Awesome sequence of very disturbing information graphics about artists’ payments at nonprofits. I love working with nonprofits and know that many just scrape by, but still, some of these numbers, and the failure to remunerate artists for their labor, is just shocking.
From Artist Payments at NYC Nonprofits, By the Numbers by William Powhida on Hyperallergic, April 23, 2012.
Gotta love new art opportunities!
CALL FOR ARTISTS: San Jose ICA Announces Sandbox Projects
Deadline to Apply: July 6, 2012
The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is proud to announce Sandbox Projects, an opportunity for West Coast artists to create and exhibit experimental artworks in the ICA’s Focus Gallery. In the Silicon Valley, technologists use the term “sandbox” as a figurative place to experiment with new code or ideas. In a similar spirit, the ICA’s Sandbox Projects is a space that supports emerging and mid-career artists to experiment, take risks and develop works that would not otherwise be realized. Open to all media, the program encourages site responsive, ambitious, architectural and large-scale works.The San Jose ICA will award an artist/artist team with a $3500 honorarium to design, create and complete a project for a March 2013 exhibition. The honorarium can be used towards project expenses including materials, supplies, transit of artwork (both ways), travel, per diem, and artist fee. The San Jose ICA will additionally support the project with access to a team of professional preparators during install and de-install, provide marketing for the program and an exhibition opening.
TIMELINE
April: Guidelines available.
July 6: Application deadline
September 7: Announcement of artist/artist team
March 2013: Exhibition OpeningAPPLICATION AND GUIDELINES
Information, details about the program, and guidelines on how to apply are available for download h.
Artists: I keep harping about professional development and won’t stop, certainly not without sharing this incredible opportunity. OK, so it’s a lottery, and it’s one more application you might get rejected from. So what? It’s free and normally would cost a LOT—and be worth every penny—so apply yo’self!
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The Artists Summer Institute (ASI), a free five-day professional development intensive, returns May 9-13! Offered through a partnership between Creative Capital and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), ASI is open to 55 New York City artists working in the fields of visual, media, performing and literary arts. The participating artists will be chosen through a lottery process; only online registrations from NYC residents received before the March 30 deadline will be considered.
This is a unique opportunity for New York City artists to step outside their daily routine and focus on developing professional skills and artistic goals in a community setting. Designed to help artists build a path to greater sustainability and self-sufficiency, ASI combines the best of Creative Capital’s Professional Development Program (PDP) and LMCC’s Basic Finance for Artists program to provide a comprehensive range of training, tools and resources for working artists.
The program is intended for artists who seek arts-focused professional training in the areas of business and strategic planning, verbal communications, financial management, marketing, promotion and effective Internet strategies.
DATES, TIMES AND LOCATION
Wednesday, May 9 – Sunday, May 13, 2012
9:00am – 5:00pm
80 Broad Street, New York, NY
LMCC’s new artist studio and rehearsal space in lower Manhattan
REGISTRATION AND SELECTION
Register by 11:59pm, Friday, March 30, 2012
ASI can accommodate 55 artists. Due to high demand, eligible participants will be selected through a lottery process. In order to be included in the lottery, artists must complete the online registration form.
For complete program details and to register, including eligibility requirements and access to the registration form, click here.<
NOT A NYC RESIDENT?
Attend one of our upcoming webinars for artists!
Learn more about PDP’s Online Learning Program
We’ve had some good times, haven’t we? We’ve found great deals and explored odd lots, and gone on adventures in re-use and recycling.
I’ve learned a lot from you. But I think it’s time we part ways.
It’s not you.
Well, to be honest, it is you.
According to Creative Capital, artists would be well-advised to systematize least liked activities, making more time to savor favorite ones. Sourcing materials can be a drag sometimes. My materials can be wide-ranging, which means it’s necessarily unsystematic; I have to experience learning curves to reconcile my needs with various industries’ consumer products.
We’ve been indulging frugality and it’s been costing too much time. Our susceptibility to sticker shock and our refusal to be price-gouged has no immediate impacts except in only prolonging our procurement sagas. And, Inner Broke Art Student, you extend our stays in retail hell by calculating and re-calculating price comparisons, and compulsively trimming the fat from our shopping basket at the last minute.
