For those interested in working in the arts, the phrase “day job” often pops up in conversation. It’s the job you do that you might not love so that you can do the work in art that you do love. It pays the bills, even if it doesn’t feed the soul.

For a number of years, Amber Ford was lucky enough—and talented enough—to have day jobs actually in the arts. Along with teaching art in after-school programs, she worked at the photography department of the Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA) from which she graduated in 2016, at Cleveland Print Room, and even for a consulting firm that fostered her creativity because the owners understood her background and abilities. Her luck and talent continue: About two years ago she was able to leave the day job to devote to her career as a freelance photographer and a fine artist.

“I definitely hoped and definitely tried to plan as much as I could and to try to take the next necessary steps that helped me—I was getting closer and closer to that goal to either work for myself or work for whatever the goal institution would have been,” she says.

“For many years I had to have that day job in conjunction with trying to make art and show in the galleries, in conjunction with taking freelance gigs when I could fit it into my schedule. I finally got to a place where … I had built enough community and enough of a network that people were trying to hire me more consistently. I had to be, like, “Oh, I actually have to step away from this job now and pursue this if I want this to work.”

Ford was the beneficiary of an especially robust arts program of the Charles F. Brush High School in South Euclid-Lyndhurst. “The students are really positioned to be able to explore through a multitude of differing mediums and different classes—at least when I was a student,” she says.

“I was introduced to very specific classes, versus maybe going to a school that had Art I or Art II, where it’s kind of just kind of all lumped in. As a freshman, I took my first photo class and I continued taking photos throughout the four years. During my second year, I took my first painting class and then continued to do that for the remaining three years. And then I also took two years of drawing, one semester of graphic design, and one semester of ceramics.”

When it came time to think about college and to which career it might lead, she cycled through a number of phases—maybe she’d be a psychologist, maybe a history teacher. But Ford found she always returned to how much she enjoyed art. Without being sure what specifically she might do, she recognized that the medium that had dominated her high school education presented her with the most opportunities.

“Entering into CIA, you go through a year of foundation classes, and you aren’t necessarily going right into your major,” she says. The foundation courses serve as a sort of sorting mechanism for students unsure about their direction, but Ford was firm.

“I kind of always knew that I was going to be in photography from the jump and so I stayed on that path even though I did know that I like other mediums. I just felt like sticking with photography was the best for me.” Because, as she says, “there were many avenues in it that I would be able to explore and potentially land on, photography, especially out of all of the arts, made the most sense for me in terms of like what I could make a living at.”

Much of the work early in the academic careers of art students is, as Ford says, “filling the brief”—tackling the assignments. But that changes toward the end of their education.

“It’s in that last year when you’re working on your BFA defense project that you’re working on one project for the entire year and really thinking deeply of ‘what is important to me, what do I want to say with my work and what do I want to work on for an extended amount of time,’ because up until that point, your projects are short-term within the academic world.

“During my last year I realized and honed in on that I wanted to focus on creating work that was specifically about Black people or Black and brown people because I wanted to make work that I was confident in speaking about, that was also stemmed from my own experiences, but also could speak obviously to a larger audience.

“From there I kind of use that as a framework for work within my personal practice. And then through my personal practice is how I would say I started to get freelance opportunities. So, when I enter into different freelance opportunities, I would say I still shoot from that same place a lot of times,” Ford says.

“I would say the thing that motivates me is working on projects that excite me and that are conversations that I want to have.”

Ford has made a living from the combination of a fine art practice that has included an impressive number of artist residencies, commissions, and gallery shows, and from a thriving freelance photography practice that provides the kind of flexibility that allows time for her fine arts work. But, unlike a day job, Ford’s freelance work isn’t simply a means to finance the fine arts; each practice feeds and builds on the other.

Commissions have included working with the Massillon Museum of Art on a project focused on that city’s Black community that had, as Ford says, “felt forgotten,” and a collaboration for the Cleveland Foundation, centered on “what home means” to the neighbors of the community foundation’s new midtown headquarters. She has been awarded three important residences: a 2019 Gordon Square Arts District Artist-In-Residence, which resulted in a community-based photographic mural, This Story is Mines and Ours, located along the north wall of the Gordon Square Arcade; a 2022 moCa Cleveland Artist-in-Residence exploring the duality of dying and healing which transformed into an audio and text installation in the yellow staircase, elevator, and restrooms on the museum; and a 2024 DWL (Digital Weaving Lab) AIR at Praxis Fiber Workshop for which she will be creating digital weaving works on the Jacquard TC2 loom.

While it looks like Ford carefully built a career path brick-by-brick, she says it’s been full of surprises.

“Every year my ‘path’ slightly changes, and I’ve learned to roll with the punches, good and bad,” she says. “I often say, as cheesy as it sounds, ‘Everything happens for a reason.’ And those things aren’t happening to you they are happening for you. The year 2020 really opened my eyes and humbled me. It has been both the worst year and best year of my career so far because at the time the doors I was walking through suddenly closed, but so many more opened in result of the shift caused by the pandemic.”

That up-and-down experience informs her advice to younger people thinking of pursuing careers in the arts.

“The ‘dream’ is a moving target,” she says. “It continuously evolves, like you and me. So don’t be afraid of change or the need to pivot. Decide what success and happiness looks like for you and keep going until you get there.”

When Ford was growing up and into her art, she didn’t know a lot of artists in her family or have close relationships with artists, and she wasn’t taken to the Cleveland Museum of Art or gallery shows by the adults around her. “Sometimes it felt like I’m kind of doing this on my own. I’m slowly finding out about other people in the art world, but, definitely, it took longer than I think it should have to have gotten introduced to some of those people.” Ford’s great-grandmother did embroidery and pursued art forms and she had an aunt and an uncle who were artists and part of an arts circle. Though she now realizes that must have had an influence on her, it didn’t click with her at the time that she was living with art.

“It wasn’t necessarily particularly talked about specifically to me as a young niece and whatnot, but I’m in this house that actually does have all these beautiful paintings and things like that.” In that house were also her supportive parents.

“I was just super fortunate even though I didn’t have parents that were in the arts that they trusted me enough to support me even though they were worried and didn’t understand them.”

What excites Ford, she says, is “using my work as a way to work through my own questions and my own problems, or being able to use my work on questions that maybe, under any other circumstances, would be a little bit more difficult, as well as creating work that other people can enter into, see themselves in, especially other young Black and brown girls who have not been introduced to other Black and brown artists and female artists as a way to be, like, ‘Oh I see that this person is doing this—now I can see that being an option for me.’”

Connecting to Futures is an ongoing series of profiles designed to help High School students envision possible careers in the arts. Funded in part by a grant from Enbridge.