We’ve uploaded videos of the performances from our benefit on November 8th. If you missed them for any reason - you couldn’t be at the benefit, you planted yourself by the open bar and skipped the boring performance stuff, etc. - now’s your chance to see these Fractured Atlas members doing their thing.

NY Polyphony (pt 1):

NY Polyphony (pt 2):

Adrienne Celeste Fadjo:

Basya Schechter:

Second only to Christmas morning, children across America anxiously await the moment when my benefit keynote is posted. Well, kiddies, Santa Claus is here!

This is in two sections, since YouTube doesn’t allow videos longer than 10 minutes (the full speech is a little over 11 minutes). In case you’re more into reading than watching/listening, I’ve posted the full transcript below.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Transcript:

On behalf of the Board and staff of Fractured Atlas, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the 2007 Fractured Atlas Benefit. As always, we’ve got a great evening planned and the schedule is packed, so I’ll try not to drone on for too long up here. But I do want to take a few minutes to fill you in on what we’ve been up to at Fractured Atlas, and talk about some of the areas where we’re going next. Then after the performances, I’m going to be announcing the winners of our $3,000 online video contest, so make sure you stick around until the end.

But first, let me hit you with a few numbers:

4,400 members, with an extended community of over 50,000 artists through the Open Arts Network – this makes us the largest arts service organization in the country;

850 artists and small organizations participating in our fiscal sponsorship program – ours is now the largest fiscal sponsorship program, in any field, in the United States;

$2.5 million dollars – that’s how much we helped those fiscal sponsees raise in the last year, while freeing them from the administrative and financial burdens of maintaining independent 501(c)(3) status;

1,500 healthier artists thanks to their participation in one of our healthcare programs;

70-80% reductions in liability insurance costs for the 5-10 members each week who purchase coverage for their events, film productions, or public art projects.

96% of expenses going directly towards programs and services, with only 4% spent on fundraising and administration; this makes Fractured Atlas among the most efficient and streamlined non-profit organizations you’ll find anywhere.

Our reach and positive impact on the arts community continues to grow, and every day we’re finding new challenges and issues to tackle on its behalf.

In the next few weeks, we’ll be introducing the first ever fully-online arts management curriculum, providing down-to-earth courses in fundraising, financial management, marketing, business law, and more. These courses will be free for members, and we’ll be growing and expanding the curriculum over time based on the feedback we get from participants.

This fall will also see the launch of numerous new features on the Fractured Atlas website that are designed to help our members promote their work and network with their peers. Our website gets a lot of traffic, and we believe our members should be front and center as the main attraction.

Now, for those of you who were here last year, you may remember that I spent most of my time up here on the bully pulpit talking about our advocacy project in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The Quixotic goal that I laid out that night was to identify and promote strategies for reversing the age old cycle of artist-led gentrification followed by a hostile neighborhood takeover by the forces of bland consumer capitalism. Well, tonight I’d like to revisit that topic and relate a quote from of the panelists at a symposium we held at Galapagos Art Space. This person is going to have to remain nameless, since this is a high-ranking government official and I’ve got no interest in committing career suicide tonight.

First let me set the scene by reminding you that we’re at Galapagos, which is a dark and gritty but vibrant alternative arts venue, and that the room is full of angry Brooklyn artists facing immanent eviction. So one of these angry artists stands up and emotionally asks what she can do to keep her apartment. The panelist’s painfully sincere answer? “Artists have always been nomadic. Maybe you should move to Yonkers.” Suffice it to say that suggestion didn’t play too well with the crowd. In his defense, the panelist wasn’t trying to be offensive. He was trying to offer genuine advice based on his understanding of the arts community and its needs.

The romanticized notion of the starving artist as nomadic bohemian is well-known to all of us in this room. And frankly a life of Ramen noodles and squatting in abandoned buildings may even seem exciting when you’re 22 years old and fresh out of college. But sooner or later you realize that it’s impossible to prosper if you can’t lay down roots. That means finding a home and participating in a community.

By “community” I mean both your peers in the arts, as well as the wider community in which we live and work. Participating in your peer community means that you don’t have the luxury of only looking out for yourself. When we face big challenges like the ones faced by those artists in Williamsburg, our only hope is be organized, focused, and persistent, as a community, with a single voice.

The wider community is equally important, because they’re just as wrapped up in this as we are. You’re all familiar with the story line. Artists move into a gray industrial neighborhood because of cheap rent and lots of raw space. A few years later, and certainly by no coincidence, the neighborhood becomes fashionable. First come the hipsters, then come the yuppies, and there goes the neighborhood. Spiraling real estate prices force a mass exodus of relatively new artists and long-time residents alike.

As it turns out, artists and real estate developers aren’t the only ones who have noticed this pattern. In recent years artists along with projects designed to support them have increasingly run into opposition from established community activists. Artists see themselves first as contributors to a richer, more culturally alive neighborhood, and then later as victims of the ensuing gentrification. But for the people who lived in that neighborhood for three generations before we got there, artists look an awful lot like the perpetrators of that gentrification. And since these folks are better organized and more experienced at the political process than we are… Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but they typically kick our asses.

If we are ever going to break this cycle, we must first learn how to engage the community that lives right outside our work studios. The truth is that we’re natural allies in the face of challenges like this, but poor communication and mutual misunderstanding too often prevent us from recognizing that we have mostly shared interests and common concerns.

