• Home
  • About
    • About this Blog
    • About Andrew Taylor
    • Contact
  • Subscribe
  • Other AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

The Artful Manager

Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture

Six Paths to Support Working Artists

February 8, 2023 by Andrew Taylor

I’m honored to serve on the governing board of Fractured Atlas, a national organization that helps creative people and creative projects along their journey with fundraising tools, educational resources, and personalized support. To imagine and explore other opportunities to empower working artists and creative projects, the organization commissioned Alexis Frasz of Helicon Collaborative to write an “Opportunity Scan” of six possible paths. The public report from this effort is now available.

Graphic showing the six opportunities explored in the report.

The six opportunities were selected in conversation with Fractured Atlas staff, board, and membership; with partner and peer institutions; and with the report’s author. The goal was not to “pick a winner” and run with it, but rather to interrogate the ecology of artist support, and imagine ways we might play a useful role as provider, partner, advocate, or ally. The six opportunities explored were:

  • Access to Capital – “the challenges that entrepreneurs face in how they access the capital they need to start up and grow their businesses.”
  • Mutual Aid – “people democratically self-organizing to meet their own and/or others’ needs outside of market structures, the state, and philanthropy.”
  • Guaranteed Income – “recurring, unrestricted, and unconditional cash transfer provided to people earning below a certain level of income” (Jain Family Institute).
  • Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) – “one part of a larger emerging ‘Web3’ universe, which use blockchain technology to verify transactions, create contracts, and make payments in a decentralized way.”
  • 1099 Worker Protection and Benefits – “potential solutions to the precarity that people working as independent contractors (those who receive a 1099 tax form instead of a W2 in the U.S.) face in regards to standard employee benefits such as unemployment insurance, workers compensation, disability, and paid leave.”
  • Worker Cooperatives – “businesses that are owned and governed by members for their collective benefit.”

The report offers definitions of each term, examples from the arts and adjacent communities, and opportunities for action that could benefit artists.

Read on!

REPORT CITATION: Alexis Frasz. Opportunity Scan: Opportunities to Support Artists’ Ability to Thrive. Edited by Vicky Blume, Theresa Hubbard, Sophia Park, Taji Senior. Fractured Atlas, January 2023. 

Filed Under: main

About Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor is a faculty member in American University's Arts Management Program in Washington, DC. [Read More …]

ArtsManaged Field Notes

#ArtsManaged logoAndrew Taylor also publishes a weekly email newsletter, ArtsManaged Field Notes, on Arts Management practice. The most recent notes are listed below.

RSS ArtsManaged Field Notes

  • The one and the many of board service May 20, 2025
    How do nonprofit boards balance individual impulse with collective resolve?
  • The relentless rise of pseudo-productivity May 13, 2025
    Visible activity and physical exhaustion are not useful measures of valuable work.
  • The strategy screen May 6, 2025
    A strong strategy demands a clear job description
  • What is Arts Management? April 29, 2025
    The practice of aggregating and animating people, stuff, and money toward expressive ends.
  • Outsourcing expertise April 22, 2025
    Sometimes, it's smart to hire outsiders. Sometimes, it's not.

Artful Manager: The Book!

The Artful Manager BookFifty provocations, inquiries, and insights on the business of arts and culture, available in
paperback, Kindle, or Apple Books formats.

Recent Comments

  • Barry Hessenius on Business in service of beauty: “An enormous loss. Diane changed the discourse on culture – its aspirations, its modus operandi, its assumptions. A brilliant thought…” Jan 19, 18:58
  • Sunil Iyengar on Business in service of beauty: “Thank you, Andrew. The loss is immense. Back when Diane was teaching a course called “Approaching Beauty,” to business majors…” Jan 16, 18:36
  • Michael J Rushton on Business in service of beauty: “A wonderful person and a creative thinker, this is a terrible loss. – thank you for posting this.” Jan 16, 13:18
  • Andrew Taylor on Two goals to rule them all: “Absolutely, borrow and build to your heart’s content! The idea that cultural practice BOTH reduces and samples surprise is really…” Jun 2, 18:01
  • Heather Good on Two goals to rule them all: “To “actively sample novel experiences (in safe ways) to build more resilient perception and prediction” is about as useful a…” Jun 2, 15:05

Archives

Creative Commons License
The written content of this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images are not covered under this license, but are linked (whenever possible) to their original author.

an ArtsJournal blog

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in