Art Above Everything

Is the all-encompassing quest to become a self-sustaining artist worth the sacrifices it often requires of us? Throughout her 20s and 30s, inveterate travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest could not help worrying if constantly prioritizing her writing over everything else—from postponing children to living nomadically to save on rent—was leading her to fulfillment or regret. After a break-up and serious health crisis in her early 40s, she turned to other women artists for their perspectives on that perennial question: is art enough?

Art Above Everything introduces us to “art monks” around the world: legendary authors, painters, dancers, and musicians who have devoted their lives to their creative pursuits. The journey begins in a classical Indian dance village, where the renown ensemble Nrityagram rehearses from sunup to sundown each day, and continues on to studios and galleries across Rwanda, Romania, Qatar, Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, Cuba, and the United States. Collectively, these women speak dozens of languages and worship a spectrum of faiths, but their determination to create despite financial hardship, misogyny, societal expectations, and the global rise of political extremism are wholly akin. Through intimate conversations with powerhouses like Rwandan playwright Hope Azeda, who uses theater to bring about national reconciliation in the aftermath of genocide, and Romanian painter Florica Prevenda, who got assigned to a provincial factory during Ceaușescu’s dictatorship but refused to relinquish her brushes, Elizondo Griest reveals the universal ecstasies and agonies of placing art at the core of our existence. No matter whether we create as an act of healing or dissent, Art Above Everything will illuminate how to wield its freedom as a vitalizing force.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest was born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas. Her six books include: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough; and All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Believer, BBC, VQR, and Oxford American. Her work has won a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, an International Latino Book Award, a PEN Southwest Book Award, and two Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism prizes. Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, she has performed as both a Moth storyteller and as a literary ambassador for the U.S. State Department.