Scaffolding for Practicing Artists (SPA) provides artists with one-on-one coaching and peer artist gatherings, helping them thoughtfully address their artistic goals and challenges.
SPA is free for artists and artist-directed at each step of the program. SPA’s goals are to increase artists’ agency in their artistic work/careers and to build a deeper sense of community and connection. Each participant’s specific needs guide their one-on-one coaching sessions and the subsequent peer gatherings:
COACHING
Artists partner with a coach for work sessions over a one-year period, creating space for dialogue about immediate or long-term challenges they face. Coaching sessions last from 45-90 minutes; the artists decide how best to use the time and can shift the focus as needed.
Coaching provides artists with a unique opportunity to have an ongoing, advising relationship with an experienced practitioner who is familiar with the arts and culture ecosystem. Artists have used sessions to focus on everything from approaches to touring new works to cultivating institutional partnerships to building sustainable creative careers.
GATHERINGS
In the last quarter of the coaching year, participants attend a two-day gathering of 4-6 fellow artists, facilitated by SPA coaches. During the gathering, artists introduce their practice and share a current challenge, which their group then considers and advises on.
SPA gatherings are an opportunity for artists to offer to each other the same deep listening, thoughtful questioning, and compassionate shared problem-solving that they experienced with their coach. Artists leave the gatherings with an expanded cross-disciplinary peer network, engendering solidarity in what can often be an isolating endeavor. All attendees receive a cash stipend to support their participation.
SPA provides artists with practical tools to develop their work, create sustainable careers, and expand their impact. We serve artists across all disciplines including choreographers, directors, playwrights, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and visual and multimedia artists. We routinely hear from participants how essential SPA is in supporting their vision and the quotidian tasks necessary for maintaining an artistic career.
SPA’s History
Starting in the early 2010’s MAP staff noticed a pattern: artists were more frequently contacting them with concerns about self-production. Fewer large arts institutions were providing comprehensive commissions to support the creation of new work. As a result, individual artists faced increasing pressure to secure funding from multiple sources, identify development residencies, manage collaborating creative staff, and contribute to the technical production and marketing elements of bringing a new work to life. While this redistribution of labor can result in much sought creative control for independent artists, it also demands a skill set artists are not always trained in, or inclined to develop. These trends continue today.
Co-designed by MAP staff and consultant David Sheingold and launched in 2011, the Scaffolding for Practicing Artists (SPA) Program provides unique forms of support to independent artists and ensembles in response to these dramatic, nationwide shifts in arts sector producing structures over the past decade.
Since its launch, SPA has engaged more than 300 artists. In 2019, MAP commissioned an assessment of the program. The report indicates that participation in the program has a strong, positive impact on the lives and work of artists, with 91% of respondents indicating that they would participate in the SPA program again.
SPA’s guiding values animate every aspect of the program:
Curiosity
Deep listening and posing thoughtful questions are at the heart of our approach. We believe that artists often know how to move through quandaries and toward opportunities, but are socialized to doubt their knowledge and instincts. Through shared inquiry, we unpack assumptions and identify paths forward.
Humility
While SPA coaches bring expertise to the table, they do not presume to have all of the answers to questions that may emerge in a coaching relationship. When possible, we point artists toward existing field resources and networks of support.
Intuition
In life, in art, in creative practice, we are required to step into the unknown. We embrace that truth and honor the many kinds of knowledge that help us navigate the world.
Compassion
Presence. Sincere loving kindness. Open mindedness and heartfulness. Belief in the inherent worthiness and dignity of every being.
Shared responsibility
Artists, coaches, and MAP staff collaborate to create the SPA experience. We create explicit agreements so that everyone consents to their contribution.
Ease
Life is stressful enough. We want the containers of the program to cultivate peace, so we crafted our protocols and practices with ease in mind. We want just enough structure that we can relax into our practices.
Analysis of structural oppression
We understand the work of artists in the context of intersecting systems of oppression. It’s not random that being an artist is challenging — particularly if you are a person of color, a trans artist, living in a rural place, or moving through the world with other identities or experiences that are marginalized and exploited. Dominant systems are designed this way.
We offer SPA participation to a subset of MAP grantees and through our partnerships with the Jerome Foundation’s Jerome Hill Artist Fellows and the Princess Grace Foundation’s Artist Fellows. To learn more about partnering with MAP’s SPA program, visit our “Partner with SPA” page. Contact Ron Ragin, SPA’s Director, with any further questions.
Banner: MAP 2020 grantee Fires of Varanasi by Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy. Photography by Dilip Barman.