NYFA “Artist as Entrepreneur” : one-day intensive workshop

NYFA “Artist as Entrepreneur” : one-day intensive workshop
Sat, Oct 14, 10:00 am - 4:00 pm
CLASS / WORKSHOP

NYFA “Artist as Entrepreneur”  is a one-day intensive workshop for artists, presented by New York Foundation for the Arts and the Roxbury Arts Center. This is a FREE workshop for artists at all stages, to help with finding and pursuing creative and professional opportunities in your field.

RSVP / reserve your spot here

Workshop Facilitator: Kelly Olshan (New York Foundation for the Arts)
Panelists: Stacy Mastrogiacomo (Community Foundation for South Central New York), Kevin Moore (Curator, Liberal Arts Roxbury), Jennifer Kabat (Writer)

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Program Schedule

10:00 AM -11:00 AM
Introductions and Overview of Artist as Entrepreneur Strategies
Attendees are introduced to the program and to each other. NYFA Staff will provide an overview of the Artist as Entrepreneur curriculum, context, and tools, as well as the common attributes of artists and entrepreneurs. Participants will then be invited to get to know one another in small groups, and then by delving into each others’ goals and reasons for choosing to participate in the program.

11:15 PM – 12:30 PM
Workshop: Writing and Talking About Your Work
While being able to speak and write about your work opens doors, it can be a difficult and intimidating process to distill everything you do into a few simple words. This session will cover how to use written and verbal tools to harvest opportunities, cultivate and grow your network, and connect to people who can support your work. Artists will work through interactive exercises to help draft both an artist statement and bio, armed with key “do’s and don’ts” as well as what jurors and panelists look for when reading over these materials and speaking to artists.

12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Break for Lunch

1:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Panel: Designing Your Creative Career: Finding the Right Opportunities for You
Stacy Mastrogiacomo, Program Officer, South Central NY Community Foundation
Kevin Moore, Curator, Gallerist, and Founder, Liberal Arts Roxbury
Jennifer Kabat, Writer

One of the most challenging and exhilarating things about working in the arts is that success is unique and varied: there is no one route to success and there is no one definition of success. Among so many different models, opportunities, and open calls, how can you identify and procure the creative milestones that are right for you? In this panel, we’ll hear from the artist, curator, and grantmaker’s perspective to inform how you might approach opportunity cultivation in alignment with your career goals.

3:15 PM – 4:00 PM
Reflection and Next Steps
Artists will have the opportunity to reflect on the day, and synthesize their next steps moving forward. The group will discuss ways they can support one another’s goals.

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Kelly Olshan is an arts manager and visual artist passionate about providing professional development opportunities for creative practitioners. At NYFA, she oversees a host of career support programs for artists, including the Artist as Entrepreneur Program, NYFA Coaching, and Doctor’s Hours. Previously, she served as the Program Manager at Queens Council on the Arts, where she was the founding manager of the organization’s Artist Commissioning Program. As a practicing visual artist, her work has been exhibited nationally, most recently in a solo exhibition, Traverse, at the Garment District Space for Public Art (NY, NY). She was an Artist in Residence at ChaShaMa’s (ChaNorth) in 2023, and she serves as a frequent panelist for NYC’s Percent for Art Program as well as on the Advisory Committee of the DOT Public Art program. She has given artist talks and guest lectures at SVA, RISD, and the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, among others. She graduated Valedictorian from UNC Asheville with a BFA in Painting, and holds an MA in Arts Administration from Columbia University. @kellyolshanfineart | www.kellyolshan.com

Stacy Mastrogiacomo is the Program Officer at the Community Foundation for South Central New York. She has been with the Foundation since 2019 after nearly two decades in healthcare. She facilitates and administers 16 grant cycles per year and strives to make meaningful connections with grantees. She is especially passionate about building the capacity of BIPOC led and serving organizations in our communities. Stacy lives in Endicott, New York with her husband and two sons. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, cooking, or curling up with a good book.

Kevin Moore is a curator and writer based in New York. His work focuses on the history of photography, film/video, and contemporary art. He earned a Ph.D. in art history in 2002 from Princeton University and has worked in curatorial departments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. He is the Curator of the McEvoy Collection, San Francisco, and the Artistic Director and Curator of FotoFocus, Cincinnati. Moore has curated museum exhibitions of the work of Tony Oursler (2022), Ian Strange (2022), Ellen Berkenblit and Sarah Braman (2019), Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott (2018), Karin Mamma Andersson (2018), Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Constance DeJong (2018), Roe Ethridge (2016), Zanele Muholi (2016), Jackie Nickerson (2016), Taiyo Onoroato & Nico Krebs (2014), David Benjamin Sherry (2014), Vivian Maier (2014), as well as thematic surveys including After Industry (2016), New Slideshow (2016), Screenings (2014), Stills (2014), Panopticum (2014), Eve Plays Duchamp (2013), Alchemical (2013), Real to Real: Photographs from the Traina Collection (2012), and Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980 (2010). Many of these exhibitions are accompanied by significant publications. Moore has written extensively on modern and contemporary art. He is the author of On the Line: Documents of Risk and Faith (with Makeda Best, 2022), Old Paris and Changing New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott (2019), Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist (2004; French version, 2012; Polish version, 2015), and a contributing author to Ian Strange: Disturbed Home (2022), Tino: Nivola in America (2022), Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern (2019), and Photography at MoMA 1920-1960 (2016). He is also a regular contributor to The Art Newspaper, Aperture, and The Guardian.

Jennifer Kabat’s THE EIGHTH MOON and NIGHTSHINING are forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2024 and 2025. Her essays are sweeping histories that interleave socialism, modernism and science with her own longing for a way to understand socialism and democracy today. Included in Best American Essays, her writing has also appeared in McSweeney’s, BOMB, The New York Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, Granta and The White Review, among others. She frequently writes for Frieze and has contributed to artists’ monographs and museum catalogues including London’s Victoria & Albert museum. NIGHTSHINING has been supported by a Silvers Foundation grant, and early research from the book was a finalist for Notting Hill Editions’ essay prize and subsequently published by Harper’s. THE EIGHTH MOON grew from an essay in Granta. She often collaborates with artists, including working with Kate Newby on a rolling site-specific project The January February March, and with Marlene McCarty in Buffalo, NY exploring capitalism, modernism and invasive weeds. For Coffee House Press, she wrote “A Dangerous Ornamental” on filing for unemployment and foraging for weeds, examining structural unemployment. Her writing has been supported by grants from SUNY Albany, NYSCA and NYFA as well as a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts. Part of the core faculty of the design research MA at SVA, she is on the advisory board for the poetry collective Ugly Duckling Presse. An apprentice herbalist, she is most proud of serving on her local fire department.