Right now, who knows when we will be able to safely gather to experience art together. But it will happen at some point. And we expect that there will be a tricky and confusing period where planning any kind of event feels touch-and-go, tenuous, and tentative. As artists, we’ll have to be able to make quick updates, shifts, or cancellations even more so than we might have before.

The COVID-19 pandemic is shaking the structure of the arts world in an incredibly painful way. People have lost their livelihoods. Institutions (especially the smaller, independent ones) face uncertain futures, and nobody knows what the future holds. Fractured Atlas recognizes the magnitude of loss, grief, and uncertainty that artists and the arts sector as a whole is feeling right now. We also recognize that there is an opportunity for us to build new, more equitable structures.

Since 2017, Fractured Atlas member The Artist Co-op has sought to provide creatives with an affordable coworking and community-building space specifically for them. Located in midtown Manhattan, members and guests can access desks, rehearsal space, and events at multiple membership tiers. Or, at least, ordinarily they could.

dropshift dance, founded and operated by Andrea Cerniglia, is a “provocative, inquisitive, and authoritative investigator of movement. Based in Chicago, dropshift uses visual art, and music composition in addition to dance in order to “engage viewers in a visual, aural, and human experience...to explode the definition of dance performance and move audiences towards a transformative experience.”

Fractured Atlas tries to be transparent about How We Work. Especially when it comes to the transition we made to becoming a fully distributed team. Over three years, we slowly wound down the number of people coming into our Manhattan office, and in late 2019, we fully flipped the switch. Here’s what it looked like for us to transition to a virtual team. Even in our own team, we’ve seen that people approach virtual working differently. With the freedom to organize our days outside of an office, we’ve each had to find out what kinds of schedules work for us, how to recharge during the day, and how to organize our workspaces. There’s a lot of information out there about how to make working from home work for you, but we know first-hand that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.

In an unpredictable world, artists need to get in the regular habit of inventorying and documenting your work. That way, if an emergency hits, you’re better prepared to get relief.

On March 12, in the early phases of national lockdowns in the United States, a Google Doc with resources for freelance artists started making the rounds. It had links to information and resources for freelancers who were getting their jobs cancelled because of COVID-19, including emergency funding. Like other Google Docs that serve an immediate need at the right time, it exploded. The document crashed and its creators quickly shifted the Google Doc to a website. Since then, its creators have become a temporary collective, the Freelance Artist Resource Producing Collective.

For software developers, as with all kinds of newly remote workers, the adjustment to working from home comes in phases. The first phase is making sure that everyone has the right computers, apps, and programs to complete the functions of their job and to communicate with one another. Then comes a whole new set of questions. How do you know what you and your colleagues are supposed to be doing? How do you feel connected to your colleagues? How do you update your infrastructure to be cloud-based rather than dependent on a physical server?

As an artist or an arts organization, you are likely inviting people to events, whether physical or virtual. You want people to attend your play, artist talk, workshop, or screening. In order to sell or distribute tickets (or even register RSVPs) ahead of time, you need a ticketing app.

It’s challenging to keep track of all of the people who are invested in your work as an artist. Who attended your last performance? Who donated to your most recent crowdfunding campaign? How much did they pitch in? Plenty of artists keep track of this crucial information in an ad-hoc, manual way. For example, manually inputting email signups from events into a big spreadsheet or by cross-referencing your email inbox with your crowdfunding platform. While it might be tempting to keep muddling through out of habit, we recommend finding a way to consolidate this information in one useful place.