Pouring Water into Boxes - Full Series
January 20, 2026
Introducing a new series: Pouring Water into Boxes
As an artist who also works across administrative and advisory roles, I’ve observed and participated in the normalized ways that “opportunity” (grants, residencies, commissions, open calls) invites artists into processes that transfer hours of unpaid labor onto those with the least margin. What artists are often led to believe they are working toward is access, visibility, legitimacy, and prestige. At the same time, institutions promise both artists and the public a richer cultural fabric, civic vitality, and a strengthened creative life.
Institutions have designed their funding processes around the assumption that delivering these promises requires sense-making labor. Grantmakers and opportunity-givers require artists to perform this work simply to be considered. Artists are asked to translate practices that are often perceptual, relational, temporal, affective, and nonlinear into institutional language, priorities, and justifications. In doing so, they are also asked to perform specialized, ethical, and relational labor involving judgment, care, and responsibility. They are asked to carry this not-insignificant labor without the structural support needed to absorb its costs.
I’m beginning a series of posts examining how these dynamics feel to live within and how they function structurally. I’m calling it Pouring Water into Boxes: Artistic labor and the limits of institutional form. It is intended as an examination of organizational, program, and project design choices and their consequences for artists, funders, administrators, and the many people working in between. My hope is to offer shared language for tensions many of us feel but struggle to name, and to invite more collective responsibility for how opportunity is structured.
As I write through the series, I’ll also entertain a fundamental shift of frame that I think is necessary for all of us. In terms of creating a vibrant and innovative society, no amount of better grantmaking can substitute for income security or healthcare. I want to look beyond our field, consider the larger context in which we are operating, and recognize the collective power we hold to make meaningful change.
I’ll share the first installment in the series next Tuesday, 1/27.
If you want to be in public dialogue, I’m also posting this on LinkedIn and FB, join me there via the social links here on my website, or use the Contact link to be in touch behind the curtain :-).
Janurary 27, 2026
Invisible Spill: Expansive ambition, narrow vision
I want to share an analysis of an application for an opportunity I recently encountered. It offers a clear example of how structural problems are embedded in the formats artists are routinely asked to navigate. This isn’t about calling anyone out; it’s about examining how opportunity is designed and what that reveals about how artistic work is understood and valued.
This particular opportunity, offered by a leading contemporary performance presenter in a major city and funded by a local foundation, provided two weeks of development in a professional theater. In-kind support included rehearsal space, technical equipment, staff, and the costs of a culminating public presentation.
The application guidelines specified an “Artist Fee” consisting of $4K to be developed into a project “budget” collaboratively with the presenter’s staff. The fee and the project budget were treated as interchangeable. Collapsing the two erases the distinction between paying a person for their labor and funding the delivery of a project.
Additionally, there was this instruction: “The resident artist must allocate at least $500 [of the $4,000] to artist fees i.e. we want you to pay yourself!” This places responsibility on the artist to pay themselves. It does not say we want to pay you a respectful fee for your labor. The exclamation mark adds emphasis, perhaps meant to encourage artists to eschew longstanding norms in which they use all available funds to realize projects while finding support for their own lives elsewhere. However, the instruction does not structurally correct that problem. It reproduces it.
In the economic context of a major U.S. city in 2026, $500 functions as a token gesture relative to two weeks of highly skilled work. In the performing arts, projects are often ensemble-based and resource-intensive; while an artist could theoretically allocate the full $4K budget to their own fee, the opportunity’s design clearly anticipates broader production demands.
Finally, there was the question: “How would your project impact the civic life of [City]?” Here, the applicant is being asked to take responsibility for producing civic impact through the work itself, at the level of the city. The magnitude of that expectation and the suggested support for artist fees (pay yourself $500!) do not align.
In our field, grand ambition is routinely poured into narrow forms of support. The “invisible spill” shows up when artists quietly subsidize projects with their own time, money, or precarity. It also appears when others never enter the system at all because they cannot afford to work under these conditions, and when outcomes fall short of the expansive civic and cultural claims made on their behalf.
For now, I’m not proposing solutions. I’m trying to make the structure visible. Until we can see how responsibility, ambition, and support are currently misaligned, it’s hard to have an actionable conversation about our futures.
Comments (2)
EX 7 months ago · 1 Like
I have a feeling I know which institution you’re talking about, and I even used to work there. If we’re talking about the same place, I’ll name that it felt extremely embarrassing to frequently ask artists to name the budget for their work when we as an institution were never able to provide any range of our own - independent of whatever 4k range was listed. I would frequently urge our ED to come up with a clearer number to propose to artists, but it became clear that being an ED for so many years made it very hard for them to understand the struggle of independent artists.
Eventually I left the organization for a multitude of reasons, but as someone who wanted to help uplift and support my artist friends, my org’s lack of transparency actually damaged important community relationships I had, which I really wish hadn’t of happened. Nowadays I’m no longer interested in being an arts administrator, but so many people who work in arts admin don’t actually understand what it means to be a scrappy artist that needs to hustle in order to survive.
Thanks for writing this post, even if we’re talking about different orgs. I tried so hard to change that institution from the inside, but the cost of trying to change the old guard became a part of why I decided to leave.
asimina chremos 7 months ago · 0 Likes
Hi EX, thanks so much for sharing your experience. This is so real and relevant to the work I'm trying to do here of revealing truths in our field. I'm grateful.
Your observation that "so many people who work in arts admin don’t actually understand what it means to be a scrappy artist that needs to hustle in order to survive" --- Yes. I hear that.
I also hear you that you have paid a personal cost for trying to shift the system from within. Locating the levers of power to effectively make positive shifts for artists, all creative work, and care work, is something I'm keen on. I hope these posts can find their way to those people that need to understand for that to happen.
