Send Evan to Los Angeles

Hi all,

I received a fellowship to attend the LARB USC Publishing Workshop in Los Angeles this summer. The Workshop pairs innovators in the publishing industry with emerging talents for a month-long boot camp. Although I received a generous scholarship, I still need to raise funds to make the trip an affordable reality. I've already paid my $1,500 deposit, but I'm just a few hundred dollars short of being able to cover the remaining tuition ($358) due June 1. 


Expenses

My scholarship covers 80% of my tuition. My primary expenses in attending the program will be $1,000 to cover my remaining fees, $858 to cover meals during networking events, and the cost of travel (est. $500). I don’t foresee myself needing to pay for housing. This means I need to raise about $2,500 to $3,000 in total.


Incentives

I’m happy to work out personalized incentive packages for individual donors. This could include: résumé and cover letter consultations; manuscript, website, and online portfolio reviews; I'm also happy to do tarot readings. I prefer this method of exchange because it prevents me from overbooking in the future.  

 
My Goal

The Trump administration’s proposal to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities last month should serve as no surprise. Public access to the arts is always under threat, and artists have long supported themselves without institutional support. But we live in a political milieu where adequate representation leads to adequate resources: Institutional funding garners artists unchecked visibility and renders otherwise suspect motives as authentic, aesthetically pleasing, and profitable. In attending the LARB USC Publishing Workshop, I hope to materialize an online space that runs counter to this system. The workshop will give me a chance to strengthen my control of web development, coding, digital strategy, online curation, and arts writing as I strive to support artists and arts educators outside of the institutional and academic sphere. In addition to providing a space for artists to circulate their work and discuss the contexts in which it was produced, I plan to offer an annual digital residency component where I will share resources with another artist as part of a collaborative arrangement. I also see the workshop as an opportunity to build an array of skills that will further my career—the better I can support myself, the better I can support other working artists.   

 
Background 

I spent several months working in a marketing office where I learned principles from user experience design, information architecture, and content strategy after completing my MFA in Creative Writing last year. I became an ad hoc design researcher and spearheaded a series of projects that—though far from my artistic training—I believe would benefit independent artists if applied on a larger scale. I want to translate the concepts I gleamed from these fields into my practice as an art historian and critic. Publishing materializes the political and creates language for artists to describe what is at stake in their work: Without documentation, the practices, disciplines, theories, insights, and histories artists carry disappear. Journals like Asymptote and Words Without Borders share translations and artwork made by veteran and emerging artists from across the globe. Online archives like The Volta, UbuWeb, The Claudius App and Triple Canopy have proven that digital spaces can serve both pedagogical and political purposes. But we need more digital spaces created to support artists; we need a wider range of aesthetic and political alignments represented online; we need cross-media content that brings diverse communities together; and we need to break away from the survey model many online platforms leverage to communicate with the largest possible audience without risk or vulnerability. I propose a digital archive that builds itself on empathy and intimacy, that demonstrates the value of interpersonal connections, that links disparate communities as a response to the political turmoil of our times.