How to Budget for a Public Art Project

Ever struggle with putting together a budget for your art project? In this episode I share my tips on how to put together a budget for a public art project.

Show notes & get a free budget template: https://distillcreative.com/blog/2022/1/25/how-to-budget-for-a-public-art-project

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Transcript

Stephanie Eche: 0:00

Welcome to the first show, where we explore public art, how it's made and why it matters. I'm your host, Stephanie Eche, an artist and art consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. I interview artists, cultural producers, designers and funders on how art in public space happens, and how to create more equitable and inclusive projects in public space. I also share my tips on how to curate and commissioned art projects for your business, how I run my art consulting business, distil creative, and how I'm developing my own art practice. If you're interested in my art consulting services or artwork, check out distil creative.com. Thanks so much for listening. And I hope you enjoy this episode. So I have five steps to come up with the budget. Step one, list out everything that you need to create your art project. Now, if you are the artist, you're going to have a much better idea about this then if you are someone commissioning the artwork, but either way, you should have an idea of what it's going to take, I'm going to talk about things to include if you are commissioning a project for your business. But these are pretty similar if you are the artist putting together a budget for your own project. So the first thing I would include is an artist stipend. This is because you might want to ask for proposals or sketches or ideas from artists for the project that you have in mind. Like, again, going back to the mural idea, if you want a mural in your common area, maybe you're going to reach out to a few artists and ask them to send you a concept, you need to pay them for that. So put a budget item for stipend that will allow you to prepare to pay them. Next thing is the artist fee. So this could basically covers the labor of creating the work, including designing the work, researching, actually physically making the work or covering the cost if they're hiring out other people to make the work. So I include that all in the artist fee. Next are materials, you might not know what materials are needed for a particular project. But you can put in a number. And I'll talk about how to actually come up with these numbers in a second. But first, put in a line item for materials. Next, you want to put a number in for installation. So this should cover like a lift rental or food and accommodations. Maybe if you're putting the artist up for a few days or a few weeks to work on the project. Signage, you always want to have signage for for the work. And this can be done in so many different ways. But you want to set some money aside to actually pay for the signage. You also want to set some money aside for any kind of digital component of the work. So maybe you're going to have this on a website, maybe it's a website, that's part of your business website, maybe it's a standalone website. And you want to think about that ahead of time. So you have some money to spend on that permits. Some projects in public space, many of them actually require permits of some sort. And those usually have some fees associated with it. So put that on as a line item -- consultants like me, sometimes you will find that you have an idea and everybody's on board at your company, but no one has time to do it. This has happened to me so many times when I've been in house. And then when I've been hired as a consultant, so many people are excited about this project. And honestly, it might be the most fun thing going on at the company. And so everybody wants to work on it. But if there's not one person driving this project, it's never going to happen, it's just going to be an idea. And one of the quickest ways to make a project happen, besides putting a budget aside for it is to hire a consultant who can move the ball forward, see the project from start to finish. And that's exactly what I do. So if you are like, Oh, we have so many ideas of artwork that we want to do on our site, and we want to hire these artists, and there's this cool thing, maybe it's a community or cultural program you want to put on but no one has time to do it. Set aside a budget and include in that budget, some money for consultant and feel free to reach out to me if you have a concept and you're like I don't know how much this would cost for a consultant to work on. I can give you a ballpark of what I would charge and I can give you an idea of what it would cost for me to do it and also maybe just head you in the right direction and help you out a little bit. I love working on projects like this. So definitely reach out if you need help. You also want to include money for photo and video documentation. Everyone on your marketing team is going to be like send me a photo. Where's the video? I wanna make a reel for Instagram. How can I put it on Tik Tok. Make sure you document all through installation and then have photos of the project when it's finally done. This will just help everyone out. You can just put money into hire someone to do this or maybe pay the artist a little bit of extra money and they can hire whoever they normally use. You can send someone from your marketing team to just be there ready to document but you definitely need to have that as a line item. Even if you're having someone in house do it. You'll need to put money aside for insurance to cover both the installation and then if you're borrowing an artwork to cover the artwork. While it's in your possession and travel, you might want an artist who doesn't live close to you, I highly suggest hiring local artists. But if you do want to hire an artist who lives outside of like their metro area, you'll want to cover their flight and accommodations. And if you have a local artist, you definitely want to cover like any cab subway, any transportation costs they have, it is a lot of work to install an art project, regardless of what it is. You always want to cover their transportation costs, maybe they just want to take a cab home because they're really tired, they shouldn't have to worry about that, you should be covering that. I also suggest covering meals and snacks. This is just something that's that artists really appreciate if you have coffee for them, or you can reimburse them for any of their meals and and snacks during the day. Because again, they're working really hard on this project and you want them to feel really comfortable, I also would include a contingency line. So maybe five to 10% of the overall budget, that'll just help cover anything that you didn't think of. Or if the project kind of gets bigger in scope, you will have a little bit more to play with step three. After you have your list of everything that you need to budget for, you need to figure out how much money to put in each of those buckets. If you do not know how much something is going to cost you need to do research. This might mean asking someone who's done something similar at your company, asking another company who's done something similar how much it cost them. Researching on the internet, there's a lot you can find on the internet. And you may even find the same exact project and how much someone spent on everything. If someone did a project that's similar to yours, but they're not revealing the cost, just feel free to reach out to them, they might be happy to share, because they probably know how hard it was for them to figure out. You can also reach out to me, and I can help you out. I charge a fee for budgeting for these types of projects. But it's also pretty fun for me and I have experience on knowing at least ballpark for lots of different types of projects. So reach out and let me know if you need help figuring out the budget for add it all up. So once you have an idea of what you need in your budget, how much money for each item in your budget, you can just add it all up and there's your number. Again, maybe you have a range, maybe it's like$5,000 to $10,000, or $50,000 to$70,000 or $500 to $700. I don't know what you're working on, but have an idea of what that number is. Because you're gonna want to know that when you start reaching out to artists, because they're going to need to know how much they're going to get paid for this project. And if you have no idea how much money you have to spend the full bucket, how can you possibly tell them how much you're going to pay them. So it's really, really, really important to figure this out ahead of time before you start talking to artists. Last step is to review and get feedback. So centered around your team, ask some colleagues, maybe reach back out to those people you reached out to when you were doing research, you can reach out to me and be like, Hey, this is the budget I'm thinking of for this type of project. Does this make sense and they'll help you kind of see any holes or let you know if you need to add more money somewhere. But this will, this will be so helpful for you because it'll give you time to actually think through the project and make you feel really Thanks so much for listening to my tips on how to create a confident when you start reaching out and curating for budget for a public art project. the project. If you want a head start on creating your own budget, sign up for my newsletter at distillcreative.com/blog and I'll send you a free template. Just find this post about budgeting and you'll get a free budget template as a Google spreadsheet so you could just copy it and then put in your own numbers. And please let me know what else you'd like to learn about public art projects. I am working on some new episodes for you. And I want to make sure that I'm sharing things that are helpful to you either as an artist or as a business commissioning site specific work. Thanks for listening to this episode of First coat. If you'd like this podcast, please leave a review. Make sure to subscribe to the first podcast wherever you listen to podcast and follow us on Instagram at first coat podcast or still create first coat was a production of my company still creative? Still creative.com