THE LOCAL ARTIST DILEMMA
As most of you know, we set out on a national-scale project to live full time on the road via RV and paint postcard murals across America. The initial project was meant to last only 1-year and we ended up on the road 5+ years and counting. We appreciate all of the gratitude, photos and stories about the murals that you share. It’s been inspiration that keep us staying committed to our goals. However, there’s one common argument that seems to recur in every city that we paint in. “Why didn’t a LOCAL artist paint it?”
We wanted to explore this question more in depth as it seems to be a common issue that traveling mural artists come across. Firstly, we wanted to answer this question in the context of a few different funding scenarios of a mural.
1. Murals that are donated by us out of pocket
2. Murals that are either privately funded or crowd funded
3. Murals funded by grants and/or civic organizations usually funded by tax dollars.
Donated Murals (Out of Pocket)
In general, we feel that artists should always be compensated, and they should never work for free! With that said, sometimes our values align with an organization’s and we want to donate our services for a good cause. In addition, one of our main goals is to have a mural in all 50 states. Therefore, it sometimes makes more financial sense to just paint a mural out of pocket when we are already close to a location for the travel costs and time.
In the case where a mural is being donated, we think that local artists could also go out and have the same opportunities if they are willing to invest in creating the artwork and just make it happen. A lot of people are unaware of how long the process can take behind the scenes just to find a property owner willing to let us paint a free mural on their property. Sometimes, this can take years of communication with endless calls and meetings. We encourage local artists to put in the work if they want to get their artwork out there as well. Don’t be discouraged by dead end leads as we run into those all the time.
We actually started a yearly mural grant to donate a mural to deserving city organizations and main street associations. You can check out more information on our Grant Page!
2. Privately Funded / Crowd-Funded Murals
When a property owner hires a mural artist to create public artwork on their building, it’s a matter of their personal taste. Art is subjective and not everyone may love it, but as long as it creates some positive dialogue with the community, it’s doing its job as art. With the exception of certain building codes and ordinances, it’s a property owner’s right to showcase the style artwork that they want. It shouldn’t matter if it’s by a local or foreign artist.
The same concept goes for crowd funded murals. If people are donating for the cause, then their values usually align with the artists. As a result, it’s something that they truly want to see happen. No one is forcing people to donate if they do not have the means. A good analogy is a touring musician. If you are a fan of their music and want to see them play live in your city, why wouldn’t you support them? As an artist, we need to make a living just like everyone else.
3. Public Art Grants / Murals by Civic Organizations (Funded by Tax Dollars)
This is the topic that we want to spend the most time on as it seems to be the most controversial of the three. When it comes to public art grants, there are a lot of tight restrictions on how the money can be spent. Sometimes, grants even specify that the artists have to be local and we think that’s a great thing! However, we often hear residents complaining about how money could be spent on other resources and problems. While we do agree, there are other grants out there to help with these specific issues.
For the grants that are open to non-local artists, we are usually competing against hundreds of artists (including locals) to try to win them. The application process & selection can often take years to come to fruition. When we are lucky enough to be selected, we have usually gone through a rigorous community vetting process led by a public art committee. It’s easy for the public to look at it and make quick judgements because public art is so visual. However, we appreciate all of the hard work that goes on behind the scenes when it comes to grant writing.
There are endless reasons why a non-local artist may be selected to win a grant. We obviously can’t cover all of them but wanted to share a few possibilities. Often times, a majority of a city’s public art collection is already by created by local artists. In order to bring more culture into a community, it’s important to embrace other views and to educate ourselves. By the same logic of only working with local artists, a city would also restrict the progress of their own local artists being able to expand their art career beyond their hometown. Can you think of any successful artist in history that has only worked in their hometown for their entire life? Art is a beautiful thing and it should be shared across the world!
On the topic of tax dollars, our murals provide a return on investment within the communities. While it’s tough to prove ROI when it comes to public art, we have done our best to collect testimonials from local business owners and residents for every mural that we create. For example, you can see a selection of past mural testimonials here. They also include public reviews from sites like Google & Yelp.
For our large letter postcard mural projects, we offer to subcontract local artists to help collaborate with the artwork. Often times, we leave a letter blank as a canvas within our work for local artists to showcase their artwork. In addition, we hire local spray paint artists to assist whenever possible. Our goal is to always source our supplies & equipment locally which includes lift & scaffolding rentals, paint, brushes, etc. Furthermore, we support local restaurants, accommodations and misc. services when we stay in town during the creation of a mural. Collectively, all of these expenses do go back into the local economy & tax dollars.
Finally, we also promote local businesses via our social media and blog for visitors & tourists to use as a guide when they travel to get photos of the artwork. The artwork often takes on a life of its own as a landmark to draw visitors and for locals to show their hometown pride.
Reasons why a “Local Artist” is such an important factor to many?
We wanted to take a deeper dive into why people always want public art to be created by a local artist. This isn’t meant to be a defensive blog post but we wanted to understand the mentality of the public when it comes to this recurring issue.
Growing up in New York City, every time we painted outdoors people would ask where we were from. Yes, we were local New Yorkers, but we would run into the same issue of being looked at as outsiders if we weren’t from the same borough, neighborhood or even down to the block we were painting. At what point do we get a pass for being “local” anymore? In addition, after spending over 30+ years of his life and upbringing in NYC, Victor no longer lives there and doesn’t pay into taxes. Therefore, is he still considered a New York local artist at all?
As a result, we think that the root of the issue is really when the public is not involved in a process that affects their immediate environment. Even though it’s just paint on a wall, a mural is extremely visual and can completely transform a space. It just shows how impactful public artwork can be. There is often a fear of change and not having control of one’s environment. We understand this and our goal is to try to make the public feel as involved as possible when it comes to publicly funded art.
You can read our detailed blog post about how we come up with ideas with local residents and businesses. It includes all of the elements that we try to hit with the content in our artwork. Most of the time, locals that discover the murals usually have no context about the creator(s) of the artwork and often take a form of ownership & pride of the artwork. At the end of the day, art will always be subjective, and everyone has their own tastes (including public art committees themselves.) This is something that is out of our control, but we wanted write a detailed response about this common question that comes up so often!
If you have any thoughts or comments, we would be happy to continue to explore this topic in the future! E-mail us at info@greetingstour.com and we would love to chat more.