Where artists teach, share with peers

 

Artists take part in a 2023 workshop hosted by the Assets for Artists program at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. This fall, the museum’s professional development program will become an independent nonprofit organization serving all of New England Photo courtesy of Mass MoCA

 

By KATE ABBOTT
Contributing writer

NORTH ADAMS, Mass.

Artists gather in a tall-windowed room, talking about their work.
They may make prints in colors of sun and leaf shadow — or fire in a circle of stone at night. Or they make R&B music, quilts holding oral histories, or clay thrown on a wheel.

They are here to sustain the making. In any field, in challenging times, they need time and resources to feed their creative energy and let their work grow.

From its base in North Adams, the Assets for Artists program provides professional development workshops and training for artists around the Northeast. This summer, actors are teaching fellow artists about financial planning, a dancer and activist will guide a session on project planning for dance artists, and a theater and performance artist will lead a workshop on the potential benefits of cooperative organizations in the arts.

And lately Assets for Artists, also known as A4A, has been growing its own structures.
On Oct. 1, the creative organization, which began as a program of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, will become an independent, regional nonprofit serving all of New England. The five staff members of the professional team will transition to become their own entity, with a new board, whose members will all be artists.

 

Blair Benjamin has been director of the Assets for Artists program since its inception in 2008. Photo courtesy of Mass MoCA

A4A’s founding director, Blair Benjamin, has worked with Mass MoCA since 2000, months after the museum first opened. He launched Assets for Artists in 2008 and the Studios at Mass MoCA artists residency program in 2015.

The Studios at Mass MoCA artist residency program will remain part of the museum, he said, and A4A will continue to run from office space within the museum campus.

Benjamin sees potential energy in the new incarnation of Assets for Artists.
“We will be able to explore some new programming and keep the momentum going,” he said, speaking from the A4A office on a stormy summer afternoon.

“The artist community’s needs have outstripped our ability to grow within the Mass MoCA structure,” he added. “And we have grown new communities and partnerships. We felt it made sense to realize this ambition and make this transition now.”

 

More programs in a wider region
A4A’s pool of workshops and training programs has grown significantly in just the past five years, Benjamin said.

In addition to workshops and short classes on things like personal finance and planning, A4A has deepened its teaching programs with artist cohorts — through months-long professional development programs for groups of artists in the northern Berkshires and in Pittsfield, and now across the region.

“We have staff capacity for about seven cohorts,” said assistant director Molly Rideout, a writer, artist and historian in North Adams. “Now we’re at six, because we keep adding more to each cohort.”

And A4A’s geographic footprint has grown. Its network of artists and teachers now offers programming throughout New England, through both in-person and virtual workshops, and in more possible languages, especially in Spanish.

“We’ve always done a lot of work out in western Mass.,” Benjamin said. “Pittsfield and North Berkshire has been a mainstay of our work forever. And then we have expanded our programming throughout the Connecticut River Valley. In partnership with the Community Foundation of Western Mass., we have a Valley Creates initiative that supports artists there.”
Now, he said, A4A is working with partners throughout eastern and central Massachusetts — the city of Boston, the Greater Worcester Community Foundation and Arts Worcester, Mosaic Lowell, and in partnership with the city of Lowell. The program also works with communities in Connecticut and elsewhere in the Northeast.

And starting this fall, A4A will have grant funding to add the only New England state it hasn’t yet served: New Hampshire.

“We collaborate with dozens of artists,” Benjamin said. “And we have been able to expand the staff. When I was hired, in terms of the professional development, A4A had the equivalent of one staff member — me part time and Brianna Halpin part time, in terms of the staff time that we could devote to the professional development work.

“And then Molly came on full time, but she was splitting her time between the professional development and the studios work. Now we’ve grown the team enough that as we go independent, we’ll have five full-time Assets for Artists professional development staff, and we hope to grow soon from there.”

 

For artists, by artists
As an independent nonprofit, Benjamin and Rideout explained, A4A will have the reach to work across a much wider geographic area and provide a higher level of coaching support for individual artists.

“Another thing I’m excited about is that by being an independent organization, we will be artist-led -- by artists for artists,” Rideout said. “Our board will all be practicing artists themselves. Artists are at the center of everything we do.”

