
An Evening with Artists: An ArtsForward Fundraiser Speech by Micah Kraus
The following blog post was originally presented by Micah Kraus at An Evening with Artists: An ArtsForward Fundraiser on December 12th, 2024.
Good evening. My name is Micah Kraus. I’m a professional artist that owns and operates Work Studio LTD. My three guiding principles are to Create, Collaborate and Serve. In 2023 I was awarded an ArtsForward grant to create Ditto Riso– Akron’s first Risograph studio, where people participate in community workshops, collaborative projects, and one-on-one printmaking experiences centered on the risograph printing process.
I always wanted to be an artist.
Well, that’s not completely true. At the age of seven I wanted to be a basketball player, but that dream ended when my sister told me that all basketball players shave their armpits. Then after falling in love with Mary Lou Retton in the ‘84 Olympics I wanted to be a gymnast, but my sister explained that all gymnasts paint the nails on their left hand. It’s required!
In elementary school I narrowed my career path to: Firefighter, McDonalds, or Artist. Thus began a sort of career exploration over the next several years. One summer day I stole a box of matches from our pantry and my best friend Mike and I proceeded to accidentally set his backyard on fire. The thrill I felt made it pretty clear that I was a better fire-starter than a fire-fighter.
During high school I worked at Dairy Queen and learned some lessons of food service: the necessity of efficiency, how to manage stress, that the smell of fryer grease is a permanent mark on one’s soul, and that it was really, really important that I went to college. If I wasn’t going to be a basketball player, a gymnast, a firefighter or a fast food worker, there was only one option left. All signs pointed toward art.
In Sunday school I drew Joseph & Mary as Han Solo & Princess Leia and the feeling I got from Mrs. Murphy’s reaction confirmed that creativity allowed for just the kind of mischief I most craved.
I was the art kid in high school and when I started thinking about a career, my art teacher said that the only options were to be a wedding photographer, an architect, a fashion designer, or a starving artist. Those things seemed so unreal to me that she might as well have said to paint my nails and shave my armpits. Seeing my reaction, she encouraged me to be an art teacher because it was “an easy career.”
Fortunately I took her advice. And even though she was as wrong as wrong can be, teaching art proved to be exactly where I was supposed to begin my life as an Artist. As a teacher, I learned the most important lessons about being an Artist.


Photos by: The Green Photograph
Students taught me:
Listen closely, then ask more questions. When someone opens up, the work email can wait. There’s always room for one more seat in the classroom. Develop a thick skin while maintaining empathy. All people deserve to experience the act of creativity. Create pathways toward excellence, but don’t clear away the hurdles.
Teaching taught me:
Servant leadership– being a leader doesn’t mean it’s all about YOU. Seek authentic collaboration, conflict enables growth, design programs with strategy and rigor, secure funding to fuel possibility.
The life-defining lesson that I learned again and again was that: Opportunity resides in the void.
Where there is nothing, there is the possibility of creating something. Every art project begins with blank paper, a block of clay, and a flawless piece of linoleum. And over time, with a great deal of effort and struggle, that simple material becomes something meaningful and representative of the person that created it.
Art students that found identity and purpose met the brick wall of scared parents and intimidated high school counselors. They could only imagine this beautiful child, full of promise and possibility, sitting in a vacant candlelit warehouse wearing fingerless gloves, eating a cold can of beans while painting a large abstract canvas. A portrait of a starving artist. The parents and counselors saw a void of possibility, so I determined to prepare students with examples of opportunity.
I created “Art Career Field Experience,” a course where each week students visited arts professionals in their places of work. We spent time with studio artists, industrial designers, curators, arts administrators, graphic novelists, and photographers in order to place students with arts professionals to validate art as a profession. Rather than share the career advice that I received from my art teacher, I wanted students to experience the vast reality of arts professions by connecting with these people directly. The course armed students with tangible examples of the specific ways they could engage their skills and interests. And as it happens, Art Career Field Experiences showed me the real possibility of creating an art business of my own.
You see…
I always wanted to be an artist.
Because…
Artists see opportunity in the void.
Artists have the courage to create.
Artists listen to what’s said and reflect back empathy, insight, and challenge.
Artists run full speed at the wall fully believing an opening will appear. And sometimes it does.
But if they hit the wall, rather than giving up and blaming the wall, they reflect, rethink, and start searching for a ladder, a window, a tunnel. And they try again.
Artists are critical, investigative, unsatisfied.
Artists flip it over, look at it backwards, imagine it inside-out. Artists are in it but not of it.
Artists ask questions without concern for an immediate solution. Artists create answers for questions that haven’t been considered.
Artists transform time and money into community-changing experiences, expressions beyond articulation, reminders of shared humanity.
Artists look into the void and see opportunity.
Where there is nothing, they see the possibility of creating something.
The people in this room are a testament to this principle. If it’s a coffee roastery or a bike shop or an arthouse theater or a record store– people take great risk and effort to create something that transforms our daily lives.
Each thing created in Akron terraforms this landscape into a place to be and do things.
Together.
Whether it’s a riso workshop, an art exhibition, a dance performance, or a theatre production.
With great effort and a little bit of funding incredible things are created where they did not before exist.
Thank you for being here tonight to fill the void. And to fuel opportunity.