Gavilán Rayna Russom has spent most of her life in the nightlife scene. Nightlife is how she has found community, refined her politics, earned a living as a musician and a DJ, and gained a deeper understanding of herself as an embodied being. Her work “fuses theory with expression, nightlife with academia and spirituality with everyday life.” She not only uses synthesizers but also uses synthesis as a structuring principle of her work, "weaving together highly differentiated strands of information and creative material into cogent expressive wholes."

Stock photography is not generally known for being an innovative field. When we think of stock photography we might think of women laughing alone with salads or awkward photos of white businessmen pointing at things.

Building and maintaining a website as an artist can be daunting. It’s a lot of work, especially if you aren’t naturally inclined to digital space, digital creation, or marketing yourself. It might be so daunting that you wonder if you need an artist website in the first place. So, why do it in the first place?

There is a lot of art-related work that just can’t happen in your home. You might need more space, more equipment, or a more professional atmosphere. When you come across those kinds of work, you’ll need to find a studio space. You might just need an extra space for a few hours for a photoshoot or private dance class. You might need to rent space weekly to host meetings or rehearsals. Or, you might need to pay rent on a fully-fledged studio space where you can come and go as you please.

Denise Shanté Brown didn’t always know that her life’s work would be at the intersection of well-being and design. Through her thesis work in Social Design for her Master’s degree at the Maryland Institute College of Art, she saw not only the ways that Black women are excluded from decisions about their own health and well-being, but that Black women were able to create their own structures of healing and community. The research process became a healing process for her, as well as a way to explore manifestations of both systemic inequality and resilience in its face.

Every month, Fractured Atlas provides a list of upcoming grant opportunities for artists and arts-based projects so that you can discover more opportunities to get financial support for your work. As a fiscal sponsor of 4000+ artistic projects, we provide access to grants for artists in every discipline.

Things are growing at Crenshaw Dairy Mart. When we spoke with two of its three founders, alexandre dorriz and noé olivas, they had been gardening and building some new work benches at the space and the sunflowers were blooming. There’s new growth happening all over and around the Mart, located in Inglewood in Los Angeles. It is a gallery, community space, and shared studio space for artists.

Selling your artwork can be an important revenue stream for you as an artist. It can help you support your work, spread the word to new audiences, and grow your practice overall. Within the context of capitalism, it can also be a way of legitimizing your work. If people will pay for work, it might be perceived as more valuable. If you’re an artist who wants to sell you work, one of the first challenges you’ll encounter is figuring out how much to charge for it. Trying to figure out pricing for each individual piece in an ad hoc way can be exhausting and stressful. We recommend building yourself a system or framework to help you price your work. If you’re selling work, you need to know why you’re pricing a piece the way you are. That way, you can move forward with more confidence and ease.

When you’re looking for support for your artwork, you’ll need to think broadly about the kind of support you need. You’ll probably be fundraising, which might entail crowdfunding, applying for grants, building a sustaining donor base, or even exploring corporate partnerships. Building the support structure for your creative practice is about more than just bringing in cold hard cash. It’s about building a community of people who are invested in your work, and who are able to help you bring your work from vision to reality.

The Fractured Atlas team reviews well over 500 grants from fiscally sponsored projects every year. Whenever one of our fiscally sponsored projects uses us as a fiscal sponsor in a grant application, we review that grant application. We have a full grant review request procedure that our team uses to ensure that our fiscally sponsored projects submit strong grant applications when seeking funding.