Vanessa Filley describes a recent body of work as “imagined cosmic map(s),” charts that connect the traditions of fiber arts with the present and the artist’s own questions of finding one’s place in the world. Titled In the Delicate Meshes, the series is comprised of sewn pieces that Filley likens to quilts, with stitches layered into symmetric patchworks of color and texture. “I am interested in the energetic threads that orient and connect us, ground us in place and time, yet tether us to our ancestral past and future—the lines that bring us home,” she says.

Filley references artists like Lenore Tawney, Hilma af Klint, and the women of Gees Bend Quilters, whose practices connect to spirituality, nature, and ancestral histories. Taut threads and twists embody tension and connection between both ends of a stitch, the intricate structures of the works as a whole, and the long tradition of fiber arts. “Each piece in this series is a quilted conversation, a way of taking the disparate questions and feeling of a given moment and mingling them with inspiration from the outside world and the work of those who came before,” the artist says.

In the Delicate Meshes was recently on view at Vivid Art Gallery in Winnetka, and you can find more of the series along with an archive of Filley’s works on her site and Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Artist Vanessa Filley Stitches Meditative Cosmic Maps Brimming with Geometry and Symmetries appeared first on Colossal.

If you’re in the business of marketing, then you’ve probably heard it before: personal branding is a game-changer. It can be a powerful tool for individuals and businesses alike, elevating your product and your message to new audiences. But, marketing your brand in a saturated space can be challenging. It’s imperative that you find the right company and the right strategy to help you stand out in a crowded market.

Artist and entrepreneur Dxtr Spits collaborated with social media expert Audrey Boyle to assemble an high-level team for men’s mental health business, How Men Cry (HMC). Dxtr envisioned HMC as a space to begin the conversation around men’s mental health so that men can start their healing journey, be that in therapy or another avenue. This small project started as a collection of art, but quickly grew and now has a powerful effect on audiences across the country. HMC continues to expand through Dxtr’s performance, facilitated workshops, and men’s retreats.

“How Men Cry came from the ashes of a failing relationship, personal issues with substance abuse, depression, and suicidal ideation,” Dxtr remembers. “When I performed some of the early spoken word pieces, I got to see firsthand how it was touching men’s hearts. I got to see myself in their eyes and vice versa.” Dxtr’s performances soon began garnering rave reviews from audiences who connected with his powerful message. The HMC team saw an opportunity to brand Dxtr Spits as an anti-hero spreading awareness for men’s mental health in a raw, open way that is accessible to men.

Today, How Men Cry is a powerful collective that is changing the narrative around men’s mental health and touching the hearts of thousands daily. Here, we’ll cover how HMC was able to use the five core components of personal branding to become bigger than Dxtr ever imagined.

1) Positioning

The first step in successful personal branding is positioning. To effectively position a brand, you need to define its foundation and added value. What niche will your brand occupy in the existing ecosystem? What value does your brand add? What fundamental problem are you trying to solve?

Artists are often the ones who inspire change and shift societal narratives. The HMC Team worked to position Dxtr Spits as the artist within the men’s mental health community, adding what called the “cherry flavor” to an ecosystem that was mostly populated by academics, practitioners, and other left-brain thinkers.

Dxtr’s powerful spoken word performances represented the “added value” of How Men Cry’s brand. His art sparked valuable conversations about men’s mental health and wellness—conversations that are vital and yet far too rare due to the stigma surrounding men’s mental health. How Men Cry made the idea of therapy digestible and the idea of being vulnerable less “taboo” for men.

Ultimately, How Men Cry was created to solve one problem, says Dxtr. “We wanted to make it easier for men to close the distance between wanting to start a healing journey and actually going to therapy. This pathway can be very difficult for many.”

2) Messaging

After defining your brand’s foundation and positioning, the next step in personal branding is messaging. What is the key message that supports your brand’s foundation? The HMC team advises that you should be able to summarize this message in 27-30 words.

The HMC team branded Dxtr Spits as the “anti-hero,” telling the story of a flawed individual on his journey to redemption. Dxtr has never been a perfect role model. He’s faced many challenges in his life, times when he failed and struggled. But he made the hero’s choice to start his journey towards mental health and healing.

