Working In The Arts

Secret Art In Minnesota

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The always cool people at Springboard for the Arts (and that isn’t a commentary on Minnesota weather) recently got to do a “TV Takeover” where they explained how they serve the artistic community in Minnesota. They chose the theme of “Your Secret Art” to emphasize the idea that a lot of people have artistic talent which may not immediately be apparent.

There were two parts of the show I liked, both dealing with “artists taking care of business.” At the 51 minute mark, artists talk about pricing their work and their initial reluctance to ask to be paid or to charge what they were really worth.

The artists that were interviewed note that it is natural to make the mistake of undervaluing your work, but that you need to quickly move past that. Pricing is not only based on your time and materials, but a result of doing market research and understanding how similar work is valued.

This was an important topic for artists and one that is rarely broached in interviews with artists about their careers.

The other part of the show I liked was at the 24 minute mark where artists talk about their work as a business. What really grabbed my attention was the statement made by Uri Sands of TU Dance in answer to the noisome assertion that art is not a profession because you love doing it. Sands says if you have a talent, you have a responsibility to your gift. It requires enormous work whether you are a mathematician, athlete or dancer.

Art requires more of him because he does love it. If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t have to think about it and could clock in/clock out. But because he loves it, thinking about dance inhabits all his free time as well.

I thought that was a fantastic answer because it is so absolutely true that artists often aren’t easily able to stop investing themselves in one part of their lives come 5:00 pm.

Visual artist Anna Metcalf talked about how valuable it was to refer to creating ceramics as her job. She spoke about having a business plan which helped her establish priorities and also legitimized her art practice as a business. It sounded to me as if this might provide her with a little self-discipline, but there also seemed to be a subtext that the frame work might help keep others from viewing her work as a hobby.

I couldn’t quite catch the name of the third artist interviewed in this segment. Even though she was surrounded by puppets, it sounded as if her practice encompassed many disciplines. Since I just wrote about mentors yesterday, her comment that when was was younger she assumed mentors would find her grabbed my attention.

She said that she now recognizes the need to seek out and cultivate people to be mentors. This made me realize that yesterday’s post really didn’t touch on the idea that you could have multiple mentors at anyone time and that it can be smart to cultivate relationships now with people who could potentially be a mentor in the future.

A corollary to the idea that not everyone is suited to be mentor is that not everyone is suited by knowledge or temperament to be a mentor at every stage of your career. You will outgrow some mentors and grow into others.

Springboard for the Arts and the people they serve are doing some pretty interesting things. I can be worth the time to watch the whole thing.

Either A Mentor or Mentee Be

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Since I am in the mood for suggesting what people should be re-evaluating professionally over the summer, I figured I might talk about finding a mentor today.

I actually don’t know if I have ever written on the subject before. There was an article for arts and culture professionals I found useful on The Guardian website back in March.

I think one of most important steps to take when seeking a mentor is discarding the “those who can’t, teach/if you are so smart, why ain’t you rich” mentality. As the article points out, just because someone is successful, it doesn’t mean they can be an effective mentor. Inversely, just because someone hasn’t achieved commercial recognition for their work, doesn’t mean they can’t be an effective mentor.

You see the truth of this most clearly in sports. There are plenty of coaches who weren’t elite athletes, but who have studied coaching and their specific field of endeavor closely enough that they produce effective teams and individuals.

And like a good coach, a good mentor will challenge you to push yourself in new, possibly uncomfortable directions.

It occurred to me as I was reading the article that I am unaware of any program that trains arts professionals to be good mentors for people outside the workplace. If you are in the position of mentoring someone in your workplace, some of your time is going to be devoted to teaching them to navigate the organization and contribute to the organization’s success.

Mentoring someone with whom you don’t already work is a different situation altogether. In some respects, it is a purer form of mentorship because you don’t have to concern yourself with workplace politics or being evaluated on how effective your mentee becomes.

When I read the article’s suggestion to:

“Also ensure the meeting ends with clear and positive actions. Importantly, as a mentee, make sure you do your homework, otherwise when you meet again you’ll end up going over the same ground.

I wasn’t sure I would have thought to formally establish a course of action to take prior to the next meeting with someone I was mentoring. Granted, every mentor relationship is different and some mentees may require concrete goal setting where others do not.

In the context of a shared work environment, goal setting is obvious. As I thought about it, I was not sure I would have immediately considered it as one of an assortment of tools a mentor could use to guide someone with whom they did not work.

Mentoring in the arts and culture field seems like a worthwhile topic for conference sessions, magazine articles or blog posts. Does anyone know of anyone who has effectively tackled the subject?

Info You Can Use: Legal Tips

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A couple weeks ago, Gene Takagi of the Non-Profit Law Blog made a post cautioning lawyers about issues to consider when representing a nonprofit.

As you might imagine, every one of his tips were important for members of a non-profit board and leadership to know as well. Some of his traps and tips are frequent points of conversation in the non-profit arts community: don’t write a mission statement that is too restrictive; be sure you have a viable business plan and don’t assume non-profit status is your only option; boards members should be aware they have a very real governance role; non-profit doesn’t mean tax-exempt or no-profit; all overhead is not bad; get board and directors insurance.

There were also some topics that are less frequently discussed:

Traps
1. Failing to inform the client at the outset of representation that you represent the organization and not any individual directors or officers.

4. Including “non-voting directors” in the organization’s bylaws (under most states’ laws, there is no such thing as a “non-voting director” and, subject to very limited exceptions, each director has the right to vote on all matters before the board).

5. Providing in the bylaws that the board of directors may combine in-person votes at a meeting with email votes to take board actions.