February 3, 2026
Flowing Forms: Nonlinear minds in linear systems
For the past fifteen years, a large part of my work has involved listening to artists, asking questions, and translating their responses into words so they can make the case for material support. I sit with people who perceive their projects as an interconnected, flowing whole. They sense relationships, momentum, aesthetic logic, and emotional charge all at once. The work is alive for them long before it can be named. What they often struggle to do is turn that three-dimensional flow into a linear sequence that a reader can follow in a grant application or a pitch to a presenter.
This is the guidance I find myself repeatedly giving: even if you can see the house all at once, you still have to walk the reader through it. You have to decide where the tour begins, what comes next, what needs to be named explicitly, and what can remain implicit. You have to narrow your frame of view and move it step by step, narrating the entire time.
For many artists, this feels foreign—even intrusive. Much artistic work emerges from nonverbal realms of consciousness. Decisions are made through sensation, rhythm, spatial awareness, affect, intuition, and embodied memory long before they are available as language. Over and over again, I watch my clients struggle as their generative artistic processes crash against the narrative demands of application systems that privilege verbal articulation as the primary evidence of thinking, planning, and visioning.
If fluent language were equivalent to thinking, large language models would already be intelligent in the way humans are. They aren’t—because intelligence is embodied, situated, temporal, and relational.
In reality, many forms of complex ideation occur entirely outside of words. Artists, athletes, engineers, and designers routinely think through movement, spatial reasoning, pattern recognition, pressure, timing, and embodied feedback long before ideas are verbalized. Entire domains of human knowledge operate at this level.
Fields such as engineering and design rely heavily on prototypes, models, simulations, and iterative testing rather than requiring full verbal articulation in advance. In sports, capacity is evaluated in motion through action, feedback, and results under real conditions. Athletes are not required to fully explain their potential performance before they are invited to join a team.
The arts funding context in the United States, however, remains a place where the bias favoring language is especially visible. Here, legitimacy, readiness, and merit are still overwhelmingly determined by an artist’s ability to translate nonverbal, emergent thinking into language-heavy formats at early stages of project or organizational development.
In artistic practice, form and function co-arise through flow, over time and in context. What the work is and what it does emerge together through making, rather than being fixed in advance. Institutional systems tend to reverse this logic. They require declared function and stable form upfront, as a condition for allowing flow to occur at all.
In application narratives, artists are asked to describe outcomes, impacts, and trajectories before the work exists. They are asked to stabilize ideas that are still in motion, to forecast effects that depend on context, and to present certainty where experimentation is the point.
Systems that privilege linguistic fluency, narrative coherence, and clean categorization reward those who can perform those skills, regardless of whether they reflect the intelligence actually driving the work. Artists often notice this themselves, remarking that certain colleagues are “good at getting grants,” even when the work itself feels thin.
As an intermediary, I’m glad when artists gain the skills to navigate these formats more effectively. But it’s worth naming where the burden still falls. The work of translation, of reshaping nonlinear thinking to fit linear forms, is disproportionately carried by those with the least institutional support. The self-education required to meet these demands often has little to do with artists’ actual practices as choreographers, sculptors, and other makers.
Long before I was working in grant and institutional contexts, I was already exploring this tension in my own artistic practice. Years ago, I conceived and led a series of dance technique classes called Flowing into Form. The work focused on cultivating flow as a way of entering technical forms, allowing those forms to become dimensional—alive with depth, pleasure, richness, and presence.
One of the central insights of that work was simple but unsettling: just because a human body is moving does not mean it is embodied. When dancers move primarily through forms designed to fulfill hegemonic cultural values—without regard for the individual intelligence, sensation, and perception that animate them—those forms can distance dancers from their own embodiment. Pouring flow into a static container preserves the container, not the flow. What remains is form without the full, generative presence of the human inhabiting it.
The issue here is not whether artists should be able to communicate or plan. It is that when institutions claim to value experimentation, nonlinearity, and complexity, but require linear certainty at the point of entry, those values remain rhetorical. The forms we design shape who can enter, what kinds of intelligence are recognized, and what kinds of work are privileged.
Again, I’m not offering solutions here. I’m trying to describe the structures many of us are moving through and the kinds of intelligence they tend to reward. Seeing this clearly is a necessary first step before new models can emerge.
February 10, 2026
Grids and Gravity: Budgets, narratives, and the illusion of support
Let’s look at project budgets as another site where institutional design is at odds with how creative work can be imagined, described, and sustained.
My own relationship to budgets was not intuitive. As someone trained primarily in the dance studio, spreadsheets once felt alien to my way of thinking. Over time, in order to support my fellow artists and their small nonprofits seeking funding, I learned how to build and read them. What I learned, and what I try to share with clients today, is that thinking in terms of money can provide a clearer view of what artistic work actually requires to exist in the world: time, labor, coordination, material resources, and ongoing care.
At their best, budgets are grounding. They help artists translate vision into action. One of the most reliable grant-writing “tricks” I share with clients is to start with a budget and a timeline before writing narrative sections. When artists do this, priorities surface naturally. My work in helping to craft grant narratives flows easily. Project descriptions become more accurate, less grandiose, and more obviously actionable.
This “trick” is useful only because application designs tend to cue other priorities. Most begin by asking for expansive narratives about vision, significance, and impact, with timelines folded in along the way. Budgets tend to appear later. This sequencing matters. It signals what is most important, shapes how applicants allocate their attention and energy, and pulls focus toward articulation and vision before material grounding.
By the time artists arrive at the budget, they are often cognitively exhausted and emotionally invested in the story they have already told. Then the spreadsheet appears: rows, columns, fixed cells. The grid feels less like a net to capture needed support and more like a wall to climb. I recognize this because I lived it myself, and I still see it in experienced artists.
This tension is compounded by the scale of funding itself. Across most project grants in the U.S., support for artistic work is limited and highly constrained. When total funding is small, there is little room for honesty. A budget that fully accounted for time, labor, administration, and basic subsistence would, in many cases, immediately expose the inadequacy of the support on offer.
