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.
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