CREATENous Tous: A Gallery For All Of Us
Citizens Of Culture cultivates economic opportunities for independent artists and designers through workshops and events.
Please describe your project proposal.
Citizens Of Culture uses engaging events to highlight and create deeper context for artist's work. With the LA2050 we will expand our gallery showroom programs beyond the walls of our space to engage with a wider network of creators.
Which of the CREATE metrics will your proposal impact?
Arts establishments
Manufacturing activity
Employment in the creative industries
Gini coefficient
Jobs per capita
Measures of cultural and global economic influence (“soft power”)
Minority- and women-owned firms
Percentage of graduates from local higher education institutions that remain in LA County 5 years after graduating
Unemployment (and opportunities) for the formerly incarcerated
Venture capital investment
In what areas of Los Angeles will you be directly working?
Central LA
City of Los Angeles
Describe in greater detail how your proposal will make LA the best place to CREATE?
Citizens Of Culture exists at the intersection of creativity, commerce, and community. Because of this we interact with hundreds of artists per year who have great work that needs marketing, and development support. This might be as little as social media strategy consulting or helping craft narrative in a press release, all the way to determining a business model or cost structure for their time. Each of these hurdles can be the defining factor in whether a talented artist can make a livelihood from their craft. Our LA2050 proposal expands our existing program; consulting and representing artists as entrepreneurs to develop initial streams of revenue that can be built upon to grow their career sustainably. In the business world this is referred to as a MVP (minimum viable product).
Our retail gallery in Chinatown, Los Angeles has been host to rapid prototyping of workshops and events that help convert artists audiences into patrons. We help them develop a value proposition that is both authentic and financially sustainable in order to begin a career as a working artist. In the past six months we have held art shows and retail events that have generated income for creatives based on helping them create meaningful context for their work and clarity of their message. Artists bring us their designs or original works and we create art shows and activations in our space that help their sales, and then package the imagery and messaging surrounding their work to present it to other galleries and shops to broaden their exposure.
Now, we would like to expand our platform to be able to build longer lasting relationships and activations that can work to drive campaigns and opportunities. To do this we need to redesign our site, run longer term events, invest in PR and marketing resources, and pay for prints and production samples. The LA2050 grant will be put to great use in allowing us to focus more directly on concept and execution by removing some of the financial barriers to campaign success.
Please explain how you will define and measure success for your project.
Our success will be measure by the number of artists we are able to create programs for, the depth and duration of the program run, and the sales revenue we help them generate through customer engagement and wholesale distribution.
The first part of our platform requires that we constantly meet with and appraise talented creatives in a variety of fields. Then we must select who to collaborate with based on shared vision and goals. After creating programs that we have confidence in and executing them we will have to measure our investment against real business metrics to determine success resulting not only a profit and loss statement but an appraisal of accountability to the values and objectives we began with.
How can the LA2050 community and other stakeholders help your proposal succeed?
Money
Volunteers
Staff
Publicity/awareness
Community outreach
Network/relationship support