With support from the California Arts Council, Los Angeles Performance Practice is conducting a study with national partners in grantmaking and fundraising on the current ecosystem of contemporary performance-making in Los Angeles, as compared to other major cities in the state and country. As creators of works that mark our current culture, we aim to demonstrate the value and need for the support of producing systems and practices that critically sustain independent artists.
The project, carried out between August 2019 – May 2021, will gather and present data, including figures, statistics and individual artist case studies, to compare and contrast the sources of funding that contribute to contemporary performance making in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. The project will culminate in a written report with results and conclusions, and a toolkit for artists on how to identify funding sources. This project aims to suggest how existing power structures and gatekeepers associated with the allocation of resources influence artist location and migration.
Our research will endeavor to come at questions of resource and distribution from the artists’ perspective, how they realize the actual practice of making. We will delve deeper, to cover a wide range of artists, including those who do not regularly receive institutional funding and therefore are often left out of data sets. We will also zoom out to evaluate our research more broadly through a per capita lens, to ask how, nationally, we are investing in contemporary art and performance as a public service.
Get Involved!
Our first phase of research involves collecting data from artists in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. We welcome your participation!
PARTICIPATE IN THE SURVEY // CLICK HERE
Information received through this survey will be reported only as unattributed, aggregate data. No individual project information will be included.
Your information will assist us in evaluating current baselines of support for the creation of new performance, and will inform our research and questioning through selected artist case studies, informational interviews with foundations, presenters, and other supportive organizations, and through our mining of collected quantitative data.
The survey will ask for budget information from your most recently completed project. We recommend having the budget open before beginning. We acknowledge the complexity of requesting sensitive information, and welcome any feedback you may have at the end of this form.
Upon receipt of completed surveys, twelve artists/groups will be randomly selected to participate in our case studies. Artists/groups will receive an honorarium in the amount of $1,000 in exchange for responding to an additional survey each quarter throughout 2020 (4 in total), and participating in a quarterly meeting via zoom.
Selected artists will be notified in December 2019.
