How do we live in a robust culture? How do we produce a robust culture at a time when we are fracturing, polarized, and creative enterprise is an afterthought?

Let's remind ourselves of where we are. If you look around, you see political fragility, economic uncertainty, and general unhappiness. That's depressing. That's the point. As a people, we ARE depressed. You don't look back at 2021, let alone what's going on now, and go, "it's a happy time." We're not happy and we have to face it. We've got essentially a global war, and a recession only partly driven by that war. We've got a big economic bubble. We have a politically fractured culture at a global level. Totalitarianism, never the friend of a creative culture, is coming back in vogue. We're at each other's throats. We're not happy. 

The beast is slouching toward Jerusalem. The earth is heating up. We're settling into (if we're lucky) a mere detente as two nations living in one national entity. Arguably, we began going in that direction in 1945 when we settled into the Cold War and that generated the Korean war, the Vietnam war, El Salvador... and we decided to live in a state of permanent animosity, driven by munitions manufacturers, the intelligence apparatus, and munitions and chemical industries that profit from it. There was a huge amount of money to be made. Those chemical makers clean your baby and make for a sparkling kitchen and they also do deforestation in Laos.

All of that to say that we're now in an understandable state of fragility when it comes to the role of creativity in our lives. We have a tenuous relationship with art.

We do not even now dream so much anymore. Our dreams are smaller. We don't dream of a world that flourishes and we haven't been given a mechanism to build better dreams. The material on CHF's site is basically an insistence that there is another path—that we're working to solve that problem in a robust way.

How do we get a robust and flourishing culture in the first place? That's the entrance to the conversation we are creating. As a culture, we tend to put creatives in a box. And even the goal of showcasing artists as essential workers and ensuring they're well-paid is not yet dreaming big enough. I think even those dreams are too small. I don't want to be a useful cog in someone's wheelhouse. I don't want to work for somebody because I have the skills. I want to work for somebody because without creative enterprise, we don't 'make it' as a culture.

We must move away from the merely theoretical lament toward a vision of doing something practical and economically powerful. Without that, We don't build a robust creative culture. We must build a road for artists to thrive, and creativity to flourish, and it has to be done at the economic and investment level.

Anything less creates the same problem we had all through the cold war, which is the starving artist syndrome. Only the 1% of artists can be famous and only those who know the right people and happen to gain the approval of the taste-makers can make any money. Everybody else is dirt poor and living on their cousins' sofas.

What we're doing at CHF isn't sexy in a theoretical way, but it's actionable and practical. We're asking people to dig deep into the thought process of how we get a culture that we want to live in. And we are starting from the premise that you don't get a robust creative culture without a thriving creative economy. 

I don't think we've widely connected the dots between these big questions—first, daring to ask them and then to dream of the ubiquitous, middle-class artist. How do you actually do it? What is the day-to-day? How do you actually implement it? And that's where we actually do have an answer.  

It starts at the mindset and knowledge level. We foster a conversation around art as a business, and we empower art-entrepreneurs with the business training all other industries require to flourish. We connect creative professionals through peer networks. We encourage and nurture pivotal projects that accelerate their careers, regardless of style. We train them in self-sustaining entrepreneurial practices. And we galvanize—not just artists but ourselves—into a movement with a pivotal aim which, at the risk of being repetitive, is a culture teeming with creative ingenuity and newly reliant on creative intelligence. All of CHF's programs, of which there are many, are devoted to these ends.

Can we really say this is not important? Are we willing to call it a pipe dream? If we settle for that, we get more of what we've got—more of what we've gotten over the past 70+ years. And really, that more is less. Much less.

In the midst of this. Old white guys like me think music sucks and art is mostly garbage. Some of us want to go back to 1984 and nothing any later than that. And even if you don't agree and you like modern, abstract expressionism and dig music from 2002, how do we get more of what we want—what any of us want? We get more by encouraging more of everything. By generating a robust dialogue, a conversation among artists that are actively thriving, economically empowered, independent, and not dependent on a small cadre of tastemakers. Regardless of what taste that is.

The most common answer I've heard is to sit and wait for government funding. 'The government needs to do more to save us. They need to bail us out. They need to have more programs.' Of course, I could be any elected official and stand up there and say, "We've got to create a thriving, creative economy. But that just gets one elected. Then, we go back to business as usual. 

Our fundamental divisions make the political sphere the least likely source of answers. And yet, we don't actually need to wait on a better Congress, a more interested President, a different governor. And we can't afford to.

No one's coming for us. We're on an island and the search has been called off. There are no planes or boats coming now, so what do you do? And either we build our own boat—ideally, a speedboat—not just an ark for preserving the minimum, or we're stuck here. 

That's where we are. And we can build it. We have the architecture for building that boat. So let's do that.

“We’re going to need more art—all of it—to solve the world’s challenging problems. Creative intelligence is what it takes to inject life into the culture, to drive effective leadership, to drive new ideas. We don’t have to choose. We can have one foot in the world of visceral taste and touch and another foot in the digital world without having to split ourselves in half.”

​​​​This is a bite-sized The Thriving Artist™podcast episode with a brief perspective on art news and cultural change. In the art news of The New York Times, a couple of headlines really stood out! The first one is 50 years of Taking Photography Seriously. The synopsis: When the Photographer's Gallery opened in London in 1971, few saw the medium as suitable for exhibitions. Today everyone does. The second article is Hands Off the Library's Picture Collection! The synopsis: Cornell Spiegelman and Warhol browse the famous collection of images in the New York Public Library. Now a century of serendipitous discovery will come to an end if the collection is closed off to the public. This episode is courtesy of Shirley Lemmon.

James D. Balestrieri is the Clark Hulings Foundation’s Writer-in-Residence. He is currently working on a new book on Hulings, Clark Hulings: Quantum Realist. Jim is the proprietor of Balestrieri Fine Arts, a consulting firm that specializes in catalogue research and arts writing, estate and collections management, and marketing and communications for museums and auctions. Jim has a BA from Columbia University, an MA in English from Marquette University, an MFA in Playwriting from Carnegie-Mellon, and was a Screenwriting Fellow at the American Film Institute. He served as Director of J.N. Bartfield Galleries in New York for 20 years and has published over 150 feature essays and reviews in a wide variety of national arts publications.

In this episode, Jim gives us an in-depth look at the themes of the upcoming Hulings book, and discusses how Clark Hulings’ career strategy applies to working artists today. Inspired by Hulings’ successes both within—and outside of—art tastemakers’ approval, Jim and Daniel question who gets to decide which artists matter, and how the canon does and does not serve the best interest of the arts, or artists. Hulings’ accomplishments, both as an artist and a small business owner, call to his deeper understanding of the dignity of work—from running a market stall to the act of making a living as a painter—as a way of belonging to the world.

A Painter of Work

• “Clark Hulings was an American artist. A realist—in a way. He began his career as a very successful illustrator in the golden age of illustration.”
• “The thing that sets him apart is the subject that he found, chose, and made his life’s work. His life’s work is depicting work. Working people in working situations—whether they’re farmers, laborers, whether it’s an urban setting, a village setting, or a rural setting. What he captured was working people at work, doing what they do. And that sets him apart from almost any other American realist of that time.”
• “Lots of people associate Clark with Western Art. [...] But really, the number of paintings he did that could be considered Western or Southwestern is miniscule compared to the numbers of paintings he did in Mexico and Europe. So there’s a whole idea that Elizabeth [Hulings] and I have talked about, which is repositioning Clark Hulings as an American Artist, and indeed, an international artist.”
• “[Hulings] doesn’t really give you a story. They’re not narrative paintings. He moves his easel painting as far from illustration as you can imagine. You see these people working and you wonder what they’re thinking, and what they’re like, and what their inner lives are. But he gives them their privacy.”

Travel Beyond Tourism

• “For Hulings, travel—and if you look at his paintings, you can see it—travel was a way for him to find places. I would use the word 'traditional places,' where the traditions of work and of life were on a long continuum. He seems to be very interested, not only in showing, ‘oh yeah, those women are washing clothes in a street today,’ but in showing that the place around them was a place that had been inhabited for a long time, so that what they were doing was on a long continuum of existence. A kind of deep time. And for those, you’ve got to travel.”
• “There's a whole tradition of travel painting where there are paintings of the famous places: paintings of Notre Dame, paintings of the Ponte Vecchio, paintings of this [or that]...That's not Clark Hulings is about. The first painting that really attracted me to his work is this small painting he did of Naples. And it's this narrow street. Narrow. You couldn't even get a car, one car down there, much less two. And there are deep shadows and the laundry is hanging across it. This is not the Amalfi Coast, this is not some famous resort.”
• “It's travel of a particular kind that really attracts him. In order to find the kinds of places that Clark Hulings wanted to find, you have to go down the roads that are not traveled. You have to get off the tourist path to see what he wanted to see, in order for him to paint what he wanted to paint.”

