My primary goal in these interviews is to inspire you with stories of people who make a living helping artists make a living making art and who consider it a real job. The art professionals I interview here have valuable tales to tell you about how to work with them.
Martha Richards Stands for Empowerment, Opportunity, and Visibility for Women Artists Martha Richards is the Founder and Executive Director of WomenArts, formerly known as The Fund for Women Artists. Martha has been recognized frequently for her commitment to women and to the arts. In April 2006 she was one of three U.S. nominees (with Quincy Jones and Wynton Marsalis) for the prestigious international Montblanc De La Culture Award for outstanding service to the arts. In April 2009 she was inducted into the BayPath College 21st Century Women Business Leaders Hall of Fame for her work in philanthropy. Martha has been honored as one of three "founding mothers" of the Women's Fund of Western Massachusetts.
Prior to WomenArts, she served as Executive Director of Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College and as Managing Director of StageWest, a regional theatre in Springfield, Massachusetts. Martha writes and lectures frequently on arts and cultural policy issues.
She has a B.A. in Economics from the University of California Berkeley; a J.D. from the University of California Hastings College of Law; is a member of the California bar, and she was one of the founding directors of California Lawyers for the Arts.
A.C.T.: What is the mission of WomenArts? Please tell us about the journey from founding until now?
WomenArts is a worldwide community of artists and allies that works for empowerment, opportunity, and visibility for women artists. We are a non-profit organization and provide a variety of free online networking, fundraising and advocacy services, and five years ago we organized Support Women Artists Now Day (SWAN Day), an annual international holiday celebrating women's creativity in all its forms. We believe in the power of women artists to create, connect, and change the world.
When I created WomenArts (formerly known as The Fund for Women Artists) in 1994, I had been working as an arts manager for twenty years. I was disturbed that stereotyped images of women were often accepted without comment in "works of art," and I had experienced many situations where women artists were not paid as well as their male counterparts or promoted as quickly. I decided to create an organization that would address these issues - employment, fair pay and visibility for accomplished women in the arts.
Our programs have evolved in response to the needs of the artists we work with. We started by providing fundraising advice and information because so many women artists who are working independently are struggling to get the funds that they need to do their art and support the business side. My original model was to provide management services to women artists. We secured funding from individuals and organizations to pay for our services so they were free or inexpensive to our clients.
A few years later, we added the WomenArts Network, our online directory of women artists, because we realized that isolation is a huge problem for many women artists, and we wanted to give them a way to connect with each other. In 2008 we launched Support Women Artists Now Day (SWAN Day), as a way of increasing the visibility of women artists, and there have now been over 900 SWAN events in 23 countries around the world.
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© Christine Bergstrom of YouthChefs in Carbondale, CO and Donna Lilah of Aspen's Caribou Club, Carbondale, CO gave a cake-decorating workshop as part of the festivities.
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A.C.T.: What kinds of "creative" do you work with and how do they benefit from your services?
All of our services are online at this point and all of them are free. My own background is in theatre and our original focus was on theatre, film and video artists. We offer free monthly newsletters listing upcoming festival and funding deadlines for theatre and film/video artists. We also have a lot of listings of potential foundation supporters for artists in all kinds of art forms in the "Find Funding" section of our website. Many video and performing artists have told us that our newsletters and other listings have saved them hours of research time.
We also have some helpful articles posted in the "Build Your Skills" section of our website about fundraising, publicity, fiscal sponsorships, crowd funding with Kickstarter or Indiegogo, and tips for artists starting out.
Any woman who defines herself as an artist in any art form is welcome to create a free profile page on the WomenArts Network. Visitors can search for women artists by name, theme, keyword, art form, geographic region, and more. We now have about 1600 artists in the network, many of whom have been approached or made connections with each other, and who feel that they are members of a community.
Also, everyone is invited to create SWAN Day events in March and April to raise money for their own work or for the work of other women artists. Artists from all over the world have told us that working on SWAN events has helped them increase their visibility and meet lots of other wonderful women artists. Each project is locally controlled but provides worldwide visibility in an international celebration of women. We provide a free downloadable SWAN logo, sample fundraising letters, publicity materials, mayor's proclamations, and more to SWAN organizers. We also maintain the WomenArts Calendar where people can post their SWAN events.
A.C.T.: Does the artist's career stage matter for them to benefit?
Our funding information services and the WomenArts Network are especially helpful for women in the early stages of their careers. We also find that a lot of mid-career artists subscribe to our funding newsletters as an easy way to stay on top of upcoming funding and festival deadlines.
Women at all levels of their careers have participated in SWAN Day - from teenagers and college students to Broadway directors and designers. We have special SWAN videos on our website that feature television star Sandra Oh, novelist Isabel Allende, and film star Famke Janssen.
