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. I have touched on this in Flowing Forms, Grids and Gravity, and Hidden Channels. 

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.

#pouringwaterintoboxes