At Fractured Atlas, we want artists to have the right tools to help you best support your creative practice - whether that’s by providing a fundraising platform and a way to apply to more grants, or by sharing the ultimate guide to fundraising for artists. We want you to have the tools you need so that you can focus on realizing your unique creative vision.

During a crisis, the impulse is to help. But it’s hard to know where to start. In the case of the coronavirus pandemic, you might be pulled in a number of different directions. Should you donate to the staff funds for the coffee shops, bars, bookstores, movie theaters, and nightclubs that you would ordinarily be visiting? Should you donate to the big national fundraisers or to small, local, specific ones? Should you focus on food security or making sure that essential workers have enough PPE to keep themselves safe? How many voicemails should you leave for your political representatives?

It is frustrating and sad to have to cancel shows and performances for the sake of public safety. You might have had to cancel your first solo show, and MFA show, or your directorial debut. Not being able to gather in person for shows or performances is emotionally challenging, and also logistically challenging. You’ll have to work through contracts, payouts, and vendors to cancel a show with as little fallout as possible.

On Thursday, April 16, only a few weeks after small businesses (and the big businesses that found the right loopholes) started applying for loans through the $349 billion Payment Protection Program, the funds dried up. Because freelancers and independent contractors didn’t get to start applying until April 10, they have been especially left behind by this first round of aid. Amidst very deep frustration and confusion about what comes next, there’s a bit of hope. It looks like more funding is on the way for small businesses and independent contractors.

One of the most amazing things about today’s artistic world is how collaboration can happen across borders; both state borders and societal ones. People who might never have met have the opportunity to work together toward beauty, inspiration, justice, peace—and pure creative exploration. Tools to facilitate collaboration unbounded by geographic location are increasingly ubiquitous in our everyday life.

At Fractured Atlas, we try to be transparent about How We Work. Especially when it comes to the transition we made to becoming a fully distributed team. We slowly wound down the number of people coming into our Manhattan office, and as of 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 flying around about how to make working from home work for you, but we know first-hand that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.

Carrie Isaacman is founder of Shakespeare Sports Theatre Company, a New York City-based project that incorporates the technique of 'Unrehearsed Shakespeare' using scrolls. Carrie has been a member of Fractured Atlas for two years and her project currently has an active fundraising campaign for a production of Hamlet. Carrie shares some of her process of infusing the Shakespearean tradition of using actor scrolls in performance and how she hopes that translates into present-day theatre production.

With over half of the global population under lockdown, it is no wonder that the coronavirus pandemic has been broadly characterized as an indiscriminate, universal threat to humanity. Media outlets continue to highlight infections among young people, healthy celebrities, and prominent leaders from all over the world in an effort to show that the virus knows no boundaries. However, while the “all in this together” narrative appeals to our need for solidarity in times of distress, it also runs the risk of erasing vast and inequitable differences in how people are experiencing the crisis. After all, the virus may not discriminate, but capitalism, racism, and classism sure as hell do. For people of color in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic has only deepened existing inequities.

Every month, Fractured Atlas provides a list of upcoming grant opportunities for artists and arts-based projects. As a fiscal sponsor of 4000+ artistic projects, we provide access to grants for artists in every discipline. Are you new to grant-seeking? You should check out our grants webinar. If you're ready to apply (and you aren't already fiscally-sponsored), learn more about our fiscal sponsorship program here. If you are fiscally-sponsored, be sure to review our grant application process. Here are the upcoming opportunities for April 2020.

I can’t remember a time when art seemed more crucial to our collective survival.