I’m here tonight to tell you that there is no bigger, more fundamental problem that the arts community faces than this. Until we can reach out to our neighbors, forge meaningful alliances, and together develop strategies for keeping our neighborhoods, we will forever be marginalized in a society that doesn’t understand us and sometimes wishes we would all just move to Yonkers.

For my part, I’ve spent the past year consumed with this challenge, and I’d like to tell you a little bit about where it’s led. This fall, Fractured Atlas launched an ambitious two-year project called Envisioning Cultural Vitality which is designed to expose and combat this process of gentrification and push out. We’re starting with three New York City neighborhoods that represent different stages of the gentrification cycle: Williamsburg, Long Island City, and SoHo/NoHo. When we’re done, we’ll have a framework that can be applied in other neighborhoods or cities across the country.

Now there’s two pieces here: community mapping and civic engagement. The first part, the mapping, is about standing up to be counted, both as individuals and as a community. In partnership with local community groups, we’re going door to door, talking to artists and arts organizations, asking them to tell their stories and lay out the challenges they face. As this information gets collected, it gets fed to a whole team of policy wonks who are working on the ground with people in the neighborhood to develop strategies for sustainable urban economic development in which the arts and cultural sector is valued and respected for the contribution it makes to our society. The map itself will be made publicly available on an interactive website, complete with personal narratives and artist profiles, making the sources of cultural vitality in these neighborhoods visible and human.

Now, for the civic engagement part: What I didn’t tell you about the mapping process is that while we’re conducting these hundreds of interviews and surveys, we’re also doing a voter registration drive. This is how we build political muscle. At the end of the day, I plan to walk into some offices at City Hall and up in Albany and say: “Here’s what we’ve done in your district. We’ve built a coalition with several important local activist groups. Together, we’ve talked to this many individual artists and this many arts organizations that until today have been completely below your radar. Here is a list of their top public policy concerns. And by the way, we’ve registered them all to vote. So let’s talk about how we can work together to fix some of these problems.”

Envisioning Cultural Vitality is just now getting underway, but I think you’ll here a lot more about it over the next couple of years. More and more, Fractured Atlas is taking a leadership role in tackling our community’s biggest challenges through projects like this. We didn’t set out to be an advocacy organization, but it has become increasingly clear that the community needs someone to step up to the plate and take this on. We’re prepared to do just that.

The bad news about this kind of work is that, as important as it is, it’s expensive and it doesn’t generate any earned revenue. That’s a big difference between these kinds of projects and the normal day-to-day services that Fractured Atlas provides. Membership dues and program income cover almost all of our day-to-day operating expenses, but projects like Envisioning Cultural Vitality can only be supported through contributed income.

On that note, it is my duty to remind you that tonight’s event is a fundraiser. Please don’t tune me out and head to the bar just yet, because this is important. Every year I stand up here and ask people to give what they can to support Fractured Atlas. And every year, only a handful of people step up to the plate and contribute. Now most of you, if you’re still even listening, are probably thinking “he’s not talking about me… he’s talking about those rich people two rows down… they’ll write a check so I don’t have to.” Sorry, pal, I’m talking about you. Everyone in this room is a part of the Fractured Atlas community and everyone in this room has a responsibility to support that community. Maybe your contribution can’t be as big as those rich people two rows down, but you still have the power to step up and say, “I want to be a part of the solution.” And that’s what I’m asking you to do tonight. If you brought your checkbook with you, we love you. Just head over the surprise box table and we can take care of you there. If you didn’t bring your checkbook… We’ve tricked you! This year we can take donations by credit card as well! You, too, can head over to the surprise box table where we accept all the major kinds of plastic.

At our benefit on Thursday night we announced the winners of the Fractured Atlas Online Video Contest. Here they are:

2nd Runner Up: “Change the World” by Kevin Sampson

1st Runner Up: “Office-Bot” by David Sandberg

$3,000 Winner: “The Egg Collaboration”

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or never heard of Fractured Atlas before today) you probably know that our annual benefit is tomorrow night. We’ve been working on this event since February (I kid you not) and we’re now in the final hours. For my part, this is much easier and less stressful than it used to be, before I was able to delegate all of the event production to my wonderful staff (and especially Arwen, our benefit czarina). Still, it’s a major operation, with an event staff of 50, open bar and catering for 300, visual art to hang, performances to tech and mount, and a million other things to worry about.

But our stress is your gain! This is the last appeal I’ll be making. If you’re in New York and you can come, you should. It’s a great way to support our community of artists and I personally guarantee you’ll have a great time. Besides, I’m sure you wouldn’t want all of our hard work to go to waste.

The deets:

Thursday, November 8th @ 7pm
The Westside Loft
336 W. 37th Street
New York, NY

You can buy tickets online or get them at the door.

The Fractured Atlas Video Contest closed on November 1. I’ve never done anything like this before, so I had no idea what to expect, but I’m very happy with how it all turned out. We ended up with 20 entries and the overall quality is excellent. Many thanks to Genius Rocket for their help putting this together.

The three winning entries will be announced on Thursday at our benefit. Between now and then you can view all of the submissions and vote on your favorites (note that to vote you’ll have to sign up for a free membership at Genius Rocket).

A huge thank you to everyone who submitted an entry and I’m looking forward to screening the winners on Thursday!