About Us

We met the way a lot of great collaborations start: awkwardly. In March 2023, Tina ran up to Jes at a local press launch party and blurted out something like, “Hey, I heard you like board games and we should meet.” The next day, we were rolling dice together, and pretty soon we were sharing a lot more than game nights.

By September 2024, we shared our first booth at Chalk It Up, a two-day outdoor festival. Jes had never vended before and mostly had books to sell. Tina had vending experience, but her disabilities made a weekend-long market physically impossible to manage alone. Together, it worked: we split the booth, shared the labor, sold each other’s work, and realized how much easier (and more fun) it was to do this as a team.

That one market sparked a bigger idea: what if we made it easier for other artists to do the same? By October, the idea for No Maidens Artist Collective was born.

 

What We Do

No Maidens is a Tulsa-based collective of artists and makers working to remove barriers to selling creative work. Chronic illness, caregiving, burnout, anxiety, limited inventory, safety concerns, lack of experience—there are a hundred reasons someone might not feel able to vend on their own. We make space anyway.

We table at events on behalf of our artists, and we’re building a community where knowledge, labor, and resources are shared. Artists keep the majority of their sales, and the collective takes only what’s needed to cover costs and recognize booth labor. It’s about collaboration, not competition.

And honestly? It’s just easier (and way more fun) to hype up your friends’ talent than your own. Knowing that we’re making a percentage of sales from artists who couldn’t be there in person motivates us to sell their work as if it were our own—because in that moment, it kind of is. Their success is our success, and vice versa.

We’re rooted in DIY punk and anarchist ethos: keep it scrappy, keep it honest, and always take care of each other.

Why “No Maidens”?

Our name is a tongue-in-cheek nod to the Maiden/Mother/Crone archetype. Traditionally, the Maiden is framed as pure, naive, and untested—all traits that have been idealized and weaponized, especially against women and marginalized creatives.

We’re not here for that.

We’re not here to play naive, sweet, or agreeable just to get by. We’re here with experience, intention, and a healthy amount of irreverence. We’ve got people of all genders and all walks of life—but what we don’t have are “Maidens” in the archetypal sense. What we do have is each other’s backs.

Our Ethos

It’s important to us to say it clearly: selling your art is not the same thing as propping up capitalism. Too often, leftist creatives feel guilty about participating in markets, as if success automatically makes you complicit. But what we’re doing here isn’t about exploiting labor or chasing profit—it’s about survival, sustainability, and community.

Commerce doesn’t have to be capitalist. We believe that sharing our work, supporting each other, and redistributing resources through small-scale markets can actually resist the systems that try to keep us isolated and undervalued.

Right now, No Maidens is focused on pop-ups and markets. Down the line, who knows? We’re figuring things out as we go—but doing it with intention, with humor, and with a firm belief in collaboration over competition.