How Men Cry’s messaging focused on using Dxtr’s journey to illustrate important truths about mental health and healing. Moments in his life illustrate that the process of healing isn’t linear, but a worthwhile journey.

Dxtr’s impactful yet relatable style and artwork was already making emotional vulnerability “cool” for men. ’s messaging plan leaned into that angle, working to bring all of How Men Cry’s design and content elements in line. Originally, the brand included intense colors like yellow, but these were changed to reflect the raw, gritty, and no-holds-barred nature of Dxtr’s life story and his art pieces. The team chose graffiti imagery, gray tones, and other calming colors to make the brand more appealing and soothing to men.

3) Brand Strategy

The third component of personal branding is building a brand strategy that incorporates and expands upon both the foundation and the messaging of the brand – all while keeping the larger goal of your work in mind.

For How Men Cry, the team had to consider how to communicate Dxtr’s anti-hero journey in a way that would help others understand their own journey better. Dxtr’s ultimate goal was to help men have vulnerable conversations and consider therapy as a tool for healing. just had to figure out how telling Dxtr’s story would translate into achieving that goal.

“When we started viewing How Men Cry as a movement and not just a collection of poems, ideas, and performances—that’s when everything changed,” notes Dxtr, who looks back on the early days of How Men Cry’s branding journey fondly. “We started applying marketing concepts and ’s business experience to use the power of images, videos, and words to push the message.”

The HMC Team developed a multi-faceted brand strategy for How Men Cry. First and foremost, the team brought all content—across the website, social media handles, and press engagements—in line with the messaging. The team created and shared a term sheet to ensure everyone was “speaking the same language” consistently. They looked for data and existing content that supported the idea that men’s mental health is a vital problem to solve, and made a plan to spread awareness.

Once your brand clearly defines what the “promised land” looks like for you, you can also start brainstorming what offerings and programs will get you there. In How Men Cry’s case, those offerings included a podcast allowing men to tell stories of vulnerability, new art pieces, and resources to bring communities of men together and spread the word.

4) Ecosystem

Next, consider the ecosystem in which your brand exists. It’s important to identify the influencers and stakeholders in your chosen niche. Who is invested in addressing the problem with you? Once you understand who is on your side, create a management strategy to build relationships with stakeholders and fans.

For How Men Cry, this meant connecting with the men who participated in the project by sharing their stories of vulnerability—dubbed “the HMCs” by and Dxtr. The HMC team helped Dxtr build and maintain connections to these stakeholders. In 2022, The team invited the HMCs to a men’s retreat where they explored what an anti-hero’s road to redemption might look like for each of them. As part of a community, they were able to open up, bond, and be vulnerable. To this day, the HMCs communicate daily through a group chat and hold monthly conversations with Dxtr. Many HMCs have become a resource to others in the community of men’s mental health, passing on How Men Cry’s vital message to new audiences, including a recent performance at the LinkedIn headquarters on the topic of men’s mental health.

As you consider where your personal brand stands in your ecosystem, a helpful exercise can be looking for the “superfan”—someone who engages with the brand, follows you on all platforms, gives you money, and supports the brand. Many existing brands aren’t clear enough on how their superfans can or should support them best. This journey has to be as simple and clear as possible. Make sure that your audience has clear avenues to engage and support you in a way that helps you reach your brand’s goal.

5) Action Plan

The fifth and final component of personal branding is the action plan. After establishing the brand positioning, messaging, strategy, and ecosystem, create a plan for continuous development. Your action plan should include specifications on who is responsible for the various components of the branding strategy.

As you begin creating content in line with your branding, ensure that every piece of content can be repurposed across many channels. Take the How Men Cry podcast as an example. Though each episode is published across all the usual podcast platforms, the content doesn’t end there. A video recording of an episode could be posted on YouTube. A transcript could be repurposed into a blog post. And clips or snippets of both can be used for social media posts and comments.

Lastly, once content is flowing and responses are coming in, use all the metrics and analytics available to you for continuous improvement. Examine what kinds of content garnered the best or most responses and what got through to the hearts and minds of your followers. Understanding what works, and what doesn’t, will help you expand on the brand’s foundation and amplify your message strategically.