We have about a dozen groups (some described in the audio of this interview) that do festival style multi-day events.
A.C.T.: What are the most common challenges women artists face?
I think the most common problems are lack of funds, lack of visibility, and isolation. Many male artists suffer from these as well, but statistically, women have fewer opportunities than men. Both men and women who are independent artists suffer from the fact that the arts are not well funded in the United States compared to other countries. WomenArts has a page of links to studies of women's employment in various art forms at: www.WomenArts.org/news/employment.htm
It is truly shocking that the statistics are still so bad in the 21st century especially in film and television which are the art forms with the largest audiences these days. Only one in ten of each year's 250 biggest Hollywood films are written or directed by women. Some of the statistics have not changed in decades.
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© Official SWAN meets Broadway soulmate and Lucy puppet from the cast of the Broadway hit show Avenue Q on SWAN Day 2009. Producer Robyn Goodman, moderated a SWAN Day panel of Broadway designers and directors at Lincoln Center Library for SWAN Day 2009. (See http://www.womenarts.org/news_archives/march23_2009.htm ) |
As I explained above, our funding information services, online directory of women artists, and Support Women Artists Now Day were developed to address the issues of lack of funds, isolation, and lack of visibility.
A.C.T.: Which basic creative skills and tools should artists have in place before they look for funding and in which order should they proceed?
I think it is important for individual artists to realize that it is extremely difficult to make a living from traditional non-profit grant-writing activities these days. The National Endowment for the Arts was founded in 1967 with the idea of funding the arts. The notion that the arts were important and warranted funding began to be dismantled in the nineties. Now such funding is considered too expensive and the value of the arts to society as a whole has been devalued.
Grant-writing is more time-consuming than it used to be because it is so much more competitive. There is less money available (especially grants for individual artists), and when the demand for funds is so much greater than the supply, the people giving out the money are forced to make arbitrary decisions among many worthy projects. I have written hundreds of grant proposals over the years, and I used to feel confident that when I studied the guidelines and wrote a strong proposal that was a good fit with the funder's mission, I would probably get a grant. Now it feels more like I am playing the lottery every time.
Make sure that you fit with the criteria for the grant before you start writing, fill in every box, answer every question and follow the guidelines exactly. I have talked to lots of individual artists who have told me that they spent hours and hours writing grant proposals and none of them came through. So they lost time that they could have spent on their art, and did not get anything from the process except frustration. Many have told me that it is easier to make money from a "day job" than to struggle with endless grant applications and reporting requirements.
So my advice first of all is to figure out whether you can get or create some kind of steady job that uses your creative skills. Many women artists are happy as teachers or as employees of arts organizations. In my own case, I created WomenArts as a non-profit organization, and it has provided steady jobs for me and two or three others for most of the past seventeen years in addition to providing services to thousands of artists every year.
I would also encourage artists to look carefully at any federal or state employment programs that are available in their region, and see if there is a way to use those funds to create arts jobs for themselves. When I was starting out, I found a theatre company that I wanted to work with, and then I approached them about writing a proposal to create a position for myself with the company. At that time (the mid-1970s) there was a federal employment program called the Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA). I was able to create a CETA position for myself as the business manager of the theatre company and that was my first full-time job in the arts. I worked there for three years. These days it's important for artists to lobby and advocate their local politicians to convince them that artists are in business too and deserve employment and job training funding as much as any other profession.
My other suggestion is that artists should form groups or alliances and do their fundraising together. Even if you are just getting together to review each other's proposals, it helps to have other women artists to cheer you on when times are tough and to celebrate your successes.
Also, it is easier to cultivate individual donors when you are part of a group and have an event that donors perceive as being worthy of funding than to ask them to support you individually. When most artists think about fundraising, they only think about writing proposals to foundations or government agencies. They need to think more about approaching wealthy individuals for support, but that kind of fundraising requires a sustained long-term effort that is hard to do on your own. The traditional wisdom was that it would take five to ten interactions with an individual before they would decide to make a gift, but once they made that commitment, it was not hard to get them to renew year after year. Those annually renewing individual donors provide a steady base of support to most mainstream arts organizations.
If there was a group of women artists who wanted to work together with the specific goal of building a base of annually renewing individual donors who would support their creative work, I would be willing to work with them to see if we could create a successful model for others to use. There are a lot of women who have had successful careers in high tech or other fields who are interested in donating to women's causes, and so I think the donors are out there. We just need to figure out the most effective ways to reach them.
A.C.T.: What does it take to do what you do? Please describe a typical day, and a typical month so readers can understand how you manage your time, money and energy.