Manufactured Rivalries

• “There's a lot of misinformation about the rivalry between schools. You hear it all the time. ‘Oh, that's abstract. Oh, I love that, that's realistic. I'm not really interested in realistic, I'm interested in…’ As if they're camps throwing mud balls at each other. And it isn't true. Many of those artists worked in different forms at different times. Many of them were friends. Many of them learned from one another. So it's much more fluid than popular art history would make it.”
• “You could look at Hulings’ work and just say: it's very realistic. And you could say that's not what Pop Art was doing, or not what Abstract Expressionism was doing, and so forth. Yet, when you get closer and you start to really dig in and you look at the strokes, the colors, the mosaic, the patchwork tile, the sack that he gets...There's a whole lot of overlap between his practice and the practice of mid-century modernism.”
• “If we step back and take a broader look at it, [Warhol’s] Campbell’s Soup Can and Clark’s painting of people working to sell melons in Mexico—it’s not that different. It’s making the invisible, the unnoticed, the taken for granted, visible.”

Clark’s Career Strategy

• “He did his homework. I think that's really important for artists, to know when they're submitting for a show or a gallery, to do the research and homework ahead of time. Is this likely to be a place that would be interested in my work? You know, he's very methodical about making that transition [from illustration to easel painting]. And I think there's a lesson there.”
• “My feeling about Clark Hulings is that he was always thinking ahead and saying, ‘no, I'm not going to waste my time with X, Y and Z because they aren't going to be interested in what I'm doing anyway. So I'm going to go there, where there are some other painters there that I like and admire and there's some stylistic resemblances’—that's where I'm going to pitch my tent.”
• “There’s a story—it sounds apocryphal, but it's not—is that he took a painting there [Grand Central Galleries]. One of the directors of the gallery, I believe, criticized him. He was like, nobody wants paintings of laundry, and Catholic cathedrals, and old women. And somebody walked in and said, how much is that painting?”

The Book

• “His themes of work and working people and his travels offer a lot to scholars and curators. And none of that has really been written about. Everything we know about Clark Hulings right now is really what he's written. All of his books are filled with his quotes about his art. And so the field is open for me, writing the book, to begin to reposition him alongside his antecedents, alongside his peers, alongside other artists who have some of the same concerns that he does. That's really the goal for the book, is to achieve that.”
• “Elizabeth Hulings is the first one: she approached me. And the wonderful thing about Elizabeth is she's both organized and encyclopedic, particularly when it comes to her father. I don't know how many people know this story, but Clark basically said to her, ‘You are going to be my Theo.’ Meaning Theo Van Gogh, who not only is the brother of Vincent Van Gogh and the letter-writer, but the executor and the keeper of his flame and legacy.”
• “Elizabeth is really a wealth of information and has provided me with Clark's letters from his first trip to Europe, some of his drawings, and images of partly-finished canvases to show his process—and timelines and images going all the way back to some of his earliest works. So when you're working with someone like that, there's a certain ease about it. You're not having to run around and dig through archives. She is the archive for this project.”
• “Clark Hulings straddled some fascinating moments in American art, and his brand of Realism is really unlike anybody else’s. The subjects he paints and the way that he paints them. If you look at them, you just know: that's a Hulings painting. That's unusual, even in his world where things were very derivative.”

Questioning the Canon: Which Artists Matter?

• “What we're seeing now in the arts is a correction. Who are all these forgotten and neglected women artists? What about these artists of color? They're not in the canon, and look how good some of them are. And wow, they were never even considered for the canon?”
• “It’s not even about if an artist is good, no matter what a loaded word that is, it has to do with the circumstances as well. It’s a hard question to answer why some artists are ‘in’ and why some are ‘out.’ ”
• “If nobody knows exactly how somebody gets into the canon, gets ejected from the canon, or is not allowed to be in the canon, then what good is it? So my feeling is that you want to spike the canon with so many artists that it no longer has meaning.”
• “There’s a long history of being excluded, and of exclusion becoming almost a badge of honor.”
• “I wonder if, in fact, taste might actually make a comeback [if we got rid of the canon] because it would be something we would argue about rather than assume.”
• “I would say an artist really shouldn’t care about being in the canon, about ‘making it.’ They should do what they do, which is what Clark Hulings did: work at their work.”

We’d be delighted to welcome you to the community of art lovers who support the upcoming Clark Hulings Book. Click here to securely give your tax-deductible gift.

To see Clark Hulings’ work and for information about auctions, reproductions, and upcoming Hulings events visit www.clarkhulings.com

Working artists deserve the tools to succeed as Clark did. Join our Digital Campus: 9 courses are free, and the full learning library is less than an annual Netflix subscription.

Artist and illustrator Melissa Whitaker works full-time for companies across the US, bringing her signature pop-graphic-noir style to their branding and storytelling. Melissa’s clients include Madpipe and Free Agent Source. Commissions include food and beverage, real estate, and medical industries—as well cover art for authors and musicians. Her work has been exhibited in LA, San Francisco, KC, and St. Louis. If you happen to be her part of the world, look for her new billboard for the Arts Council Southern Missouri; it’s a satisfying full circle from when she was featured on that same billboard years ago as a real estate agent. Whitaker made the commitment to a full-time art career later on as an adult: she kick-started her art-business skills with CHF and never looked back. itsallintheart.com

The Thriving Commercial Artist

• “Companies want to tell the story of who they are, and why they do what they are doing. Maybe they can’t find the perfect stock photography for their business. They will come to me to illustrate their story, and make their website or material, even their PowerPoint presentations, stand out from the rest.”
• “Companies are adapting to be able to reach out to people who are not socializing much anymore. They’ve got to put that personality into their marketing presentations. I see new people coming in for personal illustrations: I’m talking to a real estate agent right now who wants to make herself stand out from all the other agents out there. So I’m excited!”
• “A whole new world of crypto art is coming out. It works a lot like Bitcoin where you can take your digital artwork and you basically encrypt it, where the person who’s buying that is buying the original—virtual original in a way—so it’s not just a digital copy. And that has value to it.”

Collaboration: The Artist’s Voice in Commercial Work

• “The client will tell me: ‘I want a subway station platform.’ I will put myself there, thinking: ‘if I am on the subway, if I get off the subway and I’m on that platform and I’m waiting…How am I going to stand? How am I going to see that train? Where is the train coming from? Who are the people around me? And that’s what goes into the picture. So I would say a lot of myself goes into the picture because I put myself there.”
• “I’ll talk with the client and I get a sense of what they are looking for. A lot of questions come out, such as what kind of mood are you looking for? What do you want your customer to feel when they look at this? What is your objective? All of that is information that is needed in order to tell the story accurately.”
• “In today’s culture, a lot of people refer to movies. They’ll say, ‘I’m thinking of The Transporter,’ or ‘I’m thinking of 80s music’ and they’ll give me a playlist. That puts me into the zone and it will come out in the art. I try to put everything, all of me, into the art—so whatever is going in, is coming out into the art.
• “Sometimes I’ll do rough drafts to get an idea of what the customer wants. And there are times where I have an image in my head and I’ll just do the whole thing and send it to them, because sometimes the client doesn’t know what they want until they see it. Or they can’t envision the rough draft in the final completion of the project.”
• “There are struggles at times. There are directions I want to go, and the client has to pull me back and say no, no, no, that’s that’s the wrong way. Or, ‘that looks really fun but we can’t go there.’ So that can be difficult, but often I will go ahead and still create it because I can always use it somewhere else. I’m very open to change and adapting because I will always try to make something work.”