Artists will vie for $4,000 to put toward an ensemble choreographic work, for example, not because it is sufficient, but because it is what exists. Creative work is routinely pushed toward compressed timelines, partial accounting, and quiet assumptions about unpaid labor or personal subsidy. My clients describe the process as speculative and uneasy. They are asked to construct budgets that depend on funding streams that may never materialize. They struggle to pay people wages that reflect skill and experience.
Artists enter these conditions not because they make economic sense, but because the drive to make the work is not primarily economic. Artistic creation is a deeply generative human impulse. My clients routinely absorb instability in order to bring a vision into form. Arts funding structures quietly rely on this fact.
Managing funds requires administrative time: issuing payments, tracking expenses, handling taxes, maintaining compliance, reporting, and providing required public credit. Application systems for project grants do not compensate artists for the time spent applying, rarely for the work of managing the grant if awarded. I recognize that this labor is often expected to be covered by other grants or fundraising, a reality that simply adds more hours of work unrelated to the artwork itself.
The result is a particular kind of ethical strain. The mismatch between generative creative process and numeric constraint pressures artists to present plans they know are incomplete, provisional, or unsustainable. Even when they are acting in good faith, many experience this as a form of distortion—of their work, their values, and their responsibility to others.
Budgets and applications live in grids: spreadsheets, forms, boxes to be filled. Grids are excellent at organizing information. They are far less capable of supporting evolving futures. Human lives and artistic projects, by contrast, are subject to gravity and time. Artists juggle jobs and availability. Materials costs suddenly inflate because of supply chain disruptions. The creative process reveals a new area of exploration.
A net is also made of intersecting lines, but it behaves differently. It yields. It distributes weight. It allows movement without collapse. A grid is not a net. The gridded lines of a spreadsheet organize line items and allocate finite resources. They are not designed to flex and stretch to hold living, dimensional projects. When the grid cannot hold the weight, that weight does not disappear. It falls through.
This is not a failure of artists, nor an argument against planning or financial clarity. It is a design problem. When application processes lead with lofty ambition, move applicants into narrative expansion, and only later require compliance with constrained material structures, priorities become distorted. True costs are obscured from grantmakers, and applicants are encouraged to obscure them from themselves as well.
I recently heard an anecdote of a conversation between two NYC choreographers where one told the other: “Don’t do the math, or you’ll never do the project.” The message, to hide economic reality so the work can survive, has been heard and absorbed.
February 17, 2026
Undertow: Stability and precarity in a shared system
I believe we need to look at artists and the institutions that support them as parts of a single organism working toward shared cultural aims.
In theory, energy and insight would move reciprocally through that entity. But bodies depend on balanced systems. When one side bears more weight than the other, circulation shifts. The imbalance may not be immediately visible, but it shapes the currents that determine what rises into visibility and what is pulled below the surface.
Institutional staff positions are typically structured for stability and continuity. Salaries and benefits provide some degree of regular baseline security throughout the year. The organizations they work for maintain reserves, cultivate diversified funding streams, and distribute resources across multiple initiatives. Even when institutions face pressure, it is absorbed collectively and distributed across a portfolio. A single project’s outcome rarely threatens organizational continuity or staff livelihood. The administrative infrastructure remains intact.
Most generative artist work is project-based. Income fluctuates. Because basic needs are not reliably secured through artistic labor, artists assemble many unique solutions: teaching, academic posts, inheritances, partner incomes, unrelated jobs, and sometimes precarity itself. If a project falters, the artist’s reputation is immediately implicated. If funding falls through, the artist rearranges their labor and personal life. If audience development underperforms, it is often the artist who recalibrates outreach, absorbs financial loss, or renegotiates compensation with collaborators.
The system depends on the artist’s devotion and endurance. The desire to make the work is so strong that artists routinely absorb stress and instability in order to bring a vision into form. This devotion is extraordinary. It reflects something deeply human about creative impulse and meaning-making. What we see, in our system as it exists, is that devotion becomes part of the infrastructure that allows institutions to project innovation and vitality, even when the underlying conditions remain uneven.
When one part of a shared system is consistently less buffered and more exposed, feedback does not flow freely. Artists experience the consequences of design decisions immediately, but often lack the leverage to influence those designs. Institutional leaders, insulated from direct exposure, do not encounter the same pressures in their daily work. As a result, information that could refine and strengthen the system circulates incompletely. The field loses adaptive capacity.
To compound this imbalance, the implicit “job description” embedded in many grant agreements includes not only the responsibility to generate innovative new work, but also to manage funds, pay collaborators, track expenses, cultivate audiences, gather participation data, document outcomes, meet reporting requirements, navigate tax implications, and ensure required public recognition of funders. The same individual whose new work has been selected for support is often the one who must then administer it, measure it, market it, and account for it — tasks that primarily serve institutional requirements rather than artistic development.
If arts funding structures aspire to generate civic vitality, enrich public life, deepen dialogue, and expand cultural imagination, then circulation between artists and institutional staff matters. When devotion is taken for granted and misallocated labor becomes normalized, it is reasonable to ask whether the design reflects the capacities of the people inside it. And whether, in the long term, that design strengthens or constrains the very cultural vitality it claims to champion.
February 24, 2026
The Shallows: Time, depth, and development
Every artist I work with is busy juggling multiple commitments. Teaching. Administrative roles. Service work. Caregiving. Running nonprofits. Freelance gigs. This reality is common and unremarkable. It fits into a larger culture of multitasking, notions of productivity, dynamism, gig economies, and creative hustling.
In counterpoint, many forms of artistic labor depend on sustained, embodied duration. A dancer in physical practice cannot pause mid-phrase without breaking a state of attention that took time to enter. A musician working through a difficult passage relies on repetition and embodied memory. A sculptor at a kiln or a potter at the wheel cannot simply step away without altering the process. The time required is immersive and cumulative. It is not simply hours logged; it is a state that must be entered and protected.
