​THE FIRST $5,000 asks artists to compare the grant funding offered through nonprofit organizations with the entrepreneurial activity they can conduct by selling their work as either a product or service. 

​Using $5,000 to model the budgeting and application process typical of most entry-level grants, the overview session will present models for making the same amount of money over the same period of time. Crucial to this exercise is a deep examination of the lack of financial transparency in the field of arts education.

​Artists interested in reducing their dependency on institutional funding are encouraged to attend.

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​RAINMAKER is an event series about practical skills and difficult-to-hear realities that can transform your career as an artist. Taking up wide-ranging topics like grants, fundraising campaigns, contract negotiation, and product development while exploring their taboo undersides, the series hopes to inaugurate more transparent and accurate dialogues about money, debt, labor, and financial independence.

​During these sessions, participants will learn how to embrace economic skepticism and iterative modeling as business development frameworks. Reviewing real-world examples of project grants, budgets, and contracts, they will also devise case studies meant to interrogate the myths about money and power that create disinformation in the creative economies. 

​Designed for artists seeking to diversify their income streams and lead an independent studio practice, RAINMAKER provides structure and guidance for artists who desire to work through and analyze their financial trauma and money wounds. 

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​WYATT CODAY is intersex and autistic. She lives between Los Angeles and Chicago, where is a practicing financial dominatrix. Coday is the research director of NOR RESEARCH STUDIO, a research design firm that develops intellectual property for artists and creative businesses. In 2021, she received an emerging artist grant from the California Arts Council. Excerpts from her multimedia novella project, SO THAT MY BALLOON WILL TAKE ME DOWNWARD, have been published by Apogee Graphics, Nightboat Books, and Dirt. Her writing has appeared in The Avery Review, Open Space (SFMOMA), X-TRA, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

​NOR RESEARCH STUDIO is a design research studio based in Los Angeles. The studio develops didactic media, exhibitions, publications, and other forms of intellectual property for artists, nonprofits, and creative businesses.

​NAVEL is a nonprofit arts and culture organization that provides infrastructure for projects and organizations which cultivate kinship economies. Centering the leadership of QT/BIPOC artists and cultural workers, we work together to build community wealth and cultivate more just and collaborative worlds. Operating from our shared home in Downtown Los Angeles, we leverage our resources to build capacity for and invest in cultural projects supporting economic liberation and self-determination.