Artist Resources, Grants for Artists, Creative Projects, Making Money for Artists

Hold up. Gig work is work? We know this news may come as a shock to some readers. Unless you’re an artist, in which case you are intimately familiar with the hidden costs, expectations, and contradictions of 1099 work. Like many other unacceptable realities of American living, the financial precarity of gig workers has been normalized in day-to-day life and entrenched in our laws. But there are growing networks of people working to change this reality and offering promising visions for the future of gig work for artists. We’re here to bolster 1099 arts workers with a bundle of statistics, a not-so-secret stash of resources, and a heaping spoonful of hope:

If you’re anything like me, your least favorite thing of all time is talking about your work online. You’ve fantasized about having your The Devil Wears Prada moment and tossing your phone into a fountain. You delete and redownload social media apps like it’s an Olympic sport.

As we awaited the arrival of our second child, my wife and I decided that it was time to look for a house. We were renting a small, two-bedroom house that felt close to bursting at the seams with toys, clothes, and the equipment one accumulates when caring for a small child, so the prospect of squeezing in another baby felt a bit too much like a circus act. Plus our lease was running out and we really didn’t like our landlord (a story for another time).

Reader, is there anything more painful than driving over a jagged pothole? The crunch of your spine, the desperate prayers for your car’s suspension and steering, and of course, a profound shame for not avoiding the pothole in the first place. Now imagine driving down a beat up backroad, no streetlights, with nothing to guide you and your poor steed to safety except your murky intuition. This is how a lot of us go into the grant application process — vaguely uneasy, completely lost, and proceeding valiantly into a mysterious void (i.e. the review panel). But what if you had a cheat sheet, a map, with every pitfall illuminated by bright, flashing warning signs?

The way we are bringing artist opportunities to your attention is changing.

In the face of uncertainty, we often turn to leaders for wisdom, guidance, and strength. I don’t know about you, but there are plenty of people in positions of authority and influence right now who don’t inspire me — people who have betrayed their most vulnerable constituents, abandoned due process, and sunk to new levels of corruption and self-serving greed. If you’re asking yourself what leadership even means in a time like this, I can assure you that I’m right there with you: angry, confused, searching.

Many of us, myself included, were raised in a world where competing with the people around you is the norm — even when it leads us nowhere. Don’t get me wrong: I’m an incredibly competitive person at heart and have been forcibly removed from a number of casual board game groups. But when it comes to art, I believe that competition creates a false sense of scarcity among artists and keeps all of us hungry for the everyday magic of art.

You’re staring at the screen, your finger hovering over the submit button as you run through your application materials one last time — the artist statement you’ve rewritten seven (oh, wait…now eight) times, the project budget you’ve tweaked and retweaked, the work samples you’ve agonized over selecting. We’ve all hit submit with the same, well-worn mixture of hope and resignation.

As the summer rolls along, we catch wind of more artist opportunities coming down the pike. A gentle reminder to consider signing up for the weekly newsletter to stay updated on artist opportunities as we find them.

Craving attention, recognition, and validation for your work is a painfully relatable experience for most artists, especially those of us trying to make a living within the attention economy. It can take a lifetime to cultivate a marketing mindset, and the process often raises profound, unanswerable questions about the nature and boundaries of artmaking and attention. Who are we making art for, and why?