One response within the arts field has been the proliferation of residencies. These programs often promise what artists most lack: focused time. Some provide stipends, housing, and meals. Others charge fees and function more like curated retreats. In all cases, they frame artistic time as something special, carved out and set apart from ordinary life.
There is generosity in this impulse. And yet it is striking that artists are often required to leave their homes, studios, communities, and daily infrastructures in order to secure time to do their work. Parents must arrange childcare. Caregivers must reorganize support. Jobs must be paused or covered. Healthcare appointments must be scheduled around the residency window.
When time for art is treated as exceptional rather than integral, artistic identity becomes separated from everyday living. Creative work is imagined as something that happens elsewhere, under special conditions, rather than as an ongoing dimension of human life. This separation carries consequences. It reinforces the idea that art is a luxury activity rather than a continuous form of labor and perception woven into ordinary existence.
People who have never maintained a demanding artistic practice may not recognize what kind of time this work entails. They may see a finished performance or exhibition, but not the years required to develop the underlying skill, nor the ongoing practice necessary to sustain it. Artistic capacity is not static. It must be maintained through repetition, refinement, and embodied discipline. The creation of specific artworks then arises from that foundation of practice and carries its own temporal demands—planning, construction, rehearsal, iteration—each with distinct rhythms and durations. Without an understanding of this layered relationship between training, maintenance, and production, it becomes difficult to design structures that meaningfully protect artistic time.
The administrative side of an originating, generative art practice—updating the website, re-drafting the artist statement, submitting grant proposals, documenting the work, assembling documents, drafting budgets, archiving, and preparing reports—all consume hours that are rarely compensated. Administrative maintenance for artist-run nonprofits layers on additional tasks and responsibilities. My clients reliably note that the infrastructure meant to support artistic production often crowds out the activity it exists to sustain.
Other fields provide clues. Athletes train within systems that assume their bodies and focus must be protected. Scientists often work within institutions that buffer research time from administrative distraction. Surgeons have staff who field calls while they are up to their elbows in viscera. There are roles dedicated to logistics, management, and coordination. In U.S. artistic contexts, these protective layers are tough to build and burdensome to sustain. Unless artists reach a level of commercial success that allows them to hire assistance, they are responsible for both generating the work and creating the conditions under which it can be generated.
When I try to slow clients down to think through a project—to map its scope, anticipate its material needs, and reflect on its arc—they often resist. Planning feels like delay. It pulls them away from the embodied act of making and from the immersive state required to enter the work. The time required for articulation is substantial. Under current institutional conditions, it often feels less like an integrated part of the practice and more like a diversion from it. Clients tell me it competes directly with the limited, protected hours they have for their practice.
The institutional structures with which many artists interface tend to be designed as though the artist’s time were expandable rather than finite. I do see signals of institutional awareness of artist strain, though with limited success. For example, reduced word counts for narrative answers may seem like a kindness, but in practice, shorter forms often increase cognitive pressure.
For artists whose thinking unfolds relationally and dimensionally, distilling complex work into a few tight paragraphs requires more than trimming language. It demands structural decisions about emphasis, hierarchy, and sequence. As an intermediary, I have spent many hours reorganizing and condensing my clients’ ideas in ways that preserve their integrity while making them legible within strict constraints. Simplification is not necessarily a time-saver, and it is certainly not a redistribution of labor.
For the typical U.S.-based artist, time is a resource stretched thin across artistic creation, administration, communication, fundraising, and documentation. It is eroded by constant connectivity. It is fragmented by multiple income streams. If we are concerned with the long-term vitality of arts and culture, then we must at least be able to see this clearly.
Creative work continues to emerge from compressed margins. Its vitality is not in question. The question is what remains foreclosed when the very structures designed to elevate artistic work demand significant speculative labor to access them. Each application redirects finite hours away from the studio, rehearsal room, or workshop. The system does not carry that burden. The practice does. Over time, that cumulative displacement shapes what is made, how deeply it is developed, and which possibilities are never realized.
Embodied time is the substrate on which artistic capacity is built and sustained. When systems designed to support artistic production repeatedly draw from that substrate without replenishing it, the consequences are not abstract. They are developmental. They alter the scope, depth, and refinement of the work itself.
March 10, 2026
Hidden Channels: Opportunity, translation, and relational interpretation
Let’s dig deeper into the translation layer required between artistic labor and institutional formats before creative work can be funded.
Here is a true story that may be familiar to you: An artist worked for years with consistency, rigor, and a clear vision, yet struggled to secure grant funding. Then the artist’s partner began writing the applications and shaping the public communications. Funding followed. The work did not change. The translation capacity around it changed. That distinction matters. It suggests that what is being evaluated is not only the strength of the art, but the strength of its conversion into institutional language.
Grantmakers now offer online group sessions explaining their opportunities and taking questions from hopeful applicants. They explain the guidelines. They clarify eligibility. They answer procedural questions. What they do not explain is that the applicant may first need to take the structure apart in order to understand the task. The institution treats the application as self-explanatory. Applicants, especially individual artists, often assume they should be able to open the form and fill it out, as one might complete a medical history or intake sheet.
No one explains that the portal version of the application is not the form most usable for serious thinking. Yet serious thinking is required to submit a competitive application. Institutions frequently acknowledge that applicants should draft their answers in a separate document and paste them into the online portal later. But that advice still assumes the task is primarily one of drafting responses. It does not acknowledge the prior labor of understanding the application as a whole: grasping its structure, understanding its logic, and seeing how the parts will function together. They acknowledge drafting, but rarely offer structural analysis.
What the story about the artist and their partner reveals is not simply that the partner supplied better prose. What changed was that the application process became relational. The work was no longer being forced to account for itself from within a single position. It was being shaped through a combination of lived knowledge, witnessing intelligence, love, and care.
I have become very good at arts administration by helping many others across different stages of career and organizational context. Yet I am not very good at writing grants for myself because the process usually requires a combination of subjectivity, witness, and reflection that is difficult to generate alone. The artist knows the work from within, but may be too close to it to easily occupy the additional positions the application demands. The task is often treated as an individual act of self-description. In practice, it may be more accurately understood as a relational act of interpretation.
