On this blog, we share a variety of tips and tools to help support artists in your creative practices, from managing the nuts and bolts of a creative life (what’s a contract, after all?) to building better economies for artists (we’re big fans of cooperatives). Here are some of our favorite tips and tool articles from 2021.

To create art, you need materials and tools. For the most DIY of us, we can find some of those materials and tools around our homes. But the rest of us will need to source tools, equipment, and materials to make our work.

Leonie Bell’s theater project was born in 2020 and named after a woman she saw on television who was identified simply as “Local Grandma. This LOCAL GRANDMA, located in Brooklyn, is a “theater project devoted to rigorous play, communal care-taking, and causing a ruckus. LOCAL GRANDMA produces live performances and seeks out genre-, medium-, and culture-bending collaborations.”

Fiscal sponsorship is an important tool for artists, arts organizations, and creatives looking to fundraise to support your work.

Rachel Karp, Sarah Gabrielli, and Jen McGinty all found lesbian bars to be important spaces to them as they came into their own as queer adults. As Rachel puts it, it was “safe and validating and thrilling all at the same time.”

Every month, Fractured Atlas provides a list of upcoming grants and opportunities for artists and arts-based projects so that you can discover more opportunities to get financial support and other resources for your work. As a fiscal sponsor of over 3,000 artistic projects, we provide access to grants for artists in every discipline.

Neither my coworker Sophia Park nor I expected our first time as Fractured Atlas hiring managers to be such a heady experience.

The past few years have given us collectively a great deal to think about in terms of problems with our workplace cultures. Big unionization drives across sectors have gotten us to think about exploitative workplace conditions, the mass shift to remote work and the haphazard move to hybrid work have encouraged us to think about communication norms and boundaries, the George Floyd uprisings showed in new relief how racism and white supremacy show up in our workplaces.

Marcus Henderson is a new father with all of the attendant responsibilities, hopes, and dreams for his family. He wants to take care of his family, make sure that they get the right kinds of opportunities, and do his part to honor those that came before him. A few months ago, Henderson stepped up to take the role of the New York City Father of the House of LaBeija, which has over fifty members across generations. The House of LaBeija is a ballroom house full of queer, BIPOC members who compete in balls in competitions like voguing, share their lives together, and support one another when they face challenges.

At Fractured Atlas, we are dedicated to helping our community of artists and arts organizations get the resources you need in order to bring your vision to life. Often, this means fundraising.