If you are a manager who had to rapidly transition to remote work and then learn how to sustain virtual work for an indeterminate amount of time, you’ve likely felt some pressure and uncertainty. How do you keep your team on track during a pandemic? How do you let them know that they really can take time to care for themselves and loved ones? How can you make sure that you know what your team is working on without micromanaging them?

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.

Creative projects require money. You need money to rent space, hire collaborators, purchase supplies, print programs, contract web designers, and more. As an artist, you can fund your work by applying for grants, many of which will require you to be a 501(c)(3) or find a fiscal sponsor like us. You can also raise money by crowdfunding.

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.

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.

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.