You also refuse to accept the entropic nature of schlepping. Boards get scuffed, pristine papers get crinkled. Like the universe, elbows on the subway are indifferent to our petty human dramas. Getting a back-up won’t kill us.
Lastly, your distaste for shipping charges is costing us hours, and if you let us pay ourselves even just minimum wage for our time running errands, you’d see that we’re only saving pennies. Yes, I’m going to get more things shipped, even when it costs money. Don’t give me that carbon footprint line—we spewed more exhaust as Californians driving everywhere.
I know: I’ve changed. Call me a New Yorker, I can take it. That’s the difference between you and me: I don’t think we can go on like this, being our own free interns forever.
I’ve been working on my next project, and I gave myself the permission to experiment, play, and think big. That means being OK with throwing money at materials. I’m sorry to break the news: without your ‘broke’ mentality, it’s been liberating.
I didn’t measure it by whether I had a day job or not. I measured it by what my work was, what I was doing, and how well the work was becoming. It was very clear to me that I was doing fine. [Laughs] It never occurred to me that I wasn’t.
—Phillip Glass, as told to Steven Thrasher.
More on surviving as an artist at the Village Voice.
On Tuesday, I drove 240 miles to de-install and pick up my work from Catskill, NY. Today, I spent over 2 hours in transit going to Chelsea and back to photograph my installation. After this, I’m going to color-correct the photos, then work on a residency application. (Meanwhile, my latest studio project has been untouched—frozen in a state of incompletion—for the past 1.5 weeks.)
There is little joy in schlepping. The transit left me knackered, and feeling not especially productive. But I want to contrast these niggling feelings about artists’ extrastudio activity with a different sentiment about being an artist, to make space for an attitude adjustment.
When I visited Michael Arcega’s and Stephanie Syjuco’s studios in San Francisco last Friday, it felt like this is where they report to work, because it’s their jobs to be artists. This is less about occupations—Arcega and Syjuco both work as teachers—and more to do with the seriousness and intention of their practices, of their drive to be making and exhibiting as artists. The visits made me want a bigger studio, and somehow restructure my life so that I can spend more and more of my time being an artist. I left feeling inspired to be more ambitious, diligent, and committed.
I savored this sense of forward momentum. During my long drive to Catskill, I came to this realization: Being an artist for a day—working on your art, managing your art career, even undertaking extrastudio activities—is a gift.
Artists often want to focus on studio work—most of us probably became artists because of the pleasures of creativity and discovery. But there is much more to being an artist, and rather than disparage the extrastudio work—the unending grant applications, the mounting rejection letters, the mindless schlepping—I thought about being grateful for it. There are countless other things competing for our attentions—but we choose to be artists, and therefore the activities we engage in are of our volition and intention.
A few points of reference come to mind:
Lee Pembleton, in my interview with Earthbound Moon for Art Practical, said,
We pour our resources in to the work. Of course, it is not a suffering work, but an ecstatic one.
The Artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius, is about finding pleasure, satisfaction, purpose, and happiness in one’s work. I won’t give away the ending, but I will say that there are spoken words in this nearly silent film, and they are of lasting import to me.
Yes, there is little pleasure in schlepping. But perhaps I can approach this work, in all of its facets, however transcendent or mundane, exciting or tedious, in terms of finding satisfaction and purpose. From that perspective, the ability to be an artist—the capacity and circumstances—are delights in themselves.
Want inspiration? Watch these feature-length films.
Bill Cunningham New York
Directed by Richard Press (2010)
[Visit the official site or watch the trailer.]
Portrait of the bike-riding, Carnegie-Hall-residing, NY Times street fashion photographer. A real photographer and egalitarian. Made me want to go out and shoot hundreds of photos, and aspire to be unflappable of character and constantly amazed at life.
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The Artist
Directed by Michel Hazanavicius (2011)
[Visit the official site or watch the trailer.]
Heartbreakingly beautiful, symbolic, mostly-silent black-and-white movie about the rise and fall of stardom. A really potent, modern narrative about creative life and pride, brought to life with incredible cinematography, direction and acting (as well as great typography). I saw it yesterday and can’t wait to see it again.
I don’t know the source, but this meme has been making its way around the digital ‘hood, and it seems to bear sharing. Guideline #1 is on social comparison, which is correlated to unhappiness in people in general.
This is funny and dramatic because it’s framed negatively. I wonder if it would work positively?
R+D 