Personal branding is a complex process that requires a solid foundation, messaging, strategy, ecosystem, and action plan. By finding your brand’s unique voice, understanding where your brand stands in the ecosystem, and tailoring your message, you can differentiate yourself from the competition while reaching a larger audience.

Though maintaining a strong personal brand is not easy, the benefits are worth the effort. Through events and retreats with both small businesses and larger Fortune 500 companies, HMC is changing corporate culture and the community at large.

“So many people check out How Men Cry through our website or social media handles. They often tell me that they’re left with the impression that the project is so much bigger than it actually is,” says Dxtr. “That’s the power of a solid brand foundation. Amplifying our message becomes the simplest thing in the world.”

Like many eager Notre Dame students, during the end of my freshman year, I worked to seek out ways in which I could have a greater impact on the Notre Dame community. I received an email from the Student Union Board in April of my freshman year inviting students to apply for their executive board, and with very little idea of what SUB was, I decided on a whim to apply to be the Director of Art. When I applied, I had so little idea of the immense impact that SUB would have on me and my experience at Notre Dame, and I am forever grateful that I decided to take a leap and apply to join.

The Student Union Board (SUB) is the event programming branch of Notre Dame’s Student Government. Our mission is to enhance the Notre Dame undergraduate experience through intentional and engaging programming. Throughout the year, we host a ton of different events to appeal to as many students as possible, whether it’s a stress-relieving midterms event, a fun tropical-themed giveaway in the depths of winter, our weekly Acousticafe where students have the chance to see their peers perform live music, or anything else we can dream of. We also host a few larger events, such as our annual concert (more on that later!) and Antostal, a week of a ton of activities available to all students. Think fun, think SUB!

As the Director of Art, my role was to oversee our graphic designers and to work with our committee chairs in order to ensure that all of our amazing events were being shared with students in engaging, creative ways. In this role, I was able to have my hands in all of the activities planned by SUB and strengthen my artistic and creative skills. As a Neuroscience major, my classes don’t always afford me the opportunity to be artistically creative. While contributing to projects that benefited the student body, I also learned effective marketing strategies, worked with incredibly talented event programmers to help make creative ideas come to life, and developed my leadership skills by managing and working with my incredible team of designers. Especially during a year dominated by COVID where students were looking for things to do to keep engaged, I was able to have a hand in ensuring that students’ Notre Dame experiences were always full of fun, enriching activities. I continued in my artistic role in SUB into my junior year as a designer before I studied abroad, and I was able to further develop my artistic abilities and work more directly with the event programmers to incorporate their incredible events into engaging art.

This past year, I had the opportunity to serve as SUB’s Concerts Committee Chair. Every year, SUB hosts artists on campus to perform a concert for undergraduate students, and my job as the committee chair was to work with my committee to choose a lineup that would appeal to as many students as possible, contacting music agents, and planning the concert. This year, we hosted Sound of SUB, a large-scale music festival with food, games, and incredible music. We had the opportunity to host Noah Kahan and Chelsea Cutler as our headliners, supported by Briscoe and three incredible student openers. Our committee worked all year to plan the festival with the goal of creating an event that would excite the student body. The festival itself sold out the Stepan Center on campus, and went incredibly smoothly thanks to the hard work of everybody in SUB. Through careful planning, long hours, and a massive team effort, many students got to create lifetime memories and have the time of their lives. 

I am not planning on pursuing a career in the music industry, but I have always loved attending concerts. Because of my involvement in SUB, I was able to pursue a passion project in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create something to benefit the Notre Dame community. I have learned the value of working through difficult, long-term projects, and have a greater appreciation for the gratification that comes when you have put your all into an event. I had the opportunity to work with incredible students who deeply care about making Notre Dame a better, more engaging place. I am incredibly grateful for my time in SUB, and for the ways that it has made me a more creative person and a stronger leader (plus, who doesn’t love getting to meet their favorite artists?!). 

If you want to see what SUB is up to on campus, make sure to follow our Instagram @subnd !