ON NETWORKS, MENTORSHIP AND MAKING IT WORK

Galerie Roberta Keil, Vienna 

Panellists: Sophie Wratzfeld, Brittany Tucker

Convenor: Vanja Žanko

Most conversations about artistic careers focus on breakthroughs. This one focused on everything that happens in between: the relationships, collaborations and acts of generosity that make a creative life possible. A panel discussion held on 13 March, part of a gallery anniversary week, brought together three Vienna-based voices to talk honestly about what sustains creative work over the long term. Curator Sophie Wratzfeld, artist Brittany Tucker, and cultural manager and curator Vanja Žanko, who moderated the afternoon, didn't offer a tidy roadmap. What emerged was something more useful: a conversation about community, trust and the quiet infrastructure that keeps people going. 

From left to right: Vanja, Sophie, Brittany and Roberta Keil.

Sophie spoke about the double life she leads, producing large-scale, multi-year exhibitions at the Albertina while independently developing projects with artists from her own generation. The contrast revealed something larger: institutions may provide structure, but independent practice depends on people. Inside the museum there are structures, departments and budgets. Outside it, you become everything at once: designer, producer, fixer. That's where the network stops being a nice-to-have and becomes essential. "It's really about who you have as resources," she said, "in terms of contacts, knowledge, and shared skills." 

Brittany described a different kind of solitude. Painting, by its nature, asks you to turn inward and to spend long hours with materials, with process, with uncertainty. Networking feels almost antithetical to that. And yet, she said, the art world runs on relationships. Art fairs like SPRING/BREAK Art Show, where artists build and dismantle their own exhibitions across a week, create a rare kind of proximity: you're forced to show up, stay present and keep introducing yourself. It was, in fact, a SPRING/BREAK Art Show curated by peers she'd studied alongside at Bard College in NYC that first launched her career. 

What struck me throughout the conversation was how often all three returned to the idea of peers as mentors. Not formal arrangements, not a senior figure dispensing wisdom, but the horizontal bonds formed between people navigating the same terrain at the same time. Getting rejected together. Celebrating each other's wins. Sharing open calls. Sharing each other's work long before algorithms began deciding who would see it. Sophie described how a colleague who represented Croatia at the Venice Biennale used the occasion to invite every artist who had supported her career to show alongside her. The invisible network suddenly became visible. 

Galleries came up too, and not entirely comfortably. Brittany reflected on the strange intimacy of a gallery relationship, the economic and artistic entanglement with someone you need to trust completely in order to keep making work. And then something shifts. A political disagreement. A problematic decision. Suddenly the trust feels fragile, and the whole structure wobbles. 

Vanja brought in questions of access and geography. Coming from central and eastern Europe, where institutional support for emerging practitioners is often limited, she described a museum membership programme intentionally designed to move beyond networking. Its 

goal wasn't simply to introduce people to one another, but to create a shared outcome: an exhibition. The connections mattered, but only because they led to the work. 

Sophie also mentioned the Young Curators Club, a low-barrier, non-hierarchical network where she'd met some of her closest collaborators. She was clear about why it had mattered: she hadn't grown up with family connections to the arts world and had to learn how to navigate it. Communities like that gave her somewhere to start. "You just have to begin somehow," she said. Perfectionism, waiting for the right conditions, those things don't get you anywhere. 

The conversation made clear that mentorship is rarely a formal arrangement. More often, it grows through generosity, shared experience, and a willingness to invest in one another over time. Networks, in this sense, are less about building contacts than about sustaining one another's creative practice.

Perhaps the opposite of isolation isn't networking at all. It's becoming part of someone else's practice before they become part of yours.