ABOUT ARTISTS AT WORK
ARTISTS AT WORK (AAW) is a national workforce resilience program in the spirit of the WPA that is designed to support artists and their communities through artistic civic engagement.
To date, ARTISTS AT WORK has provided 70 artists and culture workers across 11 states with a salary and health benefits, leveraging their power and creativity in partnership with over 80 cultural and community organizations throughout the nation. We are proud to invest in artists and their communities. As we continue to expand with new cohorts launching in 2024, we are focusing on amplifying and sustaining the impact of these investments by modeling new public/private partnerships and funding streams to support artists.
The ARTISTS AT WORK program provides an equitable framework – structured as a dynamic network of partnerships between artists, cultural organizations, and community partners – that sets artists up with strong local and national contacts, professional development, and systems of support. AAW Artists are employed for a period of one year to deepen their art practice and work collaboratively in response to local community needs across a range of issues including mental health, antiracism, migrant justice, climate resiliency, substance abuse recovery, cultural preservation, and youth welfare, among others.
We are steadfast in our commitment to providing support to and meeting the needs of today’s artists who are both navigating a difficult gig economy and being called upon to address civic and community needs.
Click here to download our AAW Program Overview
Click here to download our AAW Supplemental Impact Report 2021-2023
Click here to download our AAW Sample Toolkit for Artists
OUR AIMS + OBJECTIVES
VALUE ARTISTS AS WORKERS
AAW puts artists working across all disciplines on payroll at a living wage salary with health benefits for a period of one year to allow them to continue their artistic practice and launch new creative projects that serve their communities.
SUPPORT THE CULTURE SECTOR
Cultural organizations that host AAW Artists and help bring their work to the public receive funding and other resources for participating in the program.
HELP COMMUNITIES FLOURISH
Participating AAW Artists are embedded in local social impact initiatives, bringing capacity and creative problem solving to crucial programs that serve a broad spectrum of community members, and integrating artists in impactful ways within their communities.
HOW WE STARTED
“Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.” — Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Inspired by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, ARTISTS AT WORK began in July of 2020 and was designed to give artists resources to continue to produce work during the immediate health and economic crisis brought by COVID, and to build new structures and partnerships to help sustain the creative sector in a post-pandemic America. Conceived by THE OFFICE performing arts + film in collaboration with the FreshGrass Foundation as a public/private partnership that combines government, corporate, and foundation support, AAW is a WPA-style initiative reimagined for a modern context that is sensitive to the 21st century landscape (drastically changed) of every artistic discipline’s place in the culture.
ARTISTS AT WORK’s early goals were to give a significant number of artists a living wage salary and health benefits to continue to make work, to activate cultural institutions in support of that work, to put that work into the public sphere for free to audiences (and in doing so to boost local economies), and to connect artists and cultural organizations to local initiatives in areas like child welfare, food and housing security, antiracism, physical and mental health, justice reform, sustainable and equitable development, environmental justice and climate resiliency, and immigration. AAW provides a dynamic and flexible structure for funding to flow into the cultural sector with substantive, immediate, and tangible impacts for individual artists, institutions, and the general public—outcomes that will help art and artists to survive, and also embed the arts more deeply into communities to the benefit of society as a whole.
We believe in the power of artists—their work helps us to understand the world; their creativity and inspirations express and allow us to maintain our humanity through trials that feel inconceivable. At the time of AAW’s launch, our musicians, fine artists, filmmakers, theater makers, writers, and dancers were suffering grave financial circumstances; their incomes decimated, and many couldn't pay rent let alone make art. For many, those struggles continue as we all navigate a post-pandemic world. AAW started as a rescue package and continues on as a plan for the future—an ambitious effort to both safeguard and amplify the vital role art and artists play as we move forward together.
ARTISTS AT WORK was conceived and created with the generous advice and input of many colleagues, and it will evolve with continued input and as the impacts of the program are evaluated and best practices identified. We hope that the connections the project engenders—between artists, institutions, and social impact initiatives in their communities, and between these entities in different regions as the program continues to grow—will become a valuable national network of support and communication that helps to root the arts more deeply into communities around the country. Our aim is to develop formal structures to facilitate and amplify these connections.
Special thanks to FreshGrass Foundation, International Storytelling Center, Sundance Institute, and Theater of War Productions for being a central part of our early conversations about the development of Artists At Work (AAW).
ARTISTS AT WORK is administered by THE OFFICE performing arts + film, an independent performing arts and film curator and production company based in New York and London. For more information and a list of the full team at THE OFFICE, click here.
For specific inquiries about ARTISTS AT WORK, please reach out via our contact form to the attention of one our team members below:
Diego Álvarez, Administrative Fellow (Los Angeles County)
Kelci Baker, Administrative Fellow (Mississippi Delta Region)
Rachel Chanoff, Founding Director
Catherine DeGennaro, Fundraising + Program Development
Scout Eisenberg, Program Manager
Kyla Gardner, Contracts & Finance
Nadine Goellner, Managing Director
Brianna Jones, Administrative Fellow (Thrive Region)
Alyse Tucker Bounds, Program Liaison (Indianapolis)
Madelyne Wilson, Program Liaison (San Antonio)
Gabriela Yadegari, Program Coordinator / Administrative Fellow (Borderlands Region)