Having access to relationships that can provide the necessary decoding and relational interpretation is often key to sustaining an arts career in the U.S. Those supports may come through social channels, professional ones, unpaid exchange, or paid assistance, but they are not evenly available.
This hidden infrastructure, and the invisible cost of time and money it carries, remains largely unexamined. Grantmakers often scrutinize the proposed use of funds more closely than the hidden labor required to access them. It is striking how rarely they ask who helped produce the application itself. The finished form is often treated as a transparent expression of the artist’s own readiness and clarity, even though it may depend on significant unseen support. What goes unexplored is the surrounding infrastructure of legibility.
Institutions do face an ethical constraint here. They need to preserve the appearance and practice of impartiality. If grants officers were to interview artists individually and help complete applications on their behalf, the risk of perceived favoritism would be obvious. That concern is real. Yet procedural distance does not automatically produce fairness. A system can be procedurally impartial while still being structurally unequal. The decoding and interpretation still has to happen. When institutions step back from that labor in the name of neutrality, it redistributed and taken up unevenly by artists, loved ones, and intermediaries.
By the time the application arrives for review, the form looks complete, coherent, and ready for evaluation. The preparatory analysis vanishes. The shared labor required to make the work legible has vanished into the past. The artist appears to have simply answered the questions. The institution appears to have simply assessed the work.
The issue is that funding systems rely on a substantial layer of translation and interpretive labor they do not properly name, define, or pay for. That labor shapes access and changes outcomes. It determines who can become legible enough to compete. And because it remains largely hidden, the strain is too often felt by artists as personal inadequacy rather than recognized for what it is: structural work that the system requires, but that cannot be done by one person, and rarely by a person steeped in artistic practice.
I learned a related lesson as a young artist, long before online portals became standard. I was already highly trained in dance and choreography and had serious professional experience. One opportunity designated for independent choreographers had an application requiring multiple paper copies and three-hole punching. I asked the grants officer whether their office could handle that part, because I did not have ready access to a photocopier or a three-hole punch. She said no. They wanted to fund people who already had those things.
I found the logic ridiculous, but it clarified something immediately. The copying, collating, and binder-ready preparation were functioning as signals. The process was not only evaluating the proposed artistic project. It was also evaluating whether the applicant already possessed the administrative environment the institution associated with responsibility and trustworthiness.
What institutions often underestimate is not only the amount of time required to complete an application, but the amount of interpretation required to use it well. What feels self-evident from inside administrative culture may feel fragmented, artificial, or misaligned from the vantage point of artistic practice. Until that hidden work is properly recognized, funding processes will continue to mistake legibility for preparedness and supported articulation for individual capacity. The application may appear to measure artistic merit. In practice, it also measures who has enough support to make their work intelligible to institutions.
March 17, 2026
The Siphon: Nonprofits, art, and cultural work
I once wanted to be a choreographer with my own company. I considered starting a nonprofit, but realized the administrative work would be onerous. I even advised colleagues against it. “It has nothing to do with making art,” I would say. “You’ll be filling out forms all the time.” Later, I came to understand that no adult life is fully free of bureaucracy, including an artist’s life. But there is a difference between accepting some red tape and reorganizing your artistic life around institutional maintenance.
Over time, I watched colleagues who formed nonprofits gain the capacity to produce larger-scale work. I also watched artists with deep, rigorous practices remain on the margins because they chose to spend their time in studios rather than in administration. And I watched others build visible organizations and raise substantial money with less depth of artistic practice behind them. Some artists manage both, and I bow to them. But these differences reveal something important: the field does not reliably reward brilliant artistic work. It reliably rewards the ability to build and maintain a corporate entity.
Early-career artists, and those who choose to remain independent, face a particular problem. Grants paid directly to individuals are generally taxable income. Because of that, many hesitate to pay themselves a meaningful fee from the award, since it is often easier to document project expenses, keep receipts, and reduce taxable income. At the same time, if they cannot show income or profit from their work year after year, artists risk having that work treated as a hobby rather than a profession, which can limit their ability to take deductions. The tax structure makes it very hard to earn subsistence this way.
As mentioned frequently in this series, arts grants to individual people tend to be small-dollar. Funders will give much larger grants to nonprofit organizations. One common workaround is fiscal sponsorship. Fiscal sponsorship opens access to many more grant opportunities. This can be a useful mechanism, but it does not simplify anything. Even when a grant supports multiple project expenses, any portion the artist receives as an artist fee for their own labor remains taxable income. The advantage is that the larger amount of money can make those taxes worth absorbing. Some fiscal sponsors will even cut separate checks for materials purchases or to pay collaborators, further reducing the applicant artist’s tax burden. Of course, the fiscal sponsor usually takes an administrative percentage to cover the cost of moving the funds through its books.
However, I cannot count the number of times I have had to explain to clients that in these arrangements, the fiscal sponsor is the actual legal applicant, not the artist and not the project itself. Fiscal sponsors generally leave the actual grant writing to the artist or the artist’s team. That means the proposal must still communicate the artist’s passion, vision, and specificity while also correctly identifying the project as something operating under another organization’s legal authority. The arrangement is conceptually split from the beginning. Even the language around it can blur the distinction between artistic ownership and institutional authorship.
Artists also often complain that fiscal sponsors require advance review of applications, sometimes at least two weeks before a deadline. From the sponsor’s standpoint, this is understandable, since the organization is legally responsible for what it submits. From the artist’s standpoint, it can feel like one more checkpoint inserted into an already crowded process.
