Next month I’ll be participating with a new arts non profit, by showing work in Ventura, rawartists.org. I have a couple other friends who have joined.
Support the show and buy a ticket, please
This event is 5th on my list of collaborative community art events this year… (lucidity, Jewish Festival, Women’s International Festival, Santa Barbara Arts and Craft Show)
I like the RAWartists experience so far, from an creative perspective. It’s got all the elements I find interesting:
- Interdisciplinary / 20 artists + staff + community
- Temporal / Event Experience
- Synchronized / Monthly show across America
- Contextual / Unique experience in each city
- Philanthropic mission / “RAW’s mission is to provide up-and-coming artists of all creative realms with the tools, resources and exposure needed to inspire and cultivate creativity so that they might be seen, heard and loved.”
Each show has 20 Artists in the categories:
Here are some technical details about the organization
“Each of the artists to participate in the show is responsible for selling 20 tickets and the tickets are $10 a piece and that’s the way that we sustain. So we sustain through ticket sales essentially and everything that goes into our organization goes right back out into building bigger and better things for each of them. We have our end-of-the-year RAWards event that we put a ton of money into and create career-building prize packages for the winner. We’re a lot like a nonprofit in a lot of ways, even down to our titles and everything that we do. We actually started out as a nonprofit in the state of California. That was the direction we were heading and then the economy tanked. And arts budgets are the first thing to be cut and arts councils’ budgets are the first thing to be cut. And we were like, “We could do better just by boot-strapping, essentially doing it ourselves.” And if the artists, if this is something they’re interested in, if the community is interested in, we’ll know right away. And so we decided to scratch that idea and know that we could kind of do more permanent good being a for-profit organization with a very altruistic mission. We’re an extremely mission-driven organization, more than the bottom line for sure. We’re always trying to create value for our artists. So that’s how we’ve been able to do it thus far.”
