to be able to partner with VMF to highlight their stories and we can't wait to do it again this year! We've also got something else coming up for 2018, but more details are yet to come!

What's your artists' experience working with VMF? 

VMF has inspired our artists to go bigger! A few of our members past and present who have painted murals as part of VMF have been Ola Volo, Nomi Chi, Sandeep Johal, Tierney Milne, Julia Iredale Amanda Smart, Bronwyn Schuster and Lani Imre. For some of them this was their first ever mural, and for others it was a way for them to create art for their city on a large scale -- an example of engaging community in a rapidly changing city. VMF is something that we believe has planted all sorts of creative seeds in creative people's minds around what is possible and our members are no exception!

Anything you want to invite readers to this spring? 

Our next THRIVE Talks are coming up on March 22nd and details for that are here. We are also accepting applications for THRIVE Mastermind currently, people can learn more and apply here!