Technique & Composition: from Walls to Web

• “If it’s a complex illustration with several individual people—each character is drawn individually and on a separate layer so that they can be reused. They’re like stickers: you can post them here or there, which makes it unique and has continuity. So if you have a character and a scene, you can take that character and use it as your profile picture, or an avatar, or even in your email signature.”
• “I do a lot of digital illustrations with the Procreate program. Because everything is built in layers, you can change colors easily, you can change the palette, and sometimes the texture. You can change the lighting—you can play with it without destroying a piece of paper with an eraser. It’s wonderful all the options that it gives you. It’s a completely expanded artist’s palette. Animation kind of started that way with Walt Disney. They would build up the image on cellophane cells, and so really Procreate is kind of the same way of building up.”
• “Websites involve a totally different composition and thinking. When I’m designing the hero image for a website, the one-third rule doesn’t always work. The picture has to fit on a wide screen as well as translate onto a mobile phone. That has been a true learning experience for me on how to tell the story, an interesting story, in a way that will translate on several different devices. It’s something I’ve had to learn by myself, and it is quite a challenge because in traditional art work, you’re taught to follow the golden rule, the rule of thirds—so artists want to fight putting something right in the center.”

Themes & Art Influences

• “I definitely am inspired by Andy Warhol. I pull a lot from Peter Max. I love Peter Max. I love the vibrant colors of Peter Max. There’s some LeRoy Neiman and Robert McGinnis. I was raised very open-minded with Playboy on the coffee table. There was one illustrator, Doug Sneyd, and he often did the bar scene or a crowded scene, a party scene. And if you look through his illustrations, every face in that scene has some sort of emotion, there’s stuff going on in the background.”
• “I would watch Noir movies. I was a huge Humphrey Bogart fan. Still am. The Maltese Falcon, all of those…Sam Malone, I love those pictures. There was a sensuality to them that is not quite in the movies that they create today.”
• “You can always go back to ‘sex sells.’ With the #MeToo movement, there is an extremely fine line there. And companies sometimes don’t want to cross that line. What’s missing, I feel, and what may be going out, is sometimes the flirtation that can happen, especially in the marketing. There is a humor there, and we have had a somewhat dark period—in my mind—for the last several years. Having a little bit of the sexual vibe in the work kind of brings a little bit of a lightness to the subject into the story. Because you can’t just ignore it.”
• “I have a sexual-leaning series of paintings that I want to do based on pearls. I’ve always found it extremely interesting there’s the vision of the woman wearing the pearl necklace. It’s always classy, elegant, and upper-crust—I think of the thing about a lady clutching her pearls—you know, out of shock! And I love shocking people.”

Becoming a Full-time Artist & Building a Network

• “In April 2018, I went to the Clark Hulings Fund Art-Business Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was energizing. It was eye-opening. And it was soul-opening, really. And it didn’t try to sell me a thing. If anything, they tried to sell me on myself. And I set a goal when I was sitting there that I was going to be out of real estate and a full time artist by January 1st, 2020.”
• “I walked into my real estate broker’s office and handed in my license, and I was terrified! I was like, oh, my gosh…I don’t want to be a starving artist…how am I going to do this? And what I learned was the more positive energy you put out there, the more passion you have with your art, or whatever your career might be, the more love you put into it, the more it feeds you and it just keeps building.”
• “Over the past year, I have met this international artist who lives 30 miles from me. She’s become kind of a mentor. Her name’s Ali Cavanaugh. She’s taught me a little bit about the international market and how to break into it.”
• “My artwork is going to be on a 14 x 48-foot billboard in town. And it’s so funny because my real estate career started on that same billboard. I think that’s fascinating.”

Thanks to ArtPlacer for their support of CHF and The Thriving ArtistTM podcast.

In the second episode of this two-part podcast, Carolyn Edlund weighs-in on how artists can shift their sales strategies and build an art business that will weather these tough times, as well as being resilient to future changes. Contrary to popular belief, collectors are buying art right now, and artists can zoom in on their relationships, update their platforms, and define or redefine their target markets to make this work in their favor.

Carolyn is Sales & Events Director at CHF and our faculty subject matter expert on Sales Strategy. She is the founder of ArtsyShark—and brings a background as an artist, former ED of the Arts Business Institute, years in art-publishing and licensing, and extensive experience in curriculum development and seminars for artists. Work with Carolyn & the CHF Faculty online at the Virtualize Your Art Career™ Conference October 19-30.

What a Sustainable Art Business Looks Like In Today’s Environment

• “There are opportunities to really grow your business. I’ve spoken to several artists lately who are making more sales than ever before. Now, how in the world is this happening? I’m sure you’re thinking, ‘What!? Who’s doing that?’ The artists who are making these sales have given some deep thought to how they are going to go virtual with their marketing and sales strategies. And they’re going 100 percent in that direction, using tools online that are helping them reach an audience who is actually very hungry to buy right now.”
• “Everybody is sitting at home, people are bored, they’re shopping and they are buying art. We know that’s happening. We know there has been an uptick in art sales. So the people that I see who are succeeding—when I get down into the weeds with them, like, ‘What are you actually doing?’ It turns out that they’ve got systems built into their business that are very methodical for drawing an audience, introducing them to their work, getting them with a hook, and then selling their work. And then selling more work to them. They’re building a very sustainable business with repeat sales, which is what we want to do in any environment. It is possible to do that during a pandemic.”

Leverage Your Art and Your Collectors For That Repeat Sale

• “I love repeat sales because it’s easier to sell to an existing customer. They’re the foundation for an ongoing business—where you have existing sales that happen again and again. Part of that is leveraging the work that you sell. I talk about that when I teach sales strategy, and I’m going to be talking more about that in our conference: are you leveraging your collector by selling to them over and over? Are you leveraging your work by selling the next piece in a set? It’s a way of thinking: what do I have that’s going to appeal to people? What can I offer them if I want to keep them as customers, and as eager customers, who will want to own more of my work?”

Embrace Your Power as an Individual Artist

• “The market has evolved over the last 20-25 years toward the empowerment of the individual artist. We’ve seen it in other industries. If we look at, for example, the movie industry, back in the day the studios owned all the actors and they would say, ‘You’re doing four movies this year,’ or ‘I’m going to loan you out to Warner Brothers.’ And they would direct the career of the ‘stable’ of actors that they would control. Nowadays, we see actors who are now directing their own production companies. They have their collaborations. They are free, they are empowered. They can do the projects that they choose to do and they’re setting their own career paths. Visual artists are in much the same position. It is not always emotionally easy to step up and say: ‘Yeah, I’m going to be the CEO of my own art business.’ It might be your personality to say, ‘Gee, you know, I wish somebody else would just sell for me.’ But there are advantages to being forced as an artist in this day and age to realize that you have a certain amount of responsibility. You’re the one who has to make the decisions, and there is no one who can replace you in knowing what you want and to be able to tell your story the way that you can.”

Stay Informed with Professional Development

• “Anyone in business can definitely benefit from experts—whether they have something that’s specifically useful to you, or you just want to hear about the industry. Think of someone like a real estate agent. They could be in business for 20 years, and yet they’re still getting training, or reading a blog, or listening to a podcast that’s going to give them really interesting strategies about how to connect with their customers or help their sellers. What’s new in the industry? What are people talking about? What are the trends? And so you really need to stay up to date with it. It’s part of professional development.”

Art vs Sneakers: The Collector’s Emotional Connection

• “A lot of artists who are making sales have put systems into place that work. And it’s not unique to art. You could be selling shoes, and you could be doing a really good job of it because you understand the strategies of how to market and sell successfully online. It’s really no different. But I think that art—I mean, at least in my mind—is very special. You can’t exactly equate it to a pair of sneakers. Art is something that people have an emotional connection to. An artist is a very special kind of person: your creativity is so important in the world, that in my mind, it’s at a higher level and it’s really treasured. Collectors want to grab the art if you’re running out of your home in a fire. You grab the art you love because it’s so important to you.”

Reclaim Your Confidence at the CHF Virtualize Your Art Career TM Conference

• “What would I really like to see an artist come away with? Confidence. I would like an artist, especially if they’re having a difficult time trying to decipher what to do in these times, this pandemic time—I’d like for them to understand that it is possible, that you can build a business. This is a hard time because life will always have hard times. We will go in and out of recession. There will be changes of all types, that’s just part of the world. So can they be successful no matter what? Yes. And I’d like people to understand that other artists are doing this. I’d like them to feel the support of a community. You brought up the emotional factor earlier: that is such an important part. When you know you can do it, when you know you’ve got your network of artists who’ve got your back, and when you know that you can follow a plan that is solid and makes sense, then it gives you a starting point to just take that first step, right after the conference. You can start following that roadmap and start realizing your goals and working towards those objectives. And if you stay with it and you are consistent and persistent, then you will make sales and you will move your art business ahead.”

