Don't Fund Artists, Hire Them

If you fainted after reading the first half of that thought (or mentally started drafting your hate mail to me), please do read to the end when you regain consciousness.

It’s coming up on one year since I closed Dance Wire - the nonprofit dance service organization I founded and led for 11 years. The ideas I will be exploring in the next few posts, I felt long before I had any words to support them. It was also difficult to see clearly when I was in the midst of it all and especially complex within the context of my roles and relationships - coaching/mentoring artists, applying for funding, running a service organization that served the broader ecosystem of dance.

But after a year of letting this idea settle into my system, I’m finally ready to put it into words, or at least my version of words which include felt senses, flow of energy, perceptions, and emerging ideas.

What I keep coming back to is the idea that somewhere in the course of history, the arts became positioned as an isolated sector that exists adjacent to “real life” instead of integrated within it - and increasingly represented through the lens of charity and funding.

Now, the professional pathways available to artists, cultural narratives, funding models, and how artists are seen and valued in society are stuck in a perpetual loop of isolation and charity.

Professional Pathways

In my last post “A Life Organized by Curiosity” I go into more detail about how trapped I was in the limiting, yet very common, view of what a career in dance can look like.

In my experience that path has been presented like this: Learn the craft, then perform the craft, teach the craft or be an administrator to other people learning, performing, and teaching. You can earn money by teaching or being an administrator, but you will need to raise money to share your skills, creativity, and vision with the world.

The message here is that the only work you can find if you are a dancer will be within the isolated sector of dance. Your creativity, skills, knowledge, and wisdom are not relevant anywhere else.

Cultural Narratives

For years, in Portland, OR, where I live, the headlines read “Save the Arts!” and “The Arts Need Funding!”

This type of language epitomizes the arts as a separate sector that is in need of charitable support. This keeps us stuck putting forward extraordinary effort to solve the wrong problem.

I have come to believe that the root cause of this is our societal focus on products, outcomes, and results. In other words, things that are transactional. When we think of the arts only in terms of the production or finished product we miss the most important (and intense and messy) part of what makes that work meaningful - the process!

If we become better connected with the value of the process and the practiced creativity, skills, knowledge, and wisdom artists have to bring to the table, we wouldn’t be perpetually figuring out how to save them, we would be devising more ways to employ them.

Funding Models

Both funders and artists are endlessly trying to refine this system. Funders are trying to make application questions more simple and straightforward. They offer sessions that help artists figure out how to align with the guidelines. Artists agonize over their grant-writing skills, try to use language not native to them to describe their work, and are continually refining their case for why they need the money.

If seen in a different light, all of this is just asking artists to get better at fitting into the box.

The loop of isolation and charity are reinforced when artists are:

• Asked to apply for funding instead of being hired to contribute. (imbalanced power dynamic)

• Required to align with criteria instead of exploring the emergence of an idea. (limiting innovation)

• Required to justify their value instead of being recognized for it. (felt sense of personal value)

• Required to make the case for their need instead of acknowledging that all people have monetary needs.

I have both felt in my body and seen repeatedly in the artists I coached, how all of this is internalized. And I can assure you that none of this makes artists feel like valued members of society.

But as someone who spent the last 11 years examining the dance ecosystem from multiple angles, I have some ideas…

Next week, the exploration continues.