After enough rounds of this, forming a 501(c)(3) can begin to look like the obvious solution. If an artist is constantly working under someone else’s institutional umbrella, why not build one of their own? Incorporation offers a legal structure, eligibility for larger grants, and a way to receive tax-deductible donations directly. It also requires board members, governance, bookkeeping, compliance, reporting, fundraising, donor relations, payroll, policies, meeting minutes, audits, timelines, and strategic plans. Time that might have been spent in the studio, in rehearsal, in research, in reflection, in (heaven forbid) rest and recovery, or in actual making is redirected toward organizational maintenance.
It is important to recognize that the 501(c)(3) model was not designed specifically for artistic or cultural work. It is a general federal tax classification for organizations operating for religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes. Arts organizations use it because it is the closest available instrument, not because it is a precise fit for the field.
The nonprofit model creates philosophical burdens as well. Since the legal and philanthropic framework is organized around charitable purposes, grantmakers are effectively positioned to ask artists how their work serves those purposes. The burden of proof falls back on the artist. How does your work educate? Whom does it benefit? What social good does it produce? What community outcome does it generate? These questions, now so familiar on arts grant applications that they can appear normal, are not neutral.
This is the question my clients ask again and again: Why must I be the one to prove the value of art in order to access support? There are scholars, historians, philosophers, and researchers who study what the arts do in human life and why they matter. Yet artists themselves are asked, in applications and reports, to account for the legitimacy of their own existence. They are asked not only to make work, but to explain why art deserves to exist in language that can pass through institutional filters.
That burden is especially distorted because being an artist is not simply a professional preference or a job category. It is a deeply rooted identity and orientation toward the world. Artists do fulfill important cultural roles, but it is worth asking why they must continually translate those roles into charitable language in order to survive. It is worth asking why they must make the case for art’s admissibility over and over again. As a mediator, I absorb a considerable amount of emotional labor in this process.
Grants require artists to repeatedly submit an identity-level commitment to external evaluation and to restate its worth in language not native to the work itself. The artist must remain coherent, persuasive, and composed while presenting something intimately bound up with identity for scrutiny and approval. I witness firsthand how this effectively challenges my clients’ dignity, often contributing to exhaustion and alienation.
There is also moral and relational strain in the nonprofit arts model. Funding often means courting wealth and building relationships with donors, foundations, and boards whose resources derive from broader systems of inequality.
Even when those relationships are cordial or generous, they are shaped by asymmetry. The artist must remain legible, persuasive, coherent, grateful, and fundable. Need must be translated into acceptable narrative. Conviction must be framed in the language of stewardship, impact, and confidence.
None of this means artists are wrong to form nonprofits. In many cases the decision is thoughtful, strategic, and made in good faith. Nor does it mean fiscal sponsorship is bad, or grants are useless. We should be clear that, in many cases, the nonprofit appears as a next step primarily because the field has made institutionalization a main route to support. Artists are oriented toward the survival of their central identity: their practice. In this, they are adaptable. They become institutions, not because institution-building is the natural evolution of artistic practice, but because the system has made it feel like the most viable path available.
Prospecting, cultivation, grant writing, stewardship, donor communication, governance, and institutional credibility are all forms of labor with their own techniques, timelines, and emotional demands. These are not incidental add-ons. They are jobs, and they deserve to be compensated accordingly. When artists are expected to carry them alongside the actual work of being artists, capacity is stretched.
Finally, applying for grants and forming nonprofits does not directly address artists’ subsistence needs. The artist does not exit precarity. Steady income, healthcare, and retirement often remain unresolved. Instead, precarity is reorganized into governance, compliance, fundraising, and institutional maintenance. When that happens, we should ask what artistic brilliance, joy, catharsis, and new ways of seeing the world are lost because so much energy has been diverted away from the work itself.
March 27, 2026
Currency: the price of prestige
My clients uniformly agree that with most grants for arts and culture, the money is too little, the time is too short, and the administrative burden is too high. Nevertheless, we keep applying for grants. We continue to apply because we struggle to find material support. As I’ve written previously, artists will vie for small-dollar grants not because they are sufficient, but because they are what is available.
Competition for these limited resources is high. I just got news from a client that our application for a creative project grant scored 97.08% on the rubric but was not funded. This was for a grant given on a monthly cycle, and our application was one of 115 eligible applications that were reviewed. 14 applications were awarded.
But scarcity of arts funding dollars alone does not explain the persistence of these systems. Grants confer something as consequential as money: prestige. Anthropology, evolutionary theory, and behavioral research all tell us that prestige is a major driver of attention. Prestige strongly shapes who people pay attention to, and artists need attention for their work.
The need for attention is not narcissism. Attention is not optional in cultural processes. Artists have a strong relational drive. Most artists do not want only to make work in isolation. They want the work to meet others, to register, to circulate, to matter. It is not enough just to make the art: As philosophers from John Dewey to Jacques Rancière have stated in different ways, art is completed in the encounter with its perceiver(s). That relational drive is legitimate and deep. In this way, prestige becomes structurally relevant because it can lead to real contact with audiences.
In a field where material support is thin and inconsistent, prestige functions as a crucial, dopamine-enhancing parallel currency. An artist who has been awarded has had their relational need met: their work has been noticed, considered, and discussed, at least among a group of grant panelists. My clients almost uniformly describe a grant award as a form of encouragement to keep going, to keep working against the many odds they face. The resulting boost to confidence and pride are valuable in and of themselves.
It is generally known that prestige is produced, assigned, and distributed through grants and awards from institutions that have wealth and/or elevated public status. The awarding body is trusted to sort the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. They tell the public that an artist’s endeavor has been positively differentiated from peers by a recognized body through some formal process of selection.
Both within and beyond the arts and culture sphere, people tend to use prestige as a shortcut when direct assessment is slippery. This shortcut is especially tempting when evaluating art and artists. Art does not always ask to be converted into clear conceptual meaning. It may ask to be received through sensation, duration, association, disturbance, pleasure, or recognition. These things can be hard for panelists to align with decision-making rubrics.
