Monthly Recap :: May 2025

Peace Everyone,

I hope this note finds you steady. It’s time again for a short dispatch—a window into what’s been moving through my practice. May has been a month of convergence. The threads I’ve been following—strategy, spirit, systems, and studio—began to braid themselves into something tighter. Not a finished form, but a rhythm. Something closer to the center of the work I’m trying to build. The kind of month that doesn’t yield big announcements, but offers the kind of quiet clarity that lasts longer.

1) What’s Been Moving in My Practice

I kicked off the month of May with a 10-day voyage to Turkey with my wife. We spent time in Cappadocia, Antalya, and Istanbul, and it was a trip that left a lasting religious, cultural, and creative imprint. Walking through Istanbul’s layered architecture—empires painted over by empire—I was suddenly reminded of the youth and fragility of “our” little American commonwealth. A reminder that folded pride and shame into each other like pages in a book I have yet to comprehend. That feeling hasn’t left. It lives with me still like a domesticated hound, curled at the door for the next woodland hunt.

Since returning from this dreamplace, I’ve found myself working with a steadier hand. The studio has been a site of rehearsal—across sound, print, sculpture, diagram, and unfinished thoughts. I’ve been writing one-page perspectives, each one a kind of scouting report for a world we haven’t quite built. What’s missing. What we’ve ignored. What we’ll need if we’re serious about surviving with dignity. These aren’t blueprints. They’re field notes for future builders.

Outside sparks found their way in, too: an AI convening featuring voices from the Omidyar Network and Dubai Future Foundation, fresh thinking in conservation finance from Yale School of Environment, and a deep return to the work and words of artists like Jack Whitten, Arthur Jafa, and Theaster Gates—artists who treat materials like scripture, and process like inheritance. Their work reminds me that seriousness isn’t a burden. It’s a kind of offering.

2) Moments I Was Proud Of

• Returning from Turkey with new clarity – The trip offered more than inspiration; it sharpened my compass.

• Refusing to separate art, strategy, and infrastructure – The past few weeks have made it clear: the distinctions are artificial. The work lives where they overlap.

3) Questions I’m Sitting With

• What are the infrastructures we’ve forgotten to build—and why were they omitted in the first place?
  So much of what’s broken isn’t accidental—it’s the result of deliberate exclusion. I’m interested in tracing these absences as design opportunities.

• Can investment strategies carry cultural memory, not just capital logic?
  Most financial models erase context in pursuit of scale. I’m wondering how we might encode narrative, ancestry, and place into how value is held.

• What forms of ownership allow for exit without abandonment?
  The transition points—succession, handoff, withdrawal—are often where harm happens. I’m trying to imagine ownership models that prioritize continuity and care.

• How do we model futures that are slow, dignified, and materially believable?
  Not just optimistic or efficient, but grounded—futures that feel like they could actually be lived in, built with, and passed on.

4) Mind-Expanding Inputs from This Month

📖 The Price of Tomorrow – Jeff Booth – A sharp critique of inflation-era economics and why current systems resist transformation.
📖 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth – Buckminster Fuller – A timeless call to think planetarily, and to design like the stakes are real.
🎥 Jack Whitten, Theaster Gates, Arthur Jafa – Honestly, any interview or YouTube special on these three gentlemen will open you to a world of plenty. 
📖 Count the Clock That Tells the Time – Harlan Ellison – A beautiful short story about memory, time, and the inability to escape one's inner architecture.
📚 Building Community Food Webs – Ken Meter – A vital blueprint for rethinking food economies from the ground up—decentralized, relational, and place-based.

5) Priorities In My Practice For Next Month

• Strategic advising for institutions exploring land, ownership, or cooperative economics

• Projects that treat art as civic or ecological infrastructure

• Collaborations at the intersection of land, design, and long-term investment

• Visual modeling or storytelling for alternative investment frameworks

• Collaborations across print, object, and ritual to materialize slow futures

Thanks for reading. If your work is circling similar questions—or if you’re building something that wants to last—I’d love to be in conversation.

Blessings,

JCM