6. Reinforcing the myth that nonprofits should always minimize overhead expenses (even at the expense of building an appropriate foundation on which to build the organization’s operations).

7. Failing to inform the client about the differences among volunteers, independent contractors, and employees, and the risks of misapplying these classifications.

10. Failing to discuss with the client the benefits of having organizational policies that address the legal and management implications of conflicts of interest, proper gift receipts, misuse of social media, expense reimbursements, acceptance of noncash gifts, document retention/destruction, and whistleblowers.

For me, that first one about the lawyer representing the organization and not you always strikes me as worth repeating. I have never had the ill-fortune of being in a situation where there was a even the whiff of legal action. However, when I am reviewing contract clauses that make me uneasy or am faced with a potentially contentious encounter, I will find myself thinking that the legal department will cover me if worse came to worse. Then I have to remind myself that in fact, they won’t necessarily have my back because they serve the interests of the organization, which may not include protecting me.

Point #5 about mixing in-person and email voting is a reference to a prohibition in California law. However, reading the rationale behind the illegality of such action, it seems reasonable to expect other states would have a similar restrictions.

Since I have heavily summarized his post, it is worth taking a look at everything Takagi cautions and advises for the legal health of a non-profit

What To Do About Curtain Speeches?

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Last week I participated in a Twitter conversation about curtain calls and curtain speeches sponsored by HowlRound. They had the whole thing storified almost before I thought about doing it myself.

The hour went by so quickly and there were so many opinions on the matter, I figured it was a great topic to bring up on the old blog here.

I will start by stating my position on curtain speeches and am happy to have people argue for or against.

If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t have a curtain speech. At worst, they are long, disorganized rambles that are often more about people giving money to support the organization than conducive to experience the audience is about to have.

That said, I see them as a necessary evil. I don’t see that as a contradiction, but rather as something of a corollary to the idea that the best king is the person who doesn’t want the job because they will be least intrusive in the people’s lives.

Many localities require fire exits, etc pointed out to audiences. Given that I have worked in locations that are tornado and earthquake prone, I feel it is important that such an announcement be made. People tend to pay more attention to a human than a recording so I will often do the curtain speech.

There is also the issue of reminding people to turn off cell phones, etc. I have seen great video announcements at movie theaters that get that point across, but those videos don’t often fit with the atmosphere of the evening and again since people will pay closer attention to a live person, I see it as another reason to do the speech.

But at least once a year I end up leaving it to the audio announcement because my presence prior to the show doesn’t fit in with the atmosphere of the event.

In the Twitter chat some people said they like curtain speeches that are made in the theme of the play. One of the most recent I saw had the actor playing the stern housekeeper in the show severely warning audience members about cell phones, etc.

I agree that this can be a clever device and hold attention, but sometimes it too clever by half and ends up detracting from the play itself when people associate the character with the person who made the curtain speech rather than with the role they play in the performance.

The other necessity I see associated with curtain speeches is supporting grants. Not only do you need to acknowledge sponsors and funders from the stage as well as in print, but granting organizations want hard number research. Again, it is more effective to have someone on stage enjoining people to fill out a survey than having it written somewhere or announced by a disembodied voice.

Some times it is just a matter of making people aware there is a meet and greet with the performers after the show. People miss the notice in the program and tend to be grateful for the opportunity. The more people attend, the better outreach attendance data for your grant report.

In some of my past posts I have written that I often use curtain speeches to forge connections with the community. They see me on stage and then I am in the lobby at intermission and the end of the show for them to deliver praise or complaints to.

As I have mentioned, I also try to impart some information about the show that people are unaware of that may enhance their enjoyment. This past year, I feel like my most successful attempts were talking about the impact of A Christmas Carol in shaping holiday traditions we take for granted and reminding people that The Miracle Worker only deals with the first of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan’s accomplishments.

Other curtain speeches aren’t as successful. It takes a little while to understand what information might resonate most with audiences.

I try to keep all this to 3-4 minutes and start right at the performance time so that the curtain speech is covering the stragglers in the audience who are trying to find their seats. That way my delay and the interruption of late comers cancel one another out.

If I didn’t do my speech, the audience would still be disturbed by those latecomers, so better they have my entertaining presence to focus on. The important element of this strategy is to get house management to give the go ahead for the speech when they estimate there are only about 2-3 minutes worth of people left in the lobby.

To make the curtain speech quick, effective, informative and not negatively impact audience enjoyment takes some work. I think the reason why people hate curtain speeches is due to the lack of preparation by those who do them. The reality is, the curtain speech is as much a tone setting first impression as the interaction a customer has with your ticket office staff or office receptionist. Equal attention must be paid.

I am often jotting notes about a performance in a Word document months before the event. Some will be part of a social media post, some will be part of a press release and some will be part of the curtain speech for that show. I usually have a good idea about what I am going to say a few days before the performance. I am waiting in the wings 5-10 minutes before the show starts staring at the floor going over what I intend to say.

Sometimes it is great and sometimes I screw up a little because I try to speak extemporaneously with only a few jotted notes. The goal is always to get a little better, a little more engaging and a little more adept each time.

Things you will notice I have not included: fundraising pleas and promoting other shows. Certain times of the year I might mention one of these topics- i.e. Telling people when to expect the new subscription brochure at the closing show of the current season. I don’t make it a habit to regularly talk about future shows because it can undermine the current show if I am praising the next show on the schedule. (Hamlet will be amazing! Oh, and enjoy tonight’s show…)

There are a lot of great thoughts in the chat. I didn’t see half of them when the discussion was in progress.

What do you think? Can any of this be handled more effectively some other way?