The temptation for the prestige shortcut is made stronger by grant applications that only supply panelists with “work samples”—a few minutes of audio, video, or viewing slides—in order to judge the artwork. Panelists do not experience the work firsthand through the selection process. So a list of previous awards on the applicants’ CV will signal distinction, mastery, and cultural salience that may be hard to read in the work itself.
The machinations of prestige are apparent when my clients complain that funding goes to the same trending cohort of artists. It is common knowledge that receiving one grant can strengthen the case for receiving another. A grant or award can change how an artist is received even by people who know little about the work itself. An award becomes a public cue that this artist is worth noticing, programming, reviewing, introducing, funding again, or taking seriously. In other words, the recognition does not just reflect esteem; it promises more work and more opportunities.
Insufficient support structures with high prestige attached have the potential to train artists to metabolize underfunding through symbolic elevation. Echoing our larger culture, prestige can capture and subvert a real need for relation and connection. When prestige serves as a replacement for real support, it feeds the wish to be selected, elevated, adorned with institutional approval, and surrounded by an aura of specialness. The honest needs for subsistence support enabling deep practice and meaningful encounters with audiences are never really fulfilled, but somehow that is OK.
The prestige dynamic makes opting out of the grant game consequential in a number of ways. Opting out may feel like stepping away from relevance, momentum, or possible arrival. Prestige narrows what seems reasonable to reject and enlarges what artists are expected to absorb. Over time, this can make it harder to distinguish between an opportunity that genuinely supports the work and one that mainly draws on the artist’s hope, endurance, and willingness to carry the gap.
I had a demonstration of this when I shared a draft of Invisible Spill with an accomplished artist colleague. The colleague said, “Wow. When you lay it out like that it really shows how crazy it is. Because when I originally looked at this opportunity it seemed pretty good. And I realize how much I hide these calculations from myself just as a function of trying to survive in the field.”
Prestige allows weak support structures to persist without forcing a reckoning with what they fail to provide. An opportunity may carry status, but without sufficient funding, time, care, stability, and administrative relief, it does not truly, materially support artistic life and work. The question for the field is, will we reckon?
April 14, 2026
Slow Burn: Fueling the arts economy
Sometime in the 2000’s, I attended a work-in-progress showing of new work by Ralph Lemon in Chicago. Some details are now hazy, it may have been at the MCA Chicago or the Dance Center of Columbia College. Lemon’s work was raw, imaginative, and vulnerable. He talked into a microphone, showed a video of old teacups in a woodland creek, and pulled his pants down. I was inspired, provoked, and moved by the art. However, when there was a Q & A, I found myself urgently wanting to ask about his living conditions. I think I asked, (embarrassingly now) “Do you have an apartment?”
I was more curious about what was making this avant-garde, highly experimental work possible in front of a large-ish audience than the mechanisms of making the work, which, as an artist myself, were apparent to me and needed no explanation. Over time, I have slowly peeled my practice away from public creation and performance and felt my way towards engaging with the resource infrastructure for the arts.
So, for over a dozen years now, my own public practice has evolved away from experimental dance, performance, and other kinds of making. I have found myself working in yet another marginalized, underground, and highly obscure, if not completely hidden, layer of the arts and culture ecosystem. Ironically, this extremely functional and mundane work is located just underneath the highly visible institutional and civic layer of the U.S. arts economy.
In about 2013, I had a graphic designer friend make some business cards with a picture of me in performance: I was stretching on the floor with my leg extended behind me, while gesturing as I read from a piece of paper. The text said “Explicator: Grant Writing Services for Artists.” My growing work in this behind-the-scenes sector of the arts was informed by almost five decades of lived experience across roles—artist, administrator, journalist, nonprofit director, and funder-side staff; circulating inside rehearsal rooms and grantmaking offices, on stages, and at board tables.
Positive work experiences came early in my practice. Clients called my ability to take down their nonlinear thinking, via spoken interviews, and tighten it into succinct, informative prose “magical.” For a long time, I enjoyed exercising my powers in that regard. I would ask a lot of questions, take notes, and use what I learned to create drafts for the clients. The feeling of being told that I had “got it” was wonderful. I also loved the windows and doors that were opened to me by fellow artists, letting me into their thinking, their practices, their archives.
Clients came to me thinking they needed a writer or an editor, but most of them needed much more than that. They needed help understanding and framing. Most of them needed me to build the clarity required for the text to even exist. I encountered a host of assumptions and knowledge gaps about institutional expectations that needed to be dealt with before making progress on a deliverable.
Eventually I found myself advising on nonprofit development, mission statements, relationship building, project planning, and program design. I had no training in this, only my lived experience and self-education through online research. I learned to design detailed budgets, something I once said I would never do but that has become integral to my work.
There are many ways my role pushed me to learn and grow, but it has also taken a lot out of me. Completing a project meant facing client frustrations rooted in structural, not personal, failings. I found myself positioned not as someone polishing language, but as someone reframing systemic pressure, holding confusion, urgency, and stakes that clients could not metabolize on their own.
I met clients who were not a good fit. They felt naked without poetic, creative phraseology that they felt was integral to their artistic voice. I needed to explain the difference between artistic and institutional standards and norms. On the most negative end, I’ve (briefly) had clients who have mistrusted my hard-earned perspective and seen my attempts at aligning their writing to fulfill the needs of the institutional structures they hoped to get support from as representing “the system.”
Understanding client needs via interview was much easier than reading their written drafts. This also allowed me to tease out inferences and assumptions, and to dig beneath where fuzzy thinking was hiding insecurity, fear, and attempts to sound compelling or sophisticated rather than inform. This was cognitively intense, as I sought to bring sequence and chronology to free-floating narratives and visions. It was also, at times, emotionally intense. When a client's difficult feelings would surface, I was not simply witnessing them. I was also accountable for changing the outcome of that artists’ attempt to move through the institutional hurdles we were faced with.