Through its training sessions, Assets for Artists is bringing artists into conversations with the wider community. Rideout said the organization just launched a new “cultural strategy” initiative — a pilot program being tried for the first time in Lowell.

“This group specifically focuses on artists who are doing community change work through their artistic practice,” she explained. “They want to impact the community and build relationships with other kinds of groups that are working on those issues — and that could be around food security, or it could be around affordable housing or support for folk in certain groups in their community.”
Rideout said the group is planning in-person events with community leaders who are interested in building stronger relationships with artists and understanding how they can align their work.
Across more than a dozen years, Assets for Artists has strengthened a broad web of creative minds, Benjamin said, and also of resources — a fundamental need in these recent months of rapid changes in funding at the federal level.

“We have a wide mix,” he said. “Most of the state arts councils have been able to give us some funding. We’ve had federal money — and we’ll see if it’s still around next year — that has often gone towards our workshop programming through the USDA. We have rural development funding. And then we have community foundations and some municipalities, and private funding partners as well.

“We’ve always taken very much an ecosystem approach, where we partner with many different organizations … and we serve artists across all disciplines and at all career stages. That helps us build a wide network of thousands of artists that we have served in workshops and other services, and we see the strength of that web at a time like this, when people are feeling very scared and threatened and wanting to connect with other artists and find resources.”

Many artists on the new A4A board are alumni of the program’s capacity building program, Rideout said. So they know from experience how the group works and how A4A supports artists. And they live in North Adams, Pittsfield, Worcester, Boston and elsewhere in eastern Massachusetts.

“We’ve had about a year together now as a board,” she said, “and all of them had had past relationships with us, including as strategic planning advisers.”

“I’m really looking forward to the nimbleness that a small organization can allow for,” Rideout added. “I mean, Mass MoCA has been an amazing steward of our program over these last 16, 17 years.

“But by having artist eyes on the ground at all levels,” she said, it will be powerful “to be able to say ‘I’m really seeing this happening right now within our community,’” and be able to respond.
“In Covid, we shifted all of our programming to respond to that moment. And Blair and I were doing consultation calls half of our days during that time. And this could be another one of those moments. We’re still figuring out: How can we support artists in this moment, and activate the network?”

 

Artists as agents of change
Benjamin said he is excited to work in greater partnership with people who are addressing community issues that go clearly beyond the traditional focus of arts organizations.

“The affordable housing and affordable space crisis in Massachusetts is hitting artists extremely hard, and it’s hitting all kinds of folk across communities,” he said. “That’s something that we’ve always had an interest in and connections to, not just the ways that artists make wonderful work, but also how do they have a sustainable career, how do they have a financial structure that works to survive as an artist.”

Benjamin said he has become increasingly interested in public policy issues and advocacy. He has gotten more closely involved with the statewide advocacy organization Mass Creative, and he has been putting together a coalition of artist service providers across Massachusetts.
“We’ve tried rolling out some workshops to test the interests of our artist community,” he said. “We had a home buyer workshop for artists last fall. And we’ve had workshops on cooperatives where artists can learn about land trusts and different approaches to thinking about ownership and ways to kind of improve your standing when it comes to property … and reduce the likelihood of being displaced by some of the economic forces that have a tendency to push artists and everyone out of communities.”

Those are areas where he wants to see A4A to continue to be more active, gain more knowledge and more relationships.

“Can we be more intentional about how we build those partnerships and find alignment with organizations?” he wondered aloud. “And then also: How do we activate and plug artists into that work … and get them involved in helping do that work and supporting that work?”

And can that work provide new alternatives and resources for artists and local communities?
As A4A moves into August, Benjamin said, theater and performance artist Daniel Park will lead a two-part workshop on worker-owned cooperatives.

An organizer for racial and labor justice, Park is a worker-owner at Obvious Agency in Philadelphia, one of the nation’s only performance-based worker-owned cooperatives. He will introduce participants to real-life cooperatives in arts and culture and encourage them to think about how a cooperative could meet their needs and the needs of their communities.

As artists continue to move to the Berkshires and to stay — a trend documented in A4A’s artist census in North Adams from 2020-24 — their needs and their communities’ needs will continue to intertwine.