Not every artist has the luxury of making art whenever inspiration strikes. Most artists are juggling other jobs – sometimes full-time jobs – plus other responsibilities like taking care of children or elders. It can be hard to find time to make your work, or to justify spending time on your creative endeavors. As a fiscal sponsor and artist membership organization, Fractured Atlas is dedicated to providing artists with tools and information to help you find more time and energy to do your artwork. We want more artists to make more work. Even when things are bad, we need art and we need artists. Plus, as artists ourselves, we feel the struggle between our creative work, our careers, and the rest of our lives!

It’s not easy for anyone to talk about money.

Someone recently asked me, “When do you think we can start pushing our teams to achieve pre-pandemic performance levels again, I mean, it’s been five months?” This past March in North America a giant remote work experiment began for many as an Adrenaline-fueled sprint. Organizations raced to get workers set up with home offices, stores sold out of computer monitors and tablets, and internet providers were inundated with rush requests to set up new or upgraded access. Coworkers helped each other learn how to use Zoom, access files on the physical server still located in their office, and move money without the ability to access check stock. The thought for many was, “let’s hunker down for a bit until this blows over. We’ll see each other back in the office in a few weeks, maybe a month or two, tops.” That moment feels like it was a lifetime ago.

It is with a mixture of sadness and profound thanks that we say farewell to Shawn Anderson and Pallavi Sharma later this month. After nearly a year of planning and preparation, Shawn and Pallavi will be departing Fractured Atlas on August 31 to pursue new opportunities and new challenges. With their departure, the four-person shared, non-hierarchical leadership team will become a two-person leadership team. Lauren Ruffin and Tim Cynova will stay on in their co-CEO roles, continuing to guide the organization and engaging in the exploration of new structures of leadership and decision-making begun several years ago.

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.

So much of what seemed impossible this time last year is now happening. Police abolition is part of the mainstream discourse, all of the jobs that we were told couldn’t happen without an office might be remote permanently, and the buses in NYC are now all free. The Overton window has shifted dramatically for a number of issues over the past few months. So much more is on the table, and collectively we can all recognize new places for our society to become less racist, less transphobic, less classist, less ableist, and more equitable overall.

Michael Lawrence-Riddell is an experienced educator. During his 20 year career, he has taught middle school math, social studies, and language arts. He has taught in elementary, middle, and high schools, and is the recipient of the Pioneer Valley Excellence in Teaching Award from the Harold Grinspoon Foundation and the Fellowship for Entrepreneurship in Education from Mount Holyoke College.

Rev. Moose is well-connected in the music industry nationally and globally. As the co-founder and managing partner of Marauder, a boutique music marketing firm, he helps artists and cultural export offices break into the US market. He helps them book shows, conferences, and festivals and gain radio airplay. As he describes it, “Most of my role is being able to not just talk to people about how the American market works, but also try to help connect people in ways that are going to be beneficial for their career. So a lot of times that's utilizing the relationships that we already have and trying to build new relationships with different people.” Marauder also runs Independent Venue Week in the U.S., which is an annual marketing campaign to highlight independent music venues. As Marauder was gearing up for Independent Venue Week 2020, South by Southwest cancelled. Then all venues started shutting down.

Artists often need help with money. It’s not because artists are necessarily bad with money, it’s just that money tends to be extra complicated for creatives. You might be balancing multiple freelance jobs, running a small business, hiring freelancers yourself, processing tickets and donations, renting equipment, and juggling multiple recurring payments for tools like fiscal sponsorship, a website, and more.

Art can shape public opinion by giving an audience insight into different lives, cultures, experiences, and viewpoints. That’s why Michael McCray includes a film festival as part of the annual, Washington, D.C. gathering for whistleblowers and their allies: the Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival.