Artists At Work (AAW)

My company, THE OFFICE performing arts + film, is an independent curator and production company based in New York and London. We work in ongoing partnerships with festivals, venues, institutions, and municipalities to create cultural programming across artistic disciplines that is inclusive, accessible, and mission driven, and we produce international public art projects of social importance. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its profound impacts on artists and the creative economy as a whole, we are launching the initiative Artists At Work (“AAW”): a public-private partnership inspired by the Depression-era WPA that is designed to provide artists and institutions with the resources to continue to make and present work, and also to integrate artists into community-based social impact initiatives to use art to promote healthy communities. The aim is to sustain the cultural sector and benefit society at large during the immediate health and economic crisis and its aftermath.

THE OFFICE is committed to providing opportunities for artists to create meaningful work, and to making that work available to the widest possible audience. Art is crucial as both the emotional and spiritual sustenance of humanity and as an important driver of dynamic local and national economies. Our work lies at the intersection of these two aspects of art’s place in society.  The problem we are committed to solving with the AAW is the catastrophic effect of COVID-19 on artists’ livelihoods (income opportunities disappearing for reasons related to public health concerns), on arts institutions (losing funding and income for the same reasons), and on the creative sector at large. AAW will elevate humanity by ensuring that art will survive and thrive--by helping to rescue art and artists during and after the pandemic.  It will also foster healthy communities by integrating artists into social impact and public health initiatives. 

The scale of the devastation the pandemic is wreaking on the cultural sector is still evolving, but it mirrors that of the economy as a whole. A crucial distinction about how artists and other workers in the creative economy are impacted is that most artists are independent contractors with fewer options for financial support in a time of crisis and less access to healthcare than many other categories of workers. More than 5 million people in the United States work in arts and culture related jobs. 

https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/03/american-culture-arts-economic-impact-employment-data-gdp/585733/

Beyond the cultural economy, arts presenters and institutions (theaters, museums, cinemas, etc) create strong economic impacts on other industries, including hospitality (hotels, restaurants and bars, etc), tourism, law, accounting, and many others. The AAW utilizes a scalable model for addressing the needs of a potentially large number of artists and culture workers and arts institutions throughout the country, which will impact local and regional economies more broadly beyond the culture sector. The program also helps artists give back to their communities by embedding them in social impact initiatives that address issues like mental health, prison reform, food justice, poverty and substance abuse, and suicide prevention. 

AAW puts participating artists working across all artistic disciplines on a living wage salary for one year with healthcare benefits to support them as they make new work. Participating artists will bring their work to the public, and also contribute to a social impact initiative local to their community during the term of their employment. Each artist is also hosted by a cultural organization in their region; these organizations receive funding to hire administrators for the program. AAW has a public-private funding model that combines foundation, private, and federal dollars, and is designed to inject health into the cultural sector. Like the WPA, AAW will result in thousands of new works of art; those works, and the collaborative projects with social impact initiatives in local communities, will benefit society long after our current surreal period has passed. These will include public art installations as well as works of theater, dance, literature, film and video, photography and music, all born of the moment, that will become part of our cultural heritage––a positive legacy blossoming from this singularly disruptive, paradigm-shifting global event.

The primary community that AAW works to directly and meaningfully improve is the creative community: artists working across all artistic disciplines, and the venues and presenting organizations that help to bring artists’ work to the public. With the pandemic effectively eliminating many artists’ and institutions’ means for earning income, the entire cultural economy is in freefall. AAW aims to put a significant number of artists on payroll at living wage salaries to continue to make work, which will also give them access to healthcare and unemployment benefits at the end of the program. AAW aims to boost the overall cultural sector and the diverse categories of workers that are part of and ancillary to it (from ushers, sound engineers, janitors, bartenders, and electricians employed by venues, to restaurants and other businesses that are positively impacted by cultural events, to the lawyers and accountants and managers and others artists hire) by shoring up arts institutions and giving artists opportunities to continue to make work. AAW will also foster connections between the creative class and community members in need by embedding artists in social impact initiatives geared toward addressing societal problems like mental health, food justice, youth at risk, and substance abuse.

AAW is intended to treat artists as workers, whose contributions to society are valued and supported in the ways other categories of workers’ are. This would represent a shift in understanding of artists’ place in society. Art is often considered  a luxury by policymakers and in emergency and relief funding conversations--something made by elites and consumed by elites as a fanciful and expendable aspect of society. But art is integral to how we live--it's a powerful engine for economic development, and artists contribute so much to the economic, social, and intellectual resilience of every community in the country.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, THE OFFICE as a business was confronted with urgent practical crisis management--canceling and rescheduling many events with our partner institutions, and thinking through with them strategies for weathering the contractions in our industry as institutions closed their doors and layoffs began to happen. As we engaged in this work, and planned our own path forward through these uncertain times, we began to think about how we could help our community survive, get back to work, and build more sustainable and equitable ways of operating in the future. AAW was born of our conviction that artists are the messengers who will lead us into that future––their work will help us to understand our new world; their creativity and inspirations will both express and allow us to maintain our humanity through trials that feel inconceivable. The world is being remade by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the America we will all re-emerge into after the immediate health crisis is weathered will be a new landscape, both economically and culturally. What will that look like, and how will we thrive? Art and artists will illuminate the path forward. AAW will ensure that they are able to do that.

THE OFFICE performing arts + film develops, produces, and presents art that makes a difference. We work in deep partnership with artists across all disciplines who strive in their practice to illuminate and advance causes that move them, and with presenting organizations that bring meaningful work to the public. 

As we have watched COVID-19 unravel our community of artists, and the society’s response fail to protect the upholders of its cultural heritage, we have found not only a challenge but an opportunity: to create a new model for sustaining the arts in our society and, in turn, help our society to be sustained by the arts.

Throughout our work, we endeavor to create spaces for art to do the things we know it’s so uniquely good at doing: to uplift and inspire, to explain and reveal, to entertain, to challenge and hold to account, and to act as a catalyst for meaningful change. We cannot afford to let the invaluable resource of artists fall subject to the vulnerability of traditional funding models and the economic structures around them.

THE OFFICE performing arts + film is uniquely positioned to develop, produce, and administer this new initiative. For decades, we have worked across many disciplines, institutions, and artists, developing a unique perspective and finding strategies to solve the problems that unite them.  

Our staff is a diverse group of curators and producers born in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s with an enormous collective wealth of experience in professional arts development and a wide range of perspectives and life experiences, all of which we bring to bear in developing strategies for cultural initiatives of every incarnation. Through this diversity of perspectives and experience throughout the cultural sector, we have a singularly broad and deep insight into how the arts intersect, with each other and with society as a whole. 

Our deep relationships across the philanthropic, creative, and administrative sectors of artistic production in the US and abroad has brought us face to face with the many challenges of creating works of art and sustaining working artists. No organization brings a similar set of capacities, perspectives, and values to the challenge of keeping the arts alive and thriving through the current moment and into the future.

Throughout our history, we have been engaged by diverse cultural institutions to overcome their communities’ expansive social challenges with innovative artistic initiatives. 

BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! was conceived in 1979 to transform Brooklyn’s historic Prospect Park, which had deteriorated as budget cuts and the broader effects of urban neglect took their toll across the city. After years of diminishing returns, THE OFFICE was brought in to revive the festival, reconceptualizing its programmatic identity to help new audiences feel safe and at home in their borough’s backyard. The renewed popularity of the program encouraged funding for a $3 million reconstruction, and the festival has been a community staple in a reinvigorated Prospect Park ever since.

Similarly, THE OFFICE began working with MASS MoCA in 1999, conceptualizing and implementing a performing arts program to support the museum’s mission to revitalize its economically depressed community. 

