Flowing into Growth, Jenny Welden

Listen to this and previous letters on Spotify!

How can I be like water as I advance my career?

Cold plunging though Aspen Art Week, Dolly Parton on creating an iconic career across decades, Herbert Bayer on creating a ‘total work of art,’ Kali Malone and Caroline Shaw on evolving through cycles of harmony, the most-asked question about my art from prospective collectors, watery meditations, plus my own contemplations about wearing an artist uniform!

See the front of this canvas at the end of this letter!

Aspen Art Week

I made my second annual pilgrimage to Aspen this month for the multi-faceted wonder that is Aspen Art Week.

Repped by Missing Piece @ Intersect Art & Design Fair!

During Artweek I was represented by Missing Piece Gallery at *Aspen Intersect Art & Design Fair*. This was a big moment for us all.

Accessing Truth Through Plurality: My Artist Talk with Carrie Scott

A highlight of the experience was sharing the work with curator, art historian, & founder of Seen, Carrie Scott, and her special guests, on her guided tour of the show.

She introduced the work to her special guests and I gave a little talk.

I spoke about my creation process: how a composition becomes the accumulation of many, many paths going back and forth, crossing one another, doubling down, and layering together.

I find this intensive process to be a form of accessing truth I could not otherwise access. It comes from plurality; one stitch is a loop that interconnects to thousands of others.

Carrie even shared about our visit on her instagram! She maintains an relevant and engaging social media presence; I encourage a follow! @CarrieScottCurates.

We had a lovely visit. But I didn’t meet her at the fair.

Cold Plunging!

When your art fair hubub happens in between cold plunges, you know you’re doing it right. While Aspen Art Week makes it impossible to fit everything in because there are world-class events happening on the hour, cold plunges, for me at least, make FOMO stop in its tracks. What could be better than this?

This kind of kinship to people, place, art, & ideas is by design. The revival of Aspen after its silver boom, bust, and subsequent quiet years as a ranching town came down to one artist, Herbert Bayer, who was commissioned in 1946 by Walter & Elizabeth Paepke to help turn Aspen into a cultural utopia. And it worked.

Over nearly three decades, Bayer implemented his concept of a unified total environment (“Gesamtkunstwerk”) by creating a range of works, from architecture to sculpture, murals, and earthworks on a forty-acre site of abandoned farmland, now known as the Aspen Meadows Campus.

Bayer stated, “I am not so much concerned with the individual work of art, as with the total shape and content of the human scene.” This legacy of carefully crafted inspiration in the culture and geography of Aspen is still palpable to this day. As intended, when in Aspen, you are “inspired by design.”

Today Aspen is one of the world’s most popular and exclusive destinations for leisure and culture. Mo and daddy walk are serenaded by live music beneath Rachel Hayes’ “Shifting Light” installation in the pedestrian mall.

Evolving Cycles of Harmony: Kali Malone & Caroline Shaw (in the same day!)

One morning I had the ultimate pleasure of experiencing Kali Malone’s organ concert on Aspen Chapel’s newly restored pipe organ. “The performance featured the US premiere of *Concentric Circles of The Choirs of Angels*— commissioned by the Vatican for the 2026 Venice Art Biennale—alongside selected works from her expansive organ repertoire, including pieces from her critically acclaimed albums *The Sacrificial Code* (2019) and *All Life Long* (2024)” (Learn more on Aspen Art Museum’s page on Air). The concert reminded me of a singing bowl meditation: slowly evolving cycles of harmony that brought me inward, to a place of true rest & resonance, and it sparked inspirations for new work. Preceding the performance, poets Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis read their poetry in call-and-response, navigating tensions between the “ineffable and the everyday,” bringing humanity through my ears in every syllable. These are the moments where being an artist doesn’t feel so lonely. Yes! There ARE others, out there too! Making art their life! These moments nurture me with community that feels rare in daily life. I don’t know exactly the breakdown how each of these artists pays for their living, –their apartments or their meals– but I know they all make their life their art.

One of my artweek highlights was experiencing Caroline Shaw’s *Brush* with my family at the Aspen Institute Campus.

We traveled in and out of land and song, walking one by one, with beautiful vignettes of music mingling with the changing landscapes. It felt like we were living the score of an epic biopic.

My life does not feel as epic as this moment did. I am currently at a classic, high-stakes inflection point that almost every major visual artist navigates within their first professional decade: caught between the market engine (which feeds the studio) and the Institutional Engine (which builds the legacy).

While exhibiting my work at Intersect Aspen Art & Design Fair, the Missing Piece Gallery got this question on repeat from prospective new collectors interested in my serious work: “what museum collections is she already in?”

This feels like a chicken-or-the-egg moment, and is one of the most notorious catch-22s in the high-end art market.

Museums, I’m coming for you!

How can I be like water as I advance my career?

This month I plunged from a sailboat into the Columbia River with utter delight. Shel captured this one from the boat.

A poetic and inspiring sign near the Columbia river in Vancouver, WA, reads, “Geographers define the source of a river as the place where its Headwaters rise. This is something that can be plotted in three dimensions. Longitude, latitude, and altitude. How to locate the origin of the Columbia River in time is a metaphysical task…
The Earth and its atmosphere make up a closed system. Water changes form, but is neither created nor destroyed. Every molecule of water in the Columbia River was once in the oceans was once in the sky. Every molecule of water in our own bodies has a similar history. The water that quenches our thirst today was already ancient when the dinosaurs bent down to drink. We may count our age in decades, but when we consider that over half of our adult body weight is water, we realize we have existed for eons. We are conduits of water. Water connects us to all the life that has ever been, to all the life that ever will be. We are this River. This river is us.” -Teresa Jordan

After all the career accomplishments of the summer, I return to water as the experience that was most meaningful.

(as in, the right version of yourself, and not an imposter, not a conformist, not a yes-girl, and not a workaholic.) As I navigate these tensions, I’ve been thinking about Dolly Parton.

Dolly Parton & Water

From early years, scavenging Nashville hotel hallways for leftover room service trays and writing songs for other singers with the will to earn a chance, Dolly was willing to bend around obstacles so she could keep flowing towards her goals. Like water, Dolly never stopped being Dolly.

Water never stops being water.

“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away any rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.” –Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

As a 28-year-old rising artist, Dolly Parton wrote and recorded “I Will Always Love You,” and Elvis Presley, King of Rock’n’Roll, wanted to cover the song! (Her big break! The pinnacle of validation and commercial potential was at her doorstep!) But the day before the recording session, Elvis’s manager called Parton to state their strict rule: Elvis wouldn’t record any song unless he gained at least half of the publishing rights. Parton was devastated. She knew she had to say no. She cried all night, knowing she was saying no to her biggest exposure opportunity yet. But that decision-to not compromise her convictions for an immediate gain–generated tens of millions of dollars in royalties for her-far more than she would have ever made under the Elvis deal. This is a lesson in staying true to oneself. Dolly desperately wanted the opportunity but chose to say no because she could not agree to the terms. Dolly Made decisions that secured her autonomy to continue to have the full creative freedom to be Dolly.