Being a Creative Person and a Professional

 Luckily, I grew up in a city that had a lot of interesting creative characters. In one of the biggest music cities in the United States: Athens, Georgia was a small, quaint, and safe place for me to express my inner artist. 

However, this hasn’t totally fixed the way in which I have had to carve myself into society. I have always been overwhelmingly creative. I am a fine artist, graphic artist, designer, musician, performer, actress, writer, etc. While these things are appreciated and often celebrated in American society, they are also seen as extracurricular. 

By nature, professionally I went through a period where I was trying to fit my triangle shaped self into a square peg. This peg looked like a cubicle in an office, at a receptionist desk, in a math class, and in my traditional family. No matter how hard I tried to be motivated professionally by things other than creative endeavors it was all in vain. I realized in my twenties that fundamentally I was going to have the composition that I had as a human being. I could learn and grow and improve on what I already had, but I would never be able to work a 9 to 5 in a position where I couldn’t use my gifts. 

So, I got to work. I taught myself a lot about business, numbers, and community engagement. Although I have had success in the fostering of my business, it is a slow climb to the salaries that I would receive working for others and I have made it my mission to find a solution to this. Pure hearted creatives shouldn’t have to sacrifice their gifts to feed themselves. Just like creatives are outwardly innovative- together we can find solutions to this. Bridging the divide between Art and Business has been my passion. The economy is symbiotic and reflects the same sentiment as a Yin Yang. The creatives help the analytical minds. Everyone possesses a little of the opposite quality, but an artist can find solutions that a physicist might be skirting. 

I truly believe whenever these two sides of the professional spectrum join, they can have the most impact. However, it hasn’t always been fair. In fact, in the handbook “How to Survive and Prosper as an Artist” by Caroll Michels it is stated that: 

“A report released in 2017 by the Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account, in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the US Department of Commerce, showed that only 2.9 percent of the salaries and compensation generated by arts and cultural programs went to independent artists, writers, and performers. The balance, 97.1 percent, went to those in occupations who serve artists, writers, and performers.”

Art is my outlet and Art is my business. I knew I had to make my work what I love and something that feeds my soul when I put hours into it. I also knew fundamentally that I wanted to be able to run a successful business, pay my bills, and grow within my craft. I also knew that I wanted to do many projects collaboratively. In order to solve this incredible gap in income in the creative industries, Artists must take responsibility in bridging the gap between the business minds and the creative. If you want to make money off of your talent or better yet make a career out of it, you should do a series of basic things.

·      Learn your legal rights as an artist and creator and uphold them.

·      Know your monetary worth and ask for appropriate compensation

·      Invest in your career but in informed and safe ways: avoiding “artist promotion” scams.

·      Protect your property- Copywriting, Licensing

·      Learn about all the opportunities your community DOES have for you. If your community is lacking don’t shun traveling or relocation

·      Read and Study Entrepreneurship- If you are an artist, especially multi-talented consider yourself an entrepreneur. Learning about succeeding as an entrepreneur is crucial. 

·      Find the people in the world who are doing what you want to be or close and learn from them.

·      Don’t be afraid to fail. We learn the most from what isn’t working. 

One thing that I have learned is that if opportunity isn’t being provided for you, you must make opportunity. No one has all the answers and the rules that are in place that limit creative workers can be changed. We are in a new era of economic development, and people like me and other creatives have an opportunity to change the statistics.

Let’s work to represent a sustainable creative economy where artists and creative freelancers know how to profit and build lasting careers from their crafts.