“Here’s my grant,” I said, waving the envelope.” She turned.

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” she said. “State funding is awful, and I suspect that arts and culture programs are going to be the first to go.“

“Maybe the NEA can step in with their $50 million in stimulus — prop ‘em up,” I joked. She gave me a look.

“It’s hard to fund the arts when people can’t eat.”

She’s right, of course, but I figured this would be a good exercise, that it would really legitimize this endeavor if I received external funding.

So, for the curious, here’s the Arts Alliance of Yamhill County’s grant application form, and below is what I sent. If you have any tips for writing better grants, by all means, weigh in. I’m a novice at this.

Project Description — The McMinnville Art Exchange
As a response to grim economic conditions, I intend to start a small lending library for original artwork. Membership to the library will be open to the community at large, and patrons will be able to join and borrow without paying a fee. Initially, the library collection will be comprised of artworks by artists from whom I have solicited for donations, but there will be an ongoing call for submissions to help the collection grow and create a collection more localized to McMinnville.

Since the art library will have no institutional premises, images of the collection will be published online, and correspondence – including patron signup and requests for checkout – will be conducted via e-mail. I will deliver and pickup the artworks once per week in my personal vehicle, and the circulation period will be fairly long; between 4 to 6 weeks, in order to keep the project manageable.

The McMinnville Art Exchange will perform several exciting functions: it will enable people who do not have the financial means to own art to enjoy it in their homes, it will provide a novel avenue for emerging and casual artists to expand their audience, and it will foster and reinforce a sense of trust and community between the artists and the public.

Dispersal of Funds
The funds that I am requesting from the AAYC will be used to cover or defray startup costs per the following description:

$25 – getting the word out. This should cover the cost of printing posters and flyers advertising the McMinnville Art Exchange and the Call For Submissions; I plan to post these in local grocery stores, colleges, the public library, the art supply store, etc. $25 dollars will pay for eight 11×17″ high-quality prints ($23), with the remainder of the funds used to print flyers on copy paper.

$75 – protective materials. It’s not financially feasible to have the artwork professionally framed (though donations must be “wall-ready” in some way), so to protect the pieces during transportation and storage, I plan to construct stiff shells out of foam-core; for rigid pieces, or work that has already been mounted, I plan to buy fabric to sew into sleeves. $75 dollars will pay for 4 sheets of foam-core ($13 ea., 30×40″) allowing the remaining $23 to be spent on a few yards of bulk fabric.

Timeline
I aim to launch the project in April, 2009 with between 12 and 20 separate pieces available for checkout. Because this is intended to be an ongoing project, I can’t issue an official date of completion. However, since I am requesting these funds to cover the initial costs of this project, I plan to spend the money within 60 days of receipt.

Some tidbits and tidbats, laid out in front of your very eyes like twitter tweets poured from a teacup:

* The Evergreen State College photo center interns had their show last weekend, and I went, and there were lots of people. I didn’t get a chance to mention this project to barely anybody, but I did talk to a few people, all of whom are on board, at least provisionally. Those people are:

Beck Nelson — currently working in analog color photography, his recent work comprises images of buildings, landscapes, birds, etc. printed with brightly colored yet ghostly shapes emerging from the subjects. Everything seems held together with scotch tape. Definite design sensibility yet unafraid to show the imperfection of the underlying materials.

Rachel Lang — recently completed a series of transparent color portraits, which she embedded in thick chunks of glycerin and lit from behind, evoking at once both the feeling of a glowing jesus votive and a body frozen in ice.

Julia DeConcini — a playful explosion of southwest american motifs in large prints with a strong, almost leatherlike presence. She explores the underlying nature of black-and-white photographic materials by subjecting the prints to certain chemical processes and adds color to the work with paint and varnish.

* Additionally, I had a good, long talk with former TESC photo services intern Vanessa LaValle who is now on board as well. Vanessa’s moved off to Cleveland, where she reports that there are no darkrooms nor any meaningful photographic community, so she’s resorted to low-tech photoshop drawings that I find simultaneously hilarious and evocative. Since none of them actually exist on paper, so far as I know, she’ll probably be sending me some files to print. Bro grabs 40 inches high, anyone?

* The deadline for the Arts Alliance of Yamhill County is fast approaching; the amount is very small indeed at only $100, but securing even a small amount of funding would help give me the encouragement I need to get these folks’ work out into the world AND it would cover the cost of printing flyers — so, nothing to sneeze at! Stay tuned, as I plan to post the grant application soon.

What could possibly go wrong?

* * *

Recently I helped a painter friend move into a new house and we had to pack up