How to start a creative platform or art organization
Online course by Node Center
Duration: Oct 13–Nov 3, 2014
Application deadline: October 9, 2014
Lecturer: Dafna Maimon
*Video-conferences every Monday at 7pm Central European Time. Recordings will be available in case you miss a live session!
DESCRIPTION
This course gives you the keys to become an organization in the art world: from freelancing to creating your own platform, foundation or cultural enterprise. It will provide creative tools and techniques to turn your art aspirations into a financially viable business.
Working individually in the art world can be hard and precarious. Some ideas and ambitions need the support of larger structures and new definitions in order to be successful. Whether you want to start an art platform for projects or exhibitions, a foundation, agency or organization for cultural services you will need to have a vision, a model and a plan.
This course will give an introduction to different kinds of existing entrepreneurial structures within the art world and go through the basics of how to create your own. It will share real life examples of successful strategies in making creative practice viable. A specific focus will be on the possibility of creating systems for ideas that fall in-between, or perhaps do not fit within the limitations of traditional structures and formats.
Participants will be encouraged to develop their own innovative organization either a hypothetical or actual one during the course.
PROGRAM
Week 1: Introduction
- Why become more than a freelancer?
- What are some benefits and challenges of working as an organization?
- A look at common pre-existing formats and the differences between them i.e. a nonprofit organization, a for-profit organization, a platform, a foundation, association, institution, center or a company?
- Examples of successful innovative organizations and structures in the art world and a brief look at how they function
Week 2: The Process of Becoming
- Idea, concept, name and definition for your organization, what to consider, how to make it concrete? What can you call your organization and what does it require?
- Your vision philosophy and future, how will it function, what is the aim and where could it head?
- What’s your niche? Considering specialization, competition, collaboration and network
- Sustainability, thinking about endurance, costs and profits even if you are nonprofit
- Recap, rethinking and analysis, how to deepen your idea, and think even further outside of your box, what are your main assets and challenges?
Week 3: Execution
- Registering or “announcing” your organization, considering it in terms of rights, finances, taxes, legal status etc.
- Your team, whom does it need to function, and on which terms? Who are your collaborators, partners, employees or mediators how can you find them and how do you communicate?
- Your audience and clients? Who are they? What do you give and take?
- Where and what is it, the need for physical or virtual space?
- Considering the launch and visibility of your organization
- Considering basic marketing, website, social media, PR projects, word of mouth, cold-calling, presentation materials and visual identity
Week 4: The Life Of Your Organization
- Time planning, short term and long term goals, essentials first, staying realistic
- Looking at money, business plans, alternative economies, funding, sponsors, profit or non-profit, considering ethics and precariousness specific to the art world
- Paying attention to risks and opportunities of your organization as an entity functioning in the art world
- Monitoring your development and productivity and fitting this with your philosophy. How can your projects and ideas benefit from the kind of organization and definition you created to the fullest?
- Summary of motivation, ambitions, practical steps of execution and continuous potential
For further information, visit: http://www.nodecenter.org/