The most recent obstacle THE OFFICE has faced is the COVID-19 crisis, during which we have seen our industry uprooted, colleagues furloughed, and partners diminished.  As arms of our business have gone up in smoke, we have responded characteristically, not only pivoting and surviving but developing the AAW to bring our community up with us into the uncertain future.

The task of building a coalition of support for monumental art projects is a lesson in effective leadership. Throughout THE OFFICE’s history as creative producers, we have unified cross-sections of funders, presenters, and commissioners around the visions of artists with messages to share, leading collaboratively between disparate communities. We lead by foregrounding common values, between governments, foundations, private donors, and artists themselves, to make work of impact and pride among all contributors.

One of our earliest successes, and most representative of our leadership style, was South African composer Philip Miller’s REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony, a commemoration of South Africa’s postapartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Hailed by Desmond Tutu as “so much more than a concert… a wonderful vehicle for telling our history and a contribution to nation building,” REwind toured the world, sharing powerful voices of protest and reconstruction with diverse audiences.

America, at the epicenter of crisis and many economic uncertainties, is positioned now more than ever for innovation and change at a large scale. AAW has grown from innovation through an unexpected occurrences (COVID-19) causing a change in perception. The deeply-rooted systemic social and economic inequalities in the US have been brought to harsh light in the American government's handling of COVID-19, pushing American citizens to think more honestly and carefully about the values our society is founded upon. The unemployment rate is at 24% as of June 3, and corporations and banks have received more assistance from the government than small businesses, individuals, and community NGOs, who continue to struggle each day without work. COVID-19 has brought public scrutiny to our current systems, and grassroots movements everywhere are mobilizing for change. They see that the cultures that make our society what it is are disappearing, and at the root of those cultures are our artists. As communities remain on pause and individuals figure out how to pay rent, public opinion is shifting favorably towards funding for public programming and community organizations who will help them rebuild local culture, and support fair and equal pay for workers and underrepresented communities, including artists. The AAW project hopes to do just that in each community it is anchored in - to change the societal precedent of the ‘starving artist’ and use the impact of COVID-19 to inspire not just economic, but ongoing cultural policy change for arts workers throughout the nation.

In the pilot program, we are serving 6 artists, and 6 cultural institutions plus stakeholders and community members at 6 social impact organizations, in a community whose population totals 124,944 as of 2019.

In one year, we are planning to roll out to a second regional hub area and those numbers are planned to rise to 36 artists additional, 12 cultural institutions, and 12 community organizations. 

After five years, we plan to have worked in 14 regions across the USA with each region expanding to 18 additional artists, 6 cultural institutional, and 6 community organizations all across the United States.

The direct beneficiaries of the program are measurable, but the indirect service to communities across the country, and impact on policy for American artists, is one of exponential impact we will only begin to truly see the effects of in decades to come.

In the next year, we aim to implement the AAW with pilot programs in the following regions:  Western Massachusetts, Miami-Dade County, Florida, Northwest Arkansas, Appalachia, and New York City. In Western Massachusetts, we have confirmed partners and funding, and are focused on implementing the program this summer. In the remaining regions, we have identified potential partners and are in the planning stages of a rollout. 

Our five-year goal is to expand the model into a sustainable project across the United States, adapting with best practices gathered during our pilot period. Using core success metrics of jobs created and public programs implemented , we will continue to build grassroots support among government, nonprofit, and private partners around the sustainability of the creative economy.

In many ways, the AAW is a culmination of THE OFFICE program at large: leveraging the ingenuity of artists to create healthy communities. Our goals for the years ahead include expanding the programs we have developed over the past decades, from programming MASS MoCA and Celebrate Brooklyn with the intention of building new audiences, to producing socially impactful works of art from our frequent collaborators, William Kentridge, Carrie Mae Weems, and Angelique Kidjo. 

The primary barriers that exist between us and full implementation of the AAW are financial and cultural. 

The cultural barriers to implementing our vision are rooted in misconceptions around the value of art in our society. Most immediately visible in the US government’s $2 trillion stimulus for the economy during the COVID-19 crisis containing a disproportionately low allowance of $250 million for arts organizations, nationwide. This amount was denounced by ambassador Nikki Haley as having been better spent for those who actually need it, perpetuating the myth of art as welfare for elites.

The funding to implement the AAW on an impactful scale requires the cross-sector participation of governments, nonprofit foundations, and private individuals. This challenge is also a central opportunity: creating a sustainable model for cultural funding that interweaves and centralizes multiple revenue streams will be a monumental achievement with implications beyond our program.  A big vision can’t be actualized by a small group of people. Our success depends on many actors taking up the mantle of citizens in our culture and working collaboratively to support the arts.

THE OFFICE expects to be raising money for the next two years around the AAW, which will go hand in hand with cultivating partnerships for national awareness, spreading information about and lending credence to the societal impact of the arts.

We have secured funding, applied to many grants, funds, local, regional, and federal agencies under the objective of supporting workers and developing the economy. The hybridity of our approach, leveraging a cross section of nonprofits, for-profits, individualis, and governments, allows us to make fundraising core to our mission: representing the permeation of art’s impact throughout our fragmented cultural economy. We are uniquely positioned to avoid the legal and organizational bottlenecks of the current nonprofit arts funding system, which will allow us to pull together funding from multiple sources.

Through spreading awareness of the program among funders of renown, we see an opportunity to craft data-driven, resonant public messaging about the value of the arts and public outcomes from their cultivation in communities nationwide.

We are working with International Storytelling Center, Cities Rise, and Sundance Institute on the organization of the AAW.

Additionally, we are engaging MASS MoCA, Hancock Shaker Village, Jacob's Pillow, Institute for the Musical Arts, Images Cinema, and The Mount as pilot partners in Western Massachusetts.

We are also engaged with our core institutional partners to advise and help implement. These partners are the American Museum of Natural History, BRIC, Williams College, MASS MoCA, Sundance Institute, Freshgrass, and the New York Jewish Film Festival.

In a very direct and practical sense, AAW will provide value to the communities it serves by giving long-term, stable income and healthcare to artists, 62% of whom are currently technically unemployed in the US, and nearly all of whom have suffered extreme negative impacts on their earning potential from the disruptions to the culture sector brought by COVID-19. AAW gives artists the opportunity to continue to work as artists, and gives dignity to that work by honoring it as essential to the functioning of a healthy commonwealth. AAW also provides value to arts institutions and organizations through both direct funding and, in many ways more crucially, by creating opportunities for them to  support artists and to present new work--key functions which have been largely taken away by the pandemic. The project also integrates artists into their communities in meaningful ways through participation in local social impact initiatives. The relationships these engagements will foster can create sustainable collaborations between artists and local communities. The mechanisms AAW establishes to support artists and arts organizations and to integrate them more deeply into communities are designed to lift up the culture sector as a whole, as it recovers and reimagines the place of the arts in society. This effort of reimagining is a profound undertaking: the cultural landscape will be permanently altered by COVID-19, and how we rebuild, and whether we can do so with more just and equitable systems in place, will be crucial to both artists and the communities they serve. 

THE OFFICE has a successful financial history of integrated service subsidization, showing a substantial $3.5 million increase in revenues from 2009 to 2019. While operating as an S-corp and not a non-profit, we are highly committed to the integration of social values throughout our business model. Our stability has been built upon existing client relationships, which allow us to pursue broad, wide-reaching projects. Through our producers’ unique networks in the cross-section of the cultural sector and the entertainment business, THE OFFICE has built a multi-year contract client base with renowned institutions such as BRIC Arts Media, MASS MoCA, Williams College, The American Museum of Natural History, Sundance Institute, and more. This, in addition to continuous one-time consulting jobs, creates a steady, stable stream of revenue which has allowed for staff increases and raises in the past five years. In those years, we have increased our revenue by over $2.5 million by expanding our services to include large-scale event producing. Many of our largest productions have been solely produced and funded through the efforts of THE OFFICE from individual donations, grants, and sponsorships. Several examples include William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load, which has toured internationally for the past 3 years with a 50-person company and multiple event budgets, the most recent which totaled nearly $1 million in fundraising for Johannesburg performances in 2020, and Angelique Kidjo’s Yemandja: A Story of Africa which has been co-commissioned by Emerson College and The Kennedy Center.

Within the past 12 months, THE OFFICE has raised $550,000 from foundations; $70,000 from co-commissioners, $202,000 from sponsorships and $100,000 from individuals. These funds are used to support projects such as William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load at the Joburg Theatre, South Africa (originally scheduled for May 2020, now postponed to 2021); Angelique Kidjo’s Yemandja: A Story of Africa, currently in the creation and fundraising stage; and our AAW pilot program in Massachusetts launching in July 2020. 

For the AAW pilot, we have raised $150,000; the funds will be used over a six month period from July 1 to December 31, 2020. Funding sources include: $100,000 grant from Freshgrass Public Foundation, $50,000 from individual donations through Hancock Shaker Village, expected July 2020.

We are currently sourcing additional funds from grants, private and public partnerships, sponsorships, and individuals.

Performances of William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load at the Joburg Theatre in May 2020:

$950,000 budget; $702,000 currently raised

$450,000 raised through foundational support; received in Dec 2019

$202,000 raised through sponsorship efforts; portions received in January, April, and June 2020

$50,000 raised through individual donations; received March 2020

Further fundraising was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, pushing back performances to 2021. 

Angelique Kidjo’s Yemandja, currently in the creation and fundraising stage with an expected 2021 premiere:

$400,000 budget; $70,000 currently raised

$70,000 raised through co-commissioning presenters; received in November 2019

We are currently sourcing the remaining funds from grants, private and public partnerships, sponsorships, and individuals.

In the next five to ten years, we hope to increase the reach of the Artists At Work program to a national level in as many regions and states as possible throughout the US. The budget for the project is flexible, and depending on the amount of money raised could be scaled up or down, with a current maximum budget of $5.5 million. This model would include six regions, six hubs per region (i.e impactful local non-profits) with a maximum of three artists hosted at each hub - totaling 108 artists. Other models could range from $250,000 for a 6 month rollout with one artist per hub, $500,000 for a year long roll out with one artist per hub, to $1 million for a year long roll out with two artists per hub. On a regional level, we hope to roll out these programs via sustained funding opportunities through local foundations, and regional governmental support through state departments that support local economic growth and workforce expansion programs. On a national level, we are aiming to acquire sponsorships with locally relevant and impactful companies who have a commitment to supporting arts and culture in the US. We also hope to obtain sustained support from the federal government by partnering with local regional policy makers to increase federal culture and arts funding across the US - especially in underserved and economically underdeveloped areas.

The Elevate Prize will enable the AAW to expand and flourish. The financial support would allow THE OFFICE to support a full-time administrative staff for two years, taking us through a successful rollout and laying the groundwork for long-term sustainability. The stamp of approval will also provide momentum and viability for our project, encouraging a chain of support that will be crucial to create sustainable impact.

Much of the intention behind AAW lies with its ability to transform ways of thinking about the value art and artists bring to the societies they work in. Connection to effective consultation with data experts will be paramount to the achievement of that goal, evaluating results to ensure the model outlives this particular initiative.

Furthermore, marketing, media, and exposure will serve this imperative with a broad messaging campaign to help the public understand our work and the work of artists in their communities.

As the AAW progresses, we hope to involve several varieties of partner:

Cultural Hubs - institutions of regional impact that can assist with identifying local artists and implementing programs

Social Impact Initiatives - organizations working to better their communities, particularly around community mental health, suicide prevention, at-risk youth, and food insecurity, for whom creative artwork will augment the impact and audience of their message

Funding Partners - public foundations, family foundations, corporate sponsors who connect with our message and understand the value of artists to the work they do