It’s 6 o’clock on a Thursday evening at the Acadiana Center for the Arts (AcA), and 35 artists are building a community agreement. This is the traditional first task of the Artist as Entrepreneur Intensive, a program that New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) has been conducting both nationally and internationally for over a decade. Its goal? To provide artists with the skills needed to thrive not only as a practice, but as a business.
One artist raises their hand. “I’m not sure how to phrase this but we have a lot of experienced artists here and I’d love it if they could share their experience and knowledge with the younger ones of us just starting out.”
“Sure,” a laugh and response comes from the back of the room, “as long as you promise to teach us how to be bold and naive.”
The cohort here represents four generations, five different Acadiana parishes, and every artistic medium from oil painting to musical theater. They will be spending the next four days together, learning everything there is to know about the arts business: goal setting, fundraising, networking, taxes. But first they must learn how to support each other. Because, as many of them have already realized trying to tackle these things on their own, isolation is the enemy of progress.
Despite their wide variety of backgrounds this process proves shockingly easy. It quickly becomes apparent during the building of the community agreement and the proceeding SWOT analysis (corporate minded readers might recognize this acronym, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), that they are all thinking about and struggling with many of the same things.
Rules like “dream big”, “be unafraid”, “think beyond what Lafayette is ready for” reveal a near universal desire for growth, a dissatisfaction with the current status quo. When discussing Weaknesses, suggestions like self-doubt and overcommitting get a chorus of commiseration. Under Threats, a shout of “Kids!” gets a laugh but also many nods of agreement.
Strengths, notably, has the widest variety. There is creativity, of course, but also dedication, multitasking, introspection, organization, extroversion, and many, many more. To misquote Tolstoy, “each artist’s weaknesses are alike, each artist’s strengths are strong in their own way.”
While I’m watching the cohort work in groups, refining their artist statements and setting their SMART goals (that’s Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely) I start to realize the true value of this intensive. Speaking as an artist, it can often feel when trying to learn about these subjects that you’re looking in from the outside. Leave your artist hat at the door and put on your entrepreneur hat. But this wasn’t Artist into Entrepreneur; this was Artist as Entrepreneur. Here were 35 artists boldly striving to be both. To take the artist’s perspective and bring it into the entrepreneurial world. To learn not just the way of business, but the artist’s way of business. And the artist’s way of business was proving to be deeply, and innately, communal.
This would be further reflected in the presentations and panels scheduled for the rest of the week, by and large led by experts who are artists themselves: lectures on grants led by a former filmmaker, a tax professional who also drums in a punk band. Dancers, painters, writers, musicians, all joining together to educate their own community on how to operate in a system that, frankly, was not designed for them.
The tax lecture begins with a cat meme and a simple directive: “Move slowly and consistently. Be curious and kind to yourself.” This mantra, in some form, would be repeated again in the marketing lecture, in the goal setting lecture, and in the fundraising lecture. In a world where success is often measured by things like bank accounts or titles, it can be easy for an artist to feel like a failure. When one person is acting in the role of an entire company, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. The presenters know this. They’ve felt this. And they know the mindset required to deal with it. 
As the weekend continues, the cohort begins to educate each other as well. Ideas are shared and clarified, contacts are exchanged, advice is given and feedback offered. A question at a lecture is just as likely to be answered by a fellow student than the presenter. By the end of the four days this group of 35, most of whom had never met before this, were planning monthly meetings and a Facebook group to keep in touch.
Artists have an inherent desire to connect. It’s why many of them make art in the first place: to put some piece of themselves out into the world in the hopes it will speak to someone else’s. They are observers, consciously or intuitively. One of the basic tenets of entrepreneurship is to identify a need and provide a solution, and there is perhaps no greater need in today’s world than the need for connection. For earnest, raw, vulnerable humanity. It is, perhaps, a need artists are uniquely suited to provide — if they are given the tools to do so.
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The AcA has been truly inspired and honored to be able to bring this program to Acadiana and to coordinate its fruition. A huge thank you to LFT Fiber for generously funding this program in its entirety, allowing these 35 artists to attend at no cost to themselves, and for believing in the arts. Thank you to the wonderful facilitators at NYFA who have dedicated their time, experience, and energy to building this program to where it is today. And thank you to the artists for trusting us and investing wholeheartedly in this intensive, in yourselves, and in each other.