Listen to Part I of this two-part episode with Carolyn Edlund! Move the needle for your art business, feel the support of your community, and learn with Carolyn and the CHF Faculty: register for our Oct 19-30 online Virtualize Your Art Career™ conference here.

Jerry’s Artarama supports CHF and this episode of The Thriving Artist™ podcast.

Carolyn Edlund is the Sales & Events Director at the Clark Hulings Foundation, and our resident subject matter expert in Sales Strategy. In the first episode of this two-part podcast, Carolyn joins us to answer questions about making a creative career virtual. Artists and makers, you can make a great decision to thrive during the pandemic and beyond: learn with Carolyn and the CHF Faculty in real time by registering for the online The Virtualize Your Art Career™ Conference Oct 19-30th.

Carolyn is the founder of ArtsyShark—a popular blog that publishes features on artist portfolios and articles on the business of art—and the former executive director of the Arts Business Institute. An artist herself, Carolyn pivoted to sales in the art-publishing business—she learned the world of price points, merchandising, building collections, and closing deals, by working a territory and becoming a top rep. She has designed curriculum for multiple art-business platforms and has presented hundreds of live seminars for artists and makers.

Selling Art During the Pandemic

• “Artists are being pushed into getting online and becoming experts at communicating and selling online. We don’t have much of a choice. The events are closed, postponed, canceled. They’re not happening in person. And as wonderful as the in-person events are (and, you know, we’ve traditionally relied on them) just like Hiscox [Online Art Trade Report 2020] noted: this is a transformation. We’ve been moving towards an online economy, an art industry that is robust in the online space, and this is forcing the issue.”
• “This is putting people in a sink or swim position where you’ve got to make decisions. You aren’t going to change your whole life, but you’ve got to make decisions about getting into the online market and making it work for you. And that, to me, is a huge opportunity. It might not be something that every artist is looking forward to, but ultimately they will really benefit from it.”

Opportunities & Challenges of Selling Online

• “It becomes very crowded when everyone is jumping online—and we know that’s true because art website providers are reporting record numbers of new clients coming in. They all want to set up websites.”
• “Anyone who is in the virtual marketplace has to fight for attention—establish that space, gather the people who are their followers, either through social media profiles or a list that they’ve built so that they can continue that conversation, and then use those interested people to turn into customers and clients.”
• “The personal touch is very appreciated these days. If you’ve got a collector who feels like they know you, they like you, they appreciate your work, and you say: ‘I want to reach out to you because I’ve got a new body of work and I haven’t shown anyone yet. But you own two of my paintings, and I really want to give you first dibs. How about we jump on a Zoom call? How about we literally get into a face to face conversation. I’ll show you what I’ve got.’ I like the personal outreach. And even though that might be a little bit scary, I think that over time, as you get to know your customer base, there will be people that you can reach out to and you’ll find that they appreciate and love hearing from an artist, and love talking with you, and that that engagement excites them. It’s part of the collector experience.”

What Does Virtualizing Your Art Career Mean?

• “There’s going to be a range for some people. It may only be that they get a website, and then they’re continuing on with what they’ve been doing for years. For other artists, virtualizing means a new format.”
• “For example, you might be an artist who teaches. You’re not going to be teaching in person right now, but you might be building courses on an online learning platform, you might be teaching through YouTube.”
• “If you are an artist who typically offers reproductions or is considering it, you might take advantage of print-on-demand technology. And that’s going to allow you to simply upload a high res image of the painting that you want to sell, and then allowing those print on demand vendors to take the order and fulfill it without you being a part of that process. So that would be taking advantage of virtual tools to actually produce.”

How to Build A Disruption-Proof Business

• “The core strategy—which is what we emphasize in the Conference and with our Art-Business Accelerator Fellows—it’s artists knowing who they are, what they’re selling, what they’re doing, why people should buy from them, what is their long term strategy. I believe for the most part, that will not change. However, when you’ve got something that comes up…and this is not short term, the pandemic’s been with us for six months… you may change some of the things that you do and some of the actions that you take, but it’s all still in alignment with your core strategy.”
• “Now, when we spoke with those artists and asked them, has your main strategy changed? The answer was no. Every single one of those people, and they represent a diverse number of businesses, mediums and so forth…every single one of those people was rock solid on what they knew to be their business, their goals, what they wanted. Maybe they’ve changed the order of how they’re going about some conversations, or maybe they’ve put a few strategies on the front burner and some on the back burner, but they know who they are.”
• “Repeat sales are extremely important. And you talk about network: I don’t think that artists necessarily need a vast network. They could actually have a rather small network of people who truly love what they do and collect on a regular basis from them and keep them going full-time. So it’s more or less finding that audience that understands and loves what you do staying in contact with them and unfolding your story over time with them—and allowing them to be part of your story as well. That’s where you truly find the sweet spot, and that’s something that’s going to transcend the pandemic. It’s not going to be a short term strategy. It’s a career strategy.”

Pivoting Your Business on a Dime

• “You could keep your budget pretty slim. But one of the things that I would throw out there to consider with your balancing act between staying the course and keeping your core business goals…To balance that, you’ve got to have a little bit of an insight into where your sales are. As a former artist and as a former outside sales person, I’ll tell you, find out where the sales are and go there. So if you’re able to start a little flurry of sales in a particular niche or certain area, well, keep going. Mine that market. Keep working that niche until your sales have slowed down or dried up. If there’s a place for you to make money, I think you should do it.
• “Of course, artists are out there [creating pandemic-era products]. Maybe they’re offering masks. That’s popular. I’ve seen some artists advertising them, advertising all kinds of ways to buy from them. Is that a good plan? Sure. If that works for you, go ahead and earn some money doing that, even if it’s not what you would normally do. I think it’s important to get through the pandemic intact. It’s certainly my goal that every one of these artists, as a small business person who might be on a limited budget, has a way to get through this period of time without giving up, throwing in the towel or just feeling so helpless that they don’t know where to turn, because there are many, many options. We going to be talking about some of those in the upcoming conference.”

Is Virtual the Future For Live Art Events?

• “Some shows have gone completely virtual. If you’ve been paying attention to what Clark Hulings Fund has been doing lately, we’ve worked with the Santa Fe Indian Market to create an online virtual market completely taking place on the Internet, which was quite successful. It had about 450 artists participate and it was really, I think, a kind of leading edge model for how art shows might go totally virtual.”
• “On the other hand, we’re seeing [in-person] shows scaling down in size, we’re seeing 10 feet between booths. We’re seeing a controlled gate, and extreme safety measures for live events. And sometimes they’re happening simultaneously.”
• “A hybrid live and virtual event, I believe, is going to be the standard in the future. The group of promoters that I’ve been in contact with and speaking to—they pretty much agree that you cannot simply bank on having a live event in the future. You need the virtual component, and that they are working on this. There are many different ways that it is brought to life. There are different platforms that host these. Some are doing them through live streaming. Some are doing them through websites.”

Stay tuned for Part II of this two-part episode with Carolyn Edlund! Take a deeper dive and get into the specifics of implementing positive change in the way you run your art business: register for the Virtualize Your Art Career™ Conference Oct 19-30.

Thanks to Jerry’s Artarama for their support of CHF and The Thriving Artist™ podcast.

The Virtual Edition of The Santa Fe Indian Market offers an amazing atmosphere of delight and awe at a time when most of us are cooped up in our own worlds of social distance. SWAIA Executive Director Kim Peone joins CHFs Executive Director Elizabeth Hulings, Artpsan Founder & Director Eric Sparre, and leader of the Vircadia Implementation Project & CHF Board Member, Steve Pruneau. Tune in for a wide-ranging discussion lead by host Daniel DiGriz about how all four organization are actualizing possibilities for collaboration and community in the digital world, how Native Artists are poised to flourish in this year’s market and beyond, a profile of the events and gallery spaces in NDN World, and how all of these partner organizations are championing artists as they emerge as leaders and innovators in our changing economy.

To purchase the artists’ work, visit swaia.artspan.com.