I majored in Economics as an undergraduate and I have a law degree, so I was educated as a business person, and then I transferred those skills to the arts. I had about 20 years of experience as an arts manager in mainstream performing arts organizations before I started WomenArts. I was never an artist myself, and did not want to be an artist - I just like working with artists, and I after I got out of law school, I realized that my knowledge and temperament could be very helpful to artists. I enjoy figuring out budgets and doing paperwork - things that many artists find boring or frustrating. I love talking to artists and then trying to figure out how to come up with an effective grant proposal or budget to support their vision. It is not easy in the current economic climate, but it is very satisfying when a project moves forward and I know that my skills played a critical role.
There is a lot of variety in my work, so it is hard to describe a "typical" day, but I spend a lot of time writing - grant proposals, letters to potential donors, correspondence with artists about their projects, or filling in government forms. Since our services are almost entirely online at this point, I spend a lot of time maintaining our website, solving various computer problems, and reading computer manuals. I also travel quite a bit to speak at various women's conferences and artist gatherings to get the word out about our work.
A.C.T.: What peak moments big and small - have you had through and with WomenArts?
WomenArts is entering its eighteenth year, so we have had lots of great moments. I am always excited when an artist is able to complete a large project because of our help.  | |
© SWAN Day Kenya 2012 organizer Sophie Dowllar with her 10 month old daughter
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SWAN day has been a great source of peak moments. I remember receiving a video from the women in Kenya, dressed in their SWAN day t-shirts about their SWAN day - it was so moving! A woman from Bulgaria told us that WomenArts was her "window on the world."
Also, WomenArts had an endowment campaign a few years back, and it was very exciting that we were able to reach our goal and establish an endowment for WomenArts of $400,000. It is wonderful to know that the annual income from those endowment funds will be there to support the work of WomenArts in perpetuity.
A.C.T.: What opportunities has a professional approach to your career brought you that you might otherwise not have had?
I feel fortunate that I had 20 years in mainstream arts organizations before I started WomenArts. I learned a lot of useful skills, and I also learned that every organization has projects that do not work out as planned.
My male colleagues taught me that trial and error is part of the growth process, and you can't grow unless you are willing to make a few mistakes along the way.
A.C.T.: Who are your role models and mentors? What was the best advice they gave you?
My mother was my first and strongest role model. She went to law school in the 1950s and had a very successful career. In second grade I took in a photo of her. She was one of three women in the class and graduated second in the entire class. Every breakfast conversation was about her legal cases so at an early age I got a lot of legal training by osmosis. She taught me that hard work and persistence is 90% of success in most endeavors. She was right.
A.C.T.: How do you use social media and how have sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn changed art marketing? What has not changed?
WomenArts delivers almost all of our services via the web these days, and so our website and e-newsletters are our main way of communicating with our constituents. We also post all of our announcements on our Facebook pages and Twitter feed to augment what we are already doing on our web site. I think some people prefer to follow us on Facebook or Twitter, but if they click through the links, they get the same information as people who subscribe to our e-newsletters.
We have found Facebook and Twitter are very useful for sending out announcements that don't make it into our main newsletters. We have also started using the WomenArts Blog to do more in-depth interviews with women artists. The WomenArts News Room has live feeds from 35 of our favorite feminist arts bloggers. It is a lot of fun to visit the News Room and see what people are talking about. I can easily spend an hour in there browsing from one cool woman arts blogger to the next.
When it comes to building a donor base, I think it's much more important to make connections in person. You also need to build relationship and it may take many people to get to someone you want to reach. A case in point is that we managed to get a donation from Bill and Camille Cosby for a film project about an African American educator. It was right up their alley in terms of the kind of project they were interested in. The film maker found someone who knew someone etc, and we submitted a one-page request that was successful that one time. I never actually met either of them in person.
A.C.T.: What advice would you pass on to artists who want to succeed in any economy?
I don't think there is any one "secret answer" that will work for any artist in any economy. Most people have to make trade-offs in their lives no matter what field they are in. My advice to artists is simply to try to find the balance point where you are happy. For some people that means finding a full-time job that uses their creative skills, for others it means living with less money so that they can explore a particular style or subject matter. There are a lot of valid choices, and people often shift as they go through different phases of their lives. So many women are responsible for children, and that also has a huge impact on their career choices. The best strategy is a diversified approach. Figure out what you actually need and how to have the lifestyle you want. Artist may actually be able to weather the economic conditions better than some other professions.
Persistence is very important. Find a way to be sustainable. Visual artists may be able to build a business selling their work if they use the advice provided by Artist Career Training and other groups. The types of programs, services and products you offer at http://www.artistcareertraining.com/ and http://www.artbusinesslibrary.com are very helpful - especially for visual artists who want to make more money from the sale of their art.
P.S. I have limited number of openings in my coaching schedule this summer. Please send me an e-mail to book a free 15-minute consultation about how we can help you get where you want to go. You may qualify for a special introductory package. | 