Witnessing has a boundary. You can hear it, understand it, even empathize, and then step away. But in my role as intermediary, I was taking on the responsibility for whether their idea became legible enough to be evaluated. I worked to make sure their proposal aligned with what the institution was actually asking for, their language read as credible, their application avoided predictable points of rejection, and their project was framed as feasible within the given constraints. So the outcome was not just whether they’d feel heard, or clearer or calmer. It was whether we could find a way to create communication that would get their work considered seriously, funded, and otherwise supported.
The emotional labor did not reset between interactions. Patterns of fear, anxiety, and repeated misunderstandings stayed active in me. They informed how I listened to the next person, what I anticipated, and how quickly I moved to intervene or explain. Instead of discrete encounters, I carried a growing composite that helped me to detect patterns across clients. This made me effective, but it also meant the load has been cumulative.
At the same time, I was well aware that I had zero authority in relation to the institutions whose structures I was regularly analyzing and mediating. I could read them, recognize their patterns, translate them for my clients, but I could not change institutional terms, timelines, or decisions. When grants were awarded as a result of my work, my role disappeared into the result. When clients were denied, my proximity made me the most available site for disappointment.
After over a dozen years of this work helping other artists, piled on top of about 40 years of navigating my own career, I am tired. I will be ending my current business structure at the close of 2026. This is not general fatigue. I am burned out from repeatedly confronting problems I do not have the authority to solve. This is what it feels like to be used as infrastructure in a field that does not provide enough of it. I am tired from sustained exposure to misaligned expectations and insufficient support. I am burned out from being positioned as the place where systemic gaps get managed but not repaired.
The exhaustion is not only emotional and cognitive. Economically, this work has never made sense. I felt that modest fees—based on what I felt my client base could afford—could work for me, but once I realized how emotionally and cognitively taxing the work was, I could never put in the 8-hour day that would make those fees add up to a living wage. I tried different pricing models. The time I’d spend adding up hours for my monthly invoices got onerous, so I tried offering inexpensive retainers to crowd-source my income. I never found a sweet spot.
Additionally, I hoped that the work I did was modeling clarity that clients would learn from, so our work together could get more sophisticated. When I eventually realized that many were only focused on extracting my service, I began to lose my enthusiasm for providing magic at bargain rates. My clients were stretched thin and were seeking to outsource this needed work. I could possibly do this for one artist who was providing me a full-time salary with benefits, but not for multiple artists who were able to only pay modest hourly fees.
I believe the work I have been doing is immensely valuable and necessary. I also believe in the necessity of rethinking our systems of support for creative work, and in recognizing that the burdens currently absorbed formall and informally—by people like me, by artists themselves, and by their colleagues and companions—are not incidental but structural. If we continue to rely on invisible labor to stabilize inadequate systems, we will continue to reproduce the same exhaustion, the same precarity, the same attrition.
Ending this chapter of my work is a refusal to keep solving, at the level of individuals, what has to be addressed at the level of structure. If the field needs this work—and it does—then it needs to build conditions that can actually hold it, rather than continuing to depend on people burning out in order to make the art possible. I am looking forward to finding a way into rooms where my experience can be fairly valued, and where I can contribute to making meaningful structural adaptations to the realities of creative labor.
April 28, 2026
The Weir: Why reforming funding systems and improving artist capacity aren’t enough
The arts and culture apparatus in the U.S. is evolving slowly. Structural experiments, like a movement for the state of Colorado to implement the “A-Corp,” a new kind of corporate status for artists, being one exciting innovation. There are a number of excellent consultants who are helping arts organizations with art-centered data collection, measuring the difference that their work makes in the world, so they can argue more effectively for the value of their work.
For individual artists, Fractured Atlas and Creative Capital have long been solid resources for building the administrative and business sides of their careers, offering guides to help artists write stronger grant applications, better document and archive their work, and articulate themselves with increasing clarity. These resources are updated regularly to adapt to changing technologies and practices.
On the side of institutions and foundations, innovation is less transparent. While there is lip service paid to better grantmaking that will redistribute access to opportunity and reduce administrative friction, I believe applications can still be clearer, processes less extractive, and the relevant human relationships set up to be more durable. Trust-based philanthropy is supposedly making slow inroads into foundations that serve arts and culture sectors, but I have not personally seen that in my own practice helping artists and artist-run organizations over the past dozen years.
The A-Corp and the concept of trust-based philanthropy do give me hope, though. It is also good when artists build skills like explanatory writing and spreadsheet fluency. But I have yet to see anything that alters the basic economic, social, or political frameworks that coexist with, and press uncomfortably upon, the lives of artists.
Grantmaking can support time-limited projects or provide temporary fellowships. It can resource organizations through project grants or general operating support. Artist skill-building can improve navigation within these systems, but none of this automatically produces ongoing livelihood, stabilizes income, or supplies healthcare.
In fact, for many artists, income instability, healthcare insecurity, and administrative burden compound one another and intrude on creative work. Income for individual artists and most artist-led nonprofits remains intermittent and insufficient, as project funding does not resolve ongoing livelihood. Healthcare in the United States is largely tied to employment, which the arts sector does not consistently provide, leaving artists to patch together coverage through unrelated jobs or public programs. Some simply go without health insurance altogether, as do many Americans.
Although meaningful improvements remain possible, unresolved conditions accumulate just beyond the reach of institutional change. It is my ardent desire for a movement composed of individual artists, arts and culture organizations, and philanthropies to advocate for universal healthcare and universal basic income in the U.S. I want to see this vibrant cohort play a bigger, more generous, and longer game that will radically shift how we understand not only artistic labor but other forms of necessary work that are un- or underpaid. The problems the arts face are not limited to our field alone.
This is a multigenerational project. I don’t expect to see UBI and UH in my lifetime—but these are things worth pushing for, raising our voices for, and creating images, messages, and campaigns for. Artists are talented in certain ways, but we are not special. We have the same basic human needs as anyone else, and in our country, those needs are not being met for a huge swath of citizens. Additionally, art and culture are relational. We don’t just need to support artists; we need to support audiences as well.