Beginnings: How Virtual Edition of SWAIA’s Indian Market Started

• Kim: “This was a scenario where SWAIA needed to pivot after cancelling their Indian Market due to the pandemic. I came on board after the organization had spoken with Clark Hulings Foundation on that possibility. Once I became the Executive Director of the organization and vetted that quickly with my board and staff and Clark Hulings’ team as well, it seemed like it was a great partnership for us to collaborate together and move this vision forward. It was a concept at the time, and now we’re really in a place of vision. And so it’s been a great partnership. And I’m really excited to be part of this collaboration.”
• Elizabeth: “SWAIA has been a champion for Native arts for almost 100 years. CHF is interested in promoting artists’ ability to earn a living, and therefore get their art to market, so that the market can decide what it likes and what it wants to buy. We want to level the playing field, get as much out there as possible, and let everybody have a fair shot. It’s a beautiful combination: we have an organization whose goal is to do that for Native arts, and an organization that is coming from the artists’ perspective to drive that forward. Instead of a top-down, it’s really a bottom-up proposition.”

Working with Native American Artists

• Kim: “This is really a ceremonial moment—where, just like when we go to our traditional powwows, we go there not only to dance, but we go there to be in a place where there is community, ceremony, and camaraderie. So I think that is no different than Indian Market.”
• Kim: “Working with Native American communities, you’re definitely working with a population that’s underserved. We have recognized, especially in my past experience in working with tribal governments, that it’s very challenging to do economic development within those organizational structures. This is the first time that I’ve been able to work for an organization which represents Native American tribes where we’re truly in that place of free commerce—and so it allows us to be creative.”
• Kim: “The resilience part of this is something that we’ve been dealing with for generations. So how do we come out of that miry clay and become something? I really appreciate being with an organization where we can empower individuals in doing that, and then as an organization come alongside them to support them. I also feel like it’s a scenario where if you’re helping one artist, you’re not just helping them, you’re helping a family—and that family is helping a community. It really is a ripple effect, as opposed to other artists organizations where it’s very individualized. When we look at an artist, we look at an artist in reference to their tribal affiliation, what nation they are representing. For SWAIA and our juried artists, that’s 220 nations that we’re touching, personally. For us it’s about not only resilience for the artists, but for the community.”

The Online Art Community & Artspan

• Eric: “What you had in the past 99 years was one event over two days. Now we will be taking in—hopefully, in the years to come, that one event as the centerpiece of something much larger, which goes throughout the year. One of the nice things about websites and a virtual marketplace is that it doesn’t end after two days. That simply becomes a very good place to meet possible collectors to give them your URL, your domain name, and then you meet them again online. And hopefully, you know, they will buy some work.”
• Eric: “It started for me 25 years ago when I went out to California to do commissions for one of the founders of Netscape, which was, as you will recall, the first great internet company. And I realized then that, wow, the whole world was going to change—at least that’s what I thought. And I set up a website and it was awful. I didn’t get any traffic, it was ugly. I had to pay somebody a lot of money. So that’s that was the genesis of Artspan itself.”
• Eric: “It really has to do with, not the death of galleries, but certainly the lesser importance of dealers and galleries. Artists really have to fend for themselves. And it’s not hard. It’s a social event—as you say, it’s belonging to a community. It seemed to me very quickly, when I set up my own website, that it was great, it was nice to have a website (although it was ugly)…but I got zero traffic. So you really have to have a community around you. You can erect your own community now through Facebook, and all sorts of different ways. But I like the idea of the individual combined with a community.”

Vircadia & NDN World: Virtual Reality at the Virtual Indian Market for Art Collectors, Patrons and Artists

• Steve: “Vircadia is an open source, virtual reality enabled, social platform. We call it Social VR. Just because it’s VR doesn’t mean you have to wear the VR headset. It works in desktop mode. The people who maintain that virtual community are very interested in the same themes that we’ve been talking about here, which is, first and foremost, community. Creating a shared experience that is not limited by physical distance or limitations that we experience in the real world—which includes some forms of prejudice or [feeling like] you don’t really fit in. So it’s really the next step in developing communities together. The second aspect of it, is that it is truly open source which means anyone can download the software, put up their own world, and host the community—or they could just be a participant and join.”
• Steve: “Every person experiences [VR] a little differently, just like we all experience the world a little differently. But there is a common theme for those who keep coming back: it is very close to the emotional connection we feel. For example, people tend to apologize sometimes unnecessarily for stepping in front of someone if you are between the speaker and the circular audience. If it’s a small group, you happen to step in [you might say], ‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to step in front.’ There are those sorts of personal space type events that happen in-world. That’s a cue that says, ‘Ooh, this is a lot more than Zoom.’ “
• Elizabeth: “The thing that excites me about it is that it’s the intersection of art and tech, because it’s artists who are making the outfits [that the avatars in the VR world wear]. It’s artists who are going to be doing the dances, it’s artists who have constructed the whole thing and added their aesthetic. When we talk about community, my goal and underlying reason for creating CHF and continuing to work on all of this, is to have artists and inventors and creators be at the center of community activity and development. That’s when we move forward as a species and that’s how we support our planet.”
• Kim: “I feel that we as an organization are in a place where we have to take into consideration generational transfers that are occurring. When you look at the demographics of our collectors, they’re 65 years and older. And so what are we going to do in the future? And this really went back to my interview with the board: one of their questions, to me specifically is, ‘What are you going to do to take us into the next hundred years?’ When I was in North Carolina, I was there with my children and with my grandchildren. And I’m watching them interact in this world called Fortnite. I have a six year-old playing a game with a 26 year-old, and they’re communicating with each other. It was their way of socializing in a space where they had a goal, they worked together, and it was community. Even before coming on to SWAIA, I was asking questions of my kids saying, ‘Who are you playing with?’ […] So when I got the proposal from Steve regarding what this [virtual] world was, there was a statistic that he gave me that said: Fortnite has only been in existence for three years, and they have 250 million followers. And I just had an aha moment: this platform is giving me the opportunity to capture a generation that we’re not currently capturing. […] As we move past Indian Market, it’s still going to be a platform that we’re going to use in the future. And one that we’re all going to learn to use together.”
• Kim: “I called up Chad—an artist I’ve been in the Powwow circle with since he was a little boy—and asked him if he would develop an avatar for me. I thought initially: ‘Oh put me in a traditional dress.’ And he was so cute, he said: ‘I don’t see you in a traditional dress, it is okay if I put you in a jingle dress?’ And I said yes. When I saw the drawings of what this avatar was going to look like: front, side and back version—do you know, that threw me back to when I was in the circle at Powwows with my kids, my friends, and my family abroad. It was not only touching to me but it was profound to me. Because now, when I go into NDN world, I’m actually in my traditional regalia. Jingle dresses represent for our people a form of intercession and prayer. And so I felt like this has been a journey of intercession and prayer for me. Not only for SWAIA but for artists and for the world.”

What’s Happening in NDN World?

• Elizabeth: “Right now, there is an exhibit of all the work submitted to the jury that you can walk in and experience, and there’s a panel next to each work that describes it and who did it. And then on the 13th, we have the preview of the final pieces. That is a private VIP experience, and it’s also the official opening of the space. So there’ll be an invitation. So that’s our first official event. And then on the 15th is the award ceremony. We will be announcing best in-category, best in show, etc.”
• Steve: “There is art on the walls, and there is a popup button ‘Open here,’ or ‘Click here.’ It pops open the SWAIA website, for this year’s entries, for that piece of art only. And from that, and also some of the information in-world, you can find the artist. You certainly tipped your hand about the future of this, which is that we do want it to be possible to just buy right there”.

A Brighter Future For Artists

• Elizabeth: “The majority of SWAIA artists historically have earned a substantial amount of their income every year during Indian Market. That was one of the reasons that we were so adamant that we have to do something: because we can’t have an economic catastrophe fall on the heels of a medical one. But the goal is to make it so that these artists and many other artists can earn a living year-round. That’s where the Artspan piece really comes into play—you have to be able to engage in e-commerce and understand what you bring to it. Who are you as an artist? What are you trying to accomplish? What is your message? What is your story? What is your brand story? What are your sales strategies and how are you going to use e-commerce? An individual website that belongs to you is really key to delivering all of that.”
• Elizabeth: “If it doesn’t start with vision and innovation— if you don’t know why the heck you’re doing something, or you’re doing something because you’re going to make bunch of money quick…maybe you will make a bunch of money quick, but you’re going to end up with something that doesn’t serve anybody else in the long term. Right now we’re in a moment. You mentioned Tesla, Steve—we’re in a moment where we have got to change the way we do a lot of things: in order to not just make sure SWAIA is here for another hundred years, but make sure that any of us is here for another hundred years. And the way to do that is by involving the artists, entrepreneurs, visionaries, and innovators at the beginning of the process.”
• Steve: “When we were paired up by Kim with various artists to work on avatars, little micro explosions were going off; there was potential and [people saying] ‘Oh, how can we do more of this?’ and ‘This is great. I get it.’ People were getting the ideas really fast. The thing that causes innovation is these unexpected reactions when you’re hanging out together, talking. When you look back in history, the way certain parallel inventions happened is because they were in each other’s orbit. They were influencing each other. Did we see this in music? People start reverbing back and forth. Now that we can no longer have distance separating us. I predict that this is going to accelerate some really interesting creative explosions.”
• Kim: “One of my thoughts for September is doing a live cookbook where we feature Native American chefs, and talk about our Indigenous foods. Food is a form of art—it’s not one we’ve probably ever talked about at SWAIA but now that we’re virtual, we can get very creative. For us, we want to stay online, we want to continue to work very closely with every partner on this podcast.”

