Arts Professional Story: Michael Workman: On Art Fairs
What advice do you have for artists and curators trying to organize their own large scale events?
Bridge Art Fair Miami 06
These are all fantastic large-scale art and cultural events, with experienced people at the helms. Its critical people who want to get involved in organizing large-scale events know exactly what's at stake before they sign a contract for a venue which they will suddenly owe fifty thousand dollars to. You'll get taken to court and lose and go bankrupt if you don't anticipate how to offset those expenses. This is a serious business and unless you've planned well, you can lose your shirt. It's literally life and death. Your employees are counting on you to pay their rent, buy their groceries, etc., so you've got to do it right the first time. Once you lose money, there's no way to recoup it, it's gone and you're in debt.
And don't count on friends to help you. This is business. Get it all in legally-binding agreements before you do anything. How many stories have I heard about roommates who skipped out on paying rent? Unless everybody's named on the lease, there's no way to force accountability. It's the same with contractual obligations in business. You need to have them, and don't trust somebody else to do them for you, you need to make sure yourself that every single other business or individual you're doing business with has something in writing that clearly lays out the terms of your association.
Contracts protect everybody, and keep in mind that you can negotiate whatever terms you want. If you're not happy with the terms of the agreement, don't sign. It's as simple as that. It's precisely in the specific "terms" you develop for contracts related to services and expenses that you're doing business, and those terms will be the blood and bones of your event. Our first year putting on the Artboat show, for instance, I stepped up to sign the rental agreements for the Anita Dee, the 120-foot yacht docked at Navy Pier that we staged the show aboard. I was working with other people on the project, and I trusted them to back me up financially. Big mistake. They who swore up and down that it was even-steven, until the bill actually came due.
Then it was like cockroaches when a light comes on, not a single one of them offered to help. I can't say I blame them, it was my name on all the contracts, not theirs, and I hadn't gotten anything with their name on it anywhere in writing. I had nothing to fall back on. No matter how much I complained, they weren't having any part of paying those bills. I got totally stuck paying the remainder of that thirty thousand bucks out of my own pocket. I'll tell you, that was a real learning experience. So, never trust anybody with a handshake when it comes to money, get it all in writing. I guarantee that if you don't, you're only setting yourself up for hardship. Now, even with contracts, you'll inevitably run into hidden charges, a certainty with almost every event.
My contract with the yacht owners, for instance, was a contract for twenty thousand dollars, a flat rate and then so much per person. There was also a proviso that stated we had to serve food if we planned on having drinks aboard the ship and sailing for more than an hour, and so we thought we could find a caterer who would donate the food to us. Except when the contract said "preferred," what it really meant was "these caterers are friends of ours and you MUST select from this list." Add another ten thousand dollars to the bill. Now, thirty thousand dollars isn't a lot of money, but back then, we were only charging a few hundred dollars of each gallery participating and I think twenty dollars per passenger. This left us with a massive deficit, especially after adding in printing costs for our promotional materials, etc. It took us a while to pay it all down, but we negotiated it and managed to come through unscathed.
You never see stuff like this happening in the background of large-scale events, but it's pretty routine. As with us, most people will only see the art at an art fair, but there's an entire infrastructure that you have to mobilize and put in place that frames the event and determines 90% of the show's success or failure. PR, lights, walls (if needed), personnel, city licenses, food and beverage options, transportation, parking, permits, EM lighting, fire extinguishers, evacuation route postings, bathrooms, HVAC, electrical, it goes on and on. You'll need floor plans or blueprints of some kind to plot out the placement of your event's physical elements. Before you can even acquire a liquor license, you need to have Occupancy Placards issued by the Department of Buildings and Permits, and before you can obtain those you'll have to advance through ever-tightening rings of fire that include visits from an army of code inspectors.
Even if you do manage to get permission from the city to put on your event, you've only just gained permission to start planning your event. You'll also need to have resources for ticket-takers if you plan to charge admission, bartenders if you plan to serve alcohol and you'll have to apply for your own liquor license (since the law has been changed). It used to be you could simply hire a caterer with their own license, but that's not good enough anymore: it's illegal if the event organizer doesn't have their own venue-specific license, regardless whether or not the caterer has one. Your very first step in organizing any event is to have a clear budget and contracts with terms that work within revenue expectations.
All of this costs money, and you need to know where every dollar is going out to and where every dollar is coming in from. Not having a good financial plan can lead to disaster. Don't do it that way. Get educated about how to do it right. Go work for somebody else and learn from their hardships. Another recommendation: never hire artists to do a job for which they're not qualified, regardless how integral you view the role of artists to your event. It's a rule that all arts admin.s would do very well to live by: artists don't manage. Find qualified people and say no to their ideas if those ideas aren't addressed in your budget. You'll be expected to provide real leadership on these events and failure to do so will only land you in a heap of trouble. Don't be afraid to fire people or dismiss them from the event planning staff if they aren't playing by the rules. Do this at the first sign of trouble. We've had staffers who started organizing their own events in conjunction with ours who then expected us to pay their bills. Your people need to have a very clear idea of what their job is, and if they're not doing it, they need to be confronted.
Finally, once you've gotten a little real-life experience under your belt, start thinking about how your event is relevant. There's the whole list of important questions you have to answer before committing to your enterprise. What's happening in the market for your event regionally, nationally, internationally? What are the historical precedents for the kind of event you want to stage in your specific geographic location? What kind of funding sources are you considering? Are they sufficient to offset your liabilities? A good rule of thumb here is that for every dollar you spend to produce an event, you should make at least twenty and ideally, fifty in return. Do you have access to sufficient manpower to get the job done? What are the city laws like where you live? Are their licensing and building code issues that you need to educate yourself about first? How do you handle your accounting and will you need to make tax disbursements on the sales? If it's more a cultural event, and no one's selling anything, these issues still apply.
Michael Workman is Director of Bridge, NFP, a Chicago-based arts programming organization. Bridge, NFP, organizes annual Bridge Art Fairs in Chicago, Miami and London and pioneered a multi-use facility that provides incubation space at 119 N. Peoria for developing arts organizations, currently occupied by GARDENfresh gallery. Bridge, NFP, also formerly published Bridge Magazine, for which Workman served as Publisher and Editor-in-Chief. He is Art Editor for the Chicago alternative weekly newspaper, NewCity, and Chicago correspondent for Flash Art . His writing has appeared in New Art Examiner, the Chicago Reader, zingmagazine, TenbyTen and Contemporary magazine.
More Arts Professional Stories by Michael Workman:
On Being a Critic
On Bridge
On Chicago
On Getting Published