Right brain, left brain

Artists offered advice on business side of their jobs

Lauren Embree, executive director for Last Nigh Fayetteville, talks about this year's lineup of performers Saturday, Nov. 16, 2013, at Matt Miller Studio in Fayetteville. Last Night Fayetteville will return for its third year.
Lauren Embree, executive director for Last Nigh Fayetteville, talks about this year's lineup of performers Saturday, Nov. 16, 2013, at Matt Miller Studio in Fayetteville. Last Night Fayetteville will return for its third year.

It's one thing to create a brochure for a client. Graphic designers do it all the time.

photo

NWA Democrat-Gazette file photo

Sonia Davis Gutierrez, founder of The New Design School, will speak to local “creatives” Aug. 26 at the first of a new lecture series hosted by the Northwest Arkansas Creative Arts Network.

It's when that brochure mutates into half a dozen other things that successful graphic designers discover they're unsuccessful as businessmen.

Go & Do

Artists Helping Artists:

Contracts for Creatives

When: 6 p.m. Aug. 26

Where: Fayetteville Underground

Cost: Free

Information: NWACAN.org

Sonia Davis Gutierrez, founder and president of The New Design School in Fayetteville, has "definitely learned by fire" herself. As a teacher, she said, "I can't send new designers into the community without knowing one very basic thing." All artists should get a contract signed before they perform. "It's not fun when your creative work is stolen or not paid for or misused," she explained. "But if there is nothing written down, you're just saying, 'Here I am, a doormat. Walk on me.' You have to make it clear what the terms are."

Gutierrez said that advice applies equally to musicians, visual artists and anyone else working in creative arts. Lauren Embree agrees, and that's why she asked Gutierrez, along with attorney Debby Winters of Winters Law Firm, to teach the first in a series of workshops titled Artists Helping Artists. It's a project of the recently renamed Northwest Arkansas Creative Arts Network, a nonprofit organization with the mission of "connecting artists with economic opportunities through production, promotion and education."

Embree was in on the ground floor of the Northwest Arkansas Creative Arts Network, which began life as the parent organization for the Last Night Fayetteville celebration in 2011.

Over the next five years, "we've worked with hundreds of artists every year," Embree said. "And we always had artists coming to us who had never signed a contract before, asking us questions about business and marketing. We started thinking we might be lacking in resources for creative individuals in Northwest Arkansas, and that started us toward the educational component.

"We also knew we wanted to produce more than one festival every year," she added. "We wanted to have a presence in the community throughout the year. So we took over the Last Saturday variety show at the Fayetteville Underground. It's a free show that features four different acts, usually a musician, comedy, performance art like dance or burlesque or juggling and Word Wars, which is like a poetry slam. So that and Last Night are our two big productions."

The promotion portion of the mission is fulfilled by Creative Cocktails, a networking opportunity held the second Friday of every month at the Fayetteville Underground for "artists and creative types to come out and relax and hang out and talk," Embree said.

The Artists Helping Artists workshops are the first step in the educational component, Embree goes on. The next big effort, she said, is an arts business conference she hopes will come to fruition in 2016.

In the meantime, it seemed logical to her to start educational efforts by talking about contracts.

"Artists don't necessarily have a lot of expendable income," Embree said. "So the legal help they need is often too costly."

Embree corrected herself then.

"We want to use the term 'creative' more than 'artist'," she said. "A lot of people have a preconceived notion of what an artist is: Somebody with a paint brush. We're really aiming at a much larger swath of the population -- musicians, designers, sound engineers, backstage techs at the Walton Arts Center, as well as traditional artists.

"We want to involve pretty much anybody who can say they're working within the creative industry."

Becca Martin-Brown can be reached by email at [email protected].

NAN Profiles on 08/16/2015

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