To purchase world-class art and support this event, go to swaia.artspan.com.

Marquee Events in NDN World are open to SWAIA Members—Membership info is here.

To get early access to the virtual reality world VIRCADIA, where you’ll find Steve Pruneau tending the virtual bar more often than not, visit Vircadia.com.

Thanks to Jerry’s Artarama for their support of CHF and The Thriving Artist™ podcast.

Artist Ashley Longshore has never waited for industry gatekeepers to open doors for her: she’s a wildly successful, self-made entrepreneur. Owner of The Longshore Studio Gallery in New Orleans and two high-traffic Instagram profiles, her partners, collaborators, and collectors are a who’s-who of upscale brands and celebrities: Dianne Von Furstenburg, Bergdorf Goodman, Gucci, Rolex, Miley Cyrus, Blake Lively, Penelope Cruz, Salma Hayek, and Eli Manning. Ashley’s been described as a “modern Andy Warhol” for her pop art sensibilities. Rizzoli New York has recently published her second book I Do Not Cook, I Do Not Clean, I Do Not Fly Commercial. In this episode, Ashley weighs-in on instinct, strategy, and other lessons learned in the art business—and discusses being a working artist during the pandemic. Keep your ears open for some very funny, candid, and insightful one-liners.

Artists Are Entrepreneurs

• “Artists are entrepreneurs. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be financially successful. The idea is that you get to a point where your profits are coming in, people are engaging with your artwork, you have that intimacy within your collector base, and you’ve got enough money in your bank account to make any idea that you have in your brain come to fruition. To me that’s the ultimate goal.”
• “I think in America you have an opportunity to make your own past. When I was told I wasn’t marketable, I decided to build this on my own. Although it wasn’t the easy way, it was the better way, because I understand my audience, I understand my engagement, and I’ve been able to build friendships that led me to great opportunities. Those opportunities have led me to extremely successful creative people.”
• “I have created what I have created on instinct alone. And you know, artists know how to use tools, they know process. Very early, I realized: I’m not going to work with galleries, I’m going to create my own system; I’m not going to give up 50%, I’m going to keep 100% of my profit margins. I’m going to build a business.”
• “I needed to hire people based on the demand for my work—more graphic designers, more photographers, more salespeople. There’s a lot of power in that. I knew I was going to do this my own way, no matter what. That’s the thing: you find your own path and you go for it.”

What It Takes To Be Successful

• “In the beginning, honestly, [it’s about] being as prolific as you can be, understanding your voice, being able to figure out how to be kind to yourself when you’re not completely inspired and on fire. You have to have that strong inner voice of, ‘I can do this, I’m going to be okay. It’s alright that I’m not inspired right now.’ It’s all these little inner thoughts of positivity and optimism. You’ve got to start building that wall inside of you. Because the more you put yourself out there, the more open you are to criticism and the bull**** from the world.”
• “F*** the establishment. F*** what anybody else thinks! You go after it, you cut your own path, you do what you have to do. You know, I’ve been turned down more than a bed in a cheap motel. Rejection is part of what’s going to happen no matter what you do as a creative person, as an entrepreneur, as an ‘artrepreneur’.”
• “The things that I do, I do them with enthusiasm, I do them with gratitude. And I think that energy is really infectious. I also work my ass off, I work quickly, I work my team. And when I’m given a huge opportunity from a billion-dollar global corporation, I work myself to DEATH to make sure that I not only produce, but I over-produce, and I blow their doors off. I mean I live for that moment when they go, ‘You did what?!’ ”
• “Start off with a goal like: I want to make $200 this week. I want to make $200, how can I get creative with my marketing? How can I find out who my audience is? Start with that. Start with that, it’s the little steps. No instant gratification. Instant gratification gets you drunk, high or pregnant.”

Art As A Luxury Item

• “A pair of high heels can cost eighteen hundred dollars. Boots that women buy cost four thousand dollars. And I mean, no—not everybody is buying that—but also, not everybody is an art collector. Being able to collect something…[it’s like the collector is] taking their spirit and putting it in a place. They can buy it and actually live with it. That is a very euphoric, exciting, very luxury type of thing. Through thinking about my work in this way, I’ve always known that I’m not going to pull any prints right now.”

Social Media & Beyond: You Control Your Message

• “Every time I create the new series and put it out there for people to see, there’s always new engagement. I mean how many people are there on the planet now? Nine billion people, ten billion people? I haven’t even begun to reach all the people that could relate to the message that I’m putting out there. That’s the whole thing that’s exciting.”
• “Social media is not just the answer. Having one art show is not the answer. It takes years of putting lots of lines in the water, the more lines you have in the water the more fish you can catch. Period.”
• “It was just a few years ago at art fairs that I started to see paintings of women of colour, that I started to see black artists that were being brought into these art fairs. Now is a great time to be an artist. I think a lot of this also has to do with social media—I think using social media you can control your own message, you can control what you’re putting out there.”

Underrepresented Artists

• “I’m not going to sit around and talk about the fact that ‘they’re not getting women in…!’ No. I’m going to work really hard. I’m building a pyramid right now, I want to have a huge foundation, I want to have a space where I can showcase female artists and artists from diverse backgrounds, artists from underrepresented communities. I want to have a platform where I can do that—and the harder I work, the more money I make, the more power and control I have over that. So I mind my business, and work hard and stack that paper up, instead of sitting around and whining about it, I do something about it.”

Thanks to Jerry’s Artarama for their support of CHF and The Thriving Artist™ podcast.

It’s a timely moment to be interviewing the team from CERF+, a leading nonprofit focused on safeguarding artists’ livelihoods nationwide. Founded in 1985—by and for materials-based artists and craftspeople—their core services are education programs, advocacy, network- building, and emergency relief. Key players in the recovery of creative industries after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, CERF+ also responded to artists impacted by Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, assisted after the California wildfires, and are actively engaged in a Covid-19 response. Their advocacy for artists is ongoing—both in times where planning and prevention are the emphasis—and in providing support in recovery from a crisis. Cornelia Carey is CERF+’s Executive Director and the founder of the National Coalition for Arts Preparedness & Emergency Response. Carrie Cleveland is their Education and Outreach Manager.

Thanks to Jerry’s Artarama for their support of CHF and The Thriving Artist™ podcast.

About CERF+

• “CERF was originally called ‘Craft Emergency Relief Fund.’ But after Hurricane Katrina, CERF committed to doing a lot more work in the preparedness and mitigation realm. We realized that no amount of money that we could ever raise was going to right somebody’s life when it had been reduced to a slab, a studio, or a home. We needed to invest in helping artists be more prepared and build more resilient careers. So that’s how we became CERF+. The ‘plus’ being all of that preparedness.”
• “
• We are actively aggregating, creating, combining, curating resources and information that help artists look at this current crisis. At last count there were 130 emergency relief funds that have been created for artists around the country and in the territories; there have been 3 federal aid packages that artists can access—so we want to make sure our artists are aware of these opportunities and how to navigate them.”

Advocacy for Artists

• “We’ve been working with cultural advocacy groups and Americans For The Arts, and making sure that the needs of artists and other self-employed workers are embedded in federal relief packages. Traditionally, self-employed workers, gig workers, and artists have not been a part of federal relief packages.”
• “Advocacy is educating decision-makers about the issues and the needs of a very important population in this country that might not be represented—in disaster response, for example.”
• “The arts serve everyone in this country. Not just left-leaning or right-leaning.”
• “Artists, like many other self-employed workers, don’t have access to a safety net of benefits that often comes with employment, such as health insurance, paid time off, and other supports and security.”
• “We’ve been making the case that artists’ careers are small businesses, and like any other small business, they employ people, they purchase equipment and supplies and materials, they buy real estate, they rent real estate. They are definitely part of economies.”
• “We did research in 2013 about the status of artists in the craft field. We found that 75% of them have 3 months of savings or less. So if you look at this current crisis with things shutting down in March—you know by May, it’s a pretty desperate situation. So we’re in there with the other advocates for small business.”
• “Maybe people think artists live in a separate bucket than the economy. There’s hard data that says just how wrong that is. Just last month the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that the Arts & Culture workforce contributed 877.8 billion dollars, or 4.5% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product in 2017.”

Helping Artists Through Disasters—Coronavirus And Beyond

• “With Covid-19, we’re focused on the health emergency care needs of artists who have gotten the virus, as well as still responding to the other disasters, including the recent tornados in and around the Nashville area and also artists who suffered significant losses in the earthquakes last January in Puerto Rico.”
• “We are working on a program about artists in the recovery phase of this crisis. There are funds that exist right now that will likely run their course in the next month or so. What often happens is there’s no access to those kinds of funding programs in the recovery phase of a disaster. We’re really focused on longer-term recovery. And I can’t say yet what that’s going to look like.”

How Covid-19 Is Affecting Artists

• “We conducted a Nationwide survey of artists during the Covid-19 pandemic. We’re hearing that people are anticipating experiencing loss of revenue from show cancellations, loss of gallery sales, loss of direct sale revenue. People are looking at—just initially from the start of this—financial loss of an average of close to $7,000, and then projecting out 3 months, an average loss of over $18,000, so the impacts of this are pretty immediate and pretty clear.”
• “We’ve been asking people about their current needs for support. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the resounding answer was ‘cash.’ People cited real concerns around being able to pay their rent or their mortgage.”
• “The other common thread was that people needed support in getting set up for— or increasing—their online sales to cover the income that they’re losing through show cancellations and loss of direct sales.”
• “Even if people already have good online systems in place and have access to their studios, their day-to-day life is completely changed—maybe from having children at home, and so now that day time that they normally would have spent in their studio, they’re adjusting to this new landscape where they’re homeschooling their children.”
• “People have been open and sharing what they’re thinking about: How long is this going to last? Are more shows going to be cancelled? What about tourism-based economies this summer, what’s that going to look like? Even if things go back to ‘normal,’ will people want to travel?”

Artists Can Help With Disaster Recovery

• “CERF+ is looking at how we can create opportunities that might not yet exist. We know our nation needs a whole infrastructure rebuilt. Just think about how artists could be involved in making our communities much more robust and beautiful and well-designed. Honestly, I get excited about the possibilities of engaging artists more in our communities and in recovery.”
• “I have a reflection from an artist named Deanna Davila, a sculptor, ceramicist and jewelry-designer in Puerto Rico. After Hurricane Maria she spent 110 days without electricity and 45 days without water. Something she said when reflecting back on this experience was really powerful: ‘I re-learned that life changes in a split second, that changes may bring you growth and opportunities if you let them. I learned ways to better protect myself in the future, and that protection is not only physical, but economic, emotional, and spiritual. I needed to reexamine the way I work and produce and manage the sales of my craft in order to be prepared for next time. We’re not alone. We’re part of a larger community no matter where we are.’ ”
• “Artists should be part of the national emergency management community and deployed like others are deployed in disasters. They’re showing up in shelters, providing arts education to the kids that are not able to go to school; they’re offering the concerts that make people feel better. Artists are very important to recovery. Unfortunately they’re very vulnerable in disasters as well, so that’s why we’ve been so committed to building programs that help them be more resilient, so they can play that role in recovery in their communities.”
• “I think that in the next couple of months we are going to see a pivot. We already are, in some instances, where people are just going about their work differently, or looking at their skill sets as artists and looking at what income possibilities are out there that can use those skill sets. It’s just about moving past that shock, and understanding that this is really going to be a long-term problem, so we can’t expect things to go back to the way things were before.”

Spirit of Generosity

• “CERF+ was founded on the gesture of mutual aid, of artists helping artists through emergencies. At all these craft shows, inevitably there was somebody who had an emergency and they literally would pass the hat to help that person go home with some money to pay bills or to rebuild. That spirit is so strong today. You’re seeing it locally in communities, you’re seeing it online, with people sharing work and ideas.”
• “Carrie and I just participated in webinars that were organized by The American Craft Council, with Springboard for the Arts, and SNAG [Society of North American Goldsmiths], and CERF was co-sponsoring with them. It was artists helping artists with ideas on how they manage their social media presence, how they sell work, how they’re thinking about this time. Many people have a little bit more time to really take in these lessons and to share how they work and think.”
• “BUY ART! I don’t even think it has to be collectors. I think anybody with a regular paycheck right now should be buying art, should be donating to their food bank, should be really trying to help out. We are extremely lucky to have our work continue. On the outside artists may look like they have beautiful jewelry, and incredible clothes—in the craft field, especially—but they are one setback away from real financial turmoil. So people are in trouble right now, and I think all of us need to be supportive in any ways that we can.”

For Covid-19 relief resources and help navigating the CARES act, see CERF+ Responds to Covid-19 and CARES Act and Steps You Can Take.

See also Reframing Our Creative Livelihood, by Alex McAdams

Find out how working artists become thriving artists. This is the biggest podcast we’ve ever recorded, featuring 18 voices: the graduating class of our most recent Art-Business Accelerator cohort, their Advisors, and CHF team members Daniel DiGriz and Elizabeth Hulings. 1:25-3:00 is a “walk across the graduation stage” celebration moment for each Fellow. The episode is packed with the artists’ insightful observations about the triumphs, challenges, community, and skill-building involved in developing a successful creative career, and the role CHF has played in the process. Elizabeth Hulings says: “We’re seeing some major projects here that have legs and are going to be important. I really do believe that these artists are going to continue to build on the momentum that they have, and achieve some of these big goals. And that’s really exciting.”

The Value of Artist-Peers & Teams

• “The team has been a huge support to me. There was an opportunity that came my way that I was thrilled about, but terrified. I didn’t see how it could benefit me financially, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to participate in it. And just talking it through with my team, they all were encouraging me and helping me to see my blind spot, really. Discussion with my peers helped me so much—these are people I respect, and that encouragement meant so much to me, that it ultimately wound up being my pivotal project. I’m very thankful, I wouldn’t have had that without that particular conversation on the phone with my team.” – Steven
• “The fellowship program offers some really comprehensive, very successful strategies. But working in teams, what resonated for me is that in getting to know each other we could really identify the sensitive aspects that each of us had. And we were able to walk through maybe some embarrassing moments or some real difficulties that some of us had to figure out how to personalize the strategies and protocols. So to me, that was very meaningful. That human direct connection that takes into account who you are and what your motivations and intentions are.” – Robin
• “There’s so much in this business about personal recommendations, personal introductions. And I have found that to be one of the most valuable parts of this. Not only meeting the other artists, but any way that they can help to introduce buyers or galleries. And I hope I’ve been able to do that to a couple of my compatriots here, but I find in this business that personal recommendation is the most important for me and the one thing that I’ve gotten most out of this.” – Tim

What Does A CHF Accelerator Fellow Artist Do After Graduation?

• “I am going to pursue my pivotal project, which was to build an addition on my studio so I can create larger sculptures. And I’m grateful to this program for helping to solidify my thought process about that—and also spurring me into action and holding me accountable.” – April
• “I’m definitely going after my pivotal project. This was an idea that I cooked up about 12 years ago and I kind of let it fall by the wayside. And being with CHF and getting the encouragement in the direction that I did, I am definitely doing this in the coming year. […] The thing that was so helpful to me was the creation of an action plan through the career blueprinting. Because it gave me the ideas to get organized and give me step-by-step of what I’m going to do throughout the year.” – Sharon
• “It was a total mind-shift this year, where the brand-story was so critical. The things I wanted to paint, versus what I was selling…I was seeing what I wanted to paint as sort of a negative. And now I see it as a way to differentiate myself. And that, that is something that I should be putting all of my energies into. There is a market for what I want to do. Like I said, it was just a total mind-shift on that. And I am selling them. There are buyers for the subject matter that I want to paint. So yeah, it’s been really great that way.” – Carrie

Highlights of the CHF Accelerator Experience

• “The very best thing to me was the weekly conference calls. Being able to stay on track with my goals and my perspectives, and having all the stuff we were learning reinforced every week was so extraordinarily useful for me. Whereas in the past, I’d start out the year with you know, grand plans and ideas and blah-blah-blah, and then business as usual kicks in and life kicks in and then I lose track of what those were. But being able to redirect it each and every week was just instrumental on me being able to stay on track and it’s made a huge, huge difference for me this year.” – James
• “I give very high points for the process of doing my brand story. It helped clarify a lot of things for me. It clarified what some of the connections are between the pieces that I’ve selected to do over the years. It also clarifies my thinking when I have to make a decision about what to do next.” – Maneulita
• “I think the thing that I liked best was the process of clarifying our business objectives. It was a very organized and informative process that really allowed us to kind of dig in and figure out what steps were necessary. I loved the idea of envisioning where we wanted to be and then looking around—in our imagination—one year, two years, five years from now and saying, what did I do to make this happen? And then go: okay, well now I need to do those things. That was really a wonderful tool that I’m going to use a lot.” – Jonathan

Professional-Level Networking

• “Our group, Absolute Red, will continue to work together. And what thrills me about that is, obviously as artists we’re isolated. We do work alone and most of us like that. I’ve learned the importance of having a network. It’s been really cool learning the different strengths and weaknesses that we each have, and how, through a network, we can lift each other up in those weak areas and encourage each other with the strengths that we have.” – Terri
• “I think that one of the beautiful things about this Fellowship is, when I was listening to the other Fellows ask questions and talk about their challenges, it may not have been issues that really are anything that I’m dealing with now, but taking notes, I know for the future whom I might contact should I have something to deal with down the line. – Robin
• “The program has helped develop my skill in working with a small group. I was already involved in a few groups, but I was not using that interaction effectively. And since the advice and the practice that I’ve been getting, it’s become much better.” – Manuelita
• “I feel like the whole experience of sharing with individuals and teams here makes me more open to even asking local people, here where I am in Woodstock, for sessions to share ideas and bat things back and forth together. And I just feel much less like I would be bothering them, but more that we would be enriching each other’s lives to do this. – Karen

Advisers’ Experiences

• “When I was in the [Accelerator] program [myself], it felt like I was climbing Mount Everest, and there were so many steps and so many slips and falls. After doing that, being an adviser—I see it more like being a Sherpa. You know, the Sherpas are the one who go up the mountain all the time, you know, people don’t make it to the top of Everest, maybe they do, maybe it’s their life’s achievement. The Sherpa, that’s their job. They keep doing it and they learn that mountain inside and out. And I think as an advisor not only were we helping new Fellows, we also were relearning steps to reclimb Everest. Which has just added another level to my art career.” – Greg
• “My experience is…the one word I would use is inspired. Inspired by the talent of the artists in my group. Inspired by their persistence. And inspired by their growth. And it was a real honor to observe everybody’s challenges and struggles and watch them grow through them.” – Nadia

Why this Program is so Important Now

• “Throughout our entire history as a species, we have succeeded by marrying a good idea to a solid plan and then implementing it. So it always starts with the idea. And unless we create the conditions in which people can have good ideas and have those ideas be respected and we can take them to market and we can implement them, we’re just not going to survive and neither is our planet.

So that’s a big-guy existential reason that I think this is just essential. I think on a more micro level, as the way we work and the way we live shifts: more and more technology, AI, different ways of working, the gig economy, all of these things, the globalization—we have to rely more on ourselves and our interpersonal relationships to succeed. We have to be able to break things down and analyze them and be strategic.” – Elizabeth Hulings

Congratulations to Tim Saternow, Robin Holder, April Wagner, Steven Lester, Karen Whitman, Manuelita Brown, Jonathan Keeton, Andie Freeman, James Moore, Adreon Henry, Carrie Cook, Terry Albanese, and Sharon Crute!

Two years in the making, CHF’s Report on the Working Artist (ROWA) is a truly groundbreaking piece of research: the first of its kind demonstrating artists’ pivotal role in our changing economy. In this engaging conversation, CHF’s data analysis team Daniel DiGriz and Lily Dulberg sit down to discuss the methodology and significance of the Report, the documented demand for entrepreneurial training for artists, the gaps in existing research and traditional art education—and how we now have solid and replicable data that supports artists’ ability to make measurable contributions to our economy and the culture at large.

Finding a Pattern: The Bottom Line for Working Artists

• “We’ve got a lot of information out there from many different sources, many reputable organizations, nonprofits, and our business education programs. But there’s so little information on what artists need to drive success, and what actually changes the landscape of their art business.”
• “Most of the data out there does not measure bottom-line outcomes, which it’s kind of funny, right? Because you need to know those things in order to develop new programs and create best practices and to support artists.”
• “Many organizations had information on their websites about the different types of programs they ran, and testimonials and quotes from artists on what they need. But there was no real evidence of what these programs were able to do for the artists. There were no business results, no income results.”
• “With all the data that we’ve collated, and more specifically, with the data that we have done in-house at the Clark Hulings Fund through our Business Accelerator Program and our events, we really came up with a pattern that we can follow for any type of research in the future. And that is, that attitudes change behavior. Behavior produces business results. And business results lead to increased income or revenue.”
• “One of the main things that I think that we should take away from this, that business education moves the needle for artists. It helps them make more income, it helps them develop a more robust network which allows them to increase their sales.”

The Gap: Business Education for Artists

• “The ecosystem of gallerists, artists, and peer networks contribute so heavily to business results—and the success that artists see in their lives and in their businesses. There really aren’t enough art business events out there and there really aren’t enough groups for artists that foster communication around what it’s like to be in an art business.”
• “There’s a gap, and in that gap is business education. And it’s so mind-boggling to think that only 5% of an average sampling of fine arts curriculum involves any sort of entrepreneurial or business education.”
• “We had to establish that there was a gap, that it exists indeed, in order to say, ‘Okay, this is how we can fill the gap, this is how we can create change and this is how artists are already creating change.’ ”
• “…it was really amazing to be able to shed light on how that’s already happening and the research that shows that it’s replicable. Other organizations can do it, and the secret sauce is business training.”

How We Collect and Analyze Data

• “So at the Clark Hulings Fund, we’ve been collecting data from our fellows, from [Art-Business Conference] participants, from artists who are involved with our work in many different ways. We have a whole process behind how we do that: we make sure that everything is categorized so that we can actually analyze the themes, and there are codes for the different themes that come up in what the artists are talking about.”
• “When have our conferences, we have artists coming up to us, giving us testimonials, talking about the experience—and none of that is lost in translation. We’re using everything that we received from the artists because that’s really where it starts, with the people. As you said, this is a human-driven thing. The data doesn’t come first. It’s the people. So, you know, we have the artists, and we’re doing the data to further shed light upon what’s possible when the community supports artists.”
• “We’ve put together something that people can get behind, because we have the data to prove that the artists who participate in our learning conferences and in the Art Business Accelerator program are seeing changes.”
• “And if you talk to anyone, any of the fellows, you’ll hear the same things that are reflected in the report. It’s like, ‘I’m making five times more income than I was before the program with just a couple of changes in my mindset and my business practices’. So it all ties together so beautifully, and I think that having the data to back it up is step one.”

Working Artists Contribute to the Economy and More

• “What we found, was that there wasn’t much research or much literature out there on working artists’ contributions to the economy, but what WAS out there, points to huge influences on the micro, macro, and mezzo levels.
• “I think that’s really huge. To know that working artists, backed by the data science, make an impact. Not just in their local communities and the economy of the local community, but on a larger scale for the entirety of the United States.”
• “We found that, through some of the collated research out there, that crime rates go down when people have access to the Arts. There’s a very clear correlation between cultural engagement and community well-being.”
• “Aside from an economic standpoint, we also have the cultural aspect that you brought up, which is that artists inject their work into the world, and they, with their contributions to the cultural capital of the world, they’re really changing communities; on not just in micro-level, but also on the larger scale.”
• “This is really just the tip of the iceberg in research on working artists—being that we’re one of the first organizations and data science teams to really dive deeper and find out what moves the needle, what artists need to develop sustainable businesses.”
• “We’re really shedding light on the fact that something that we should be investing in, is art. Contributing to thriving artists and their work really changes the economy; it changes the culture of a city, of a country.”

Read the Report on the Working Artist (ROWA) here. You may know individuals or organizations who will find that ROWA supports the case they want to make for artists or the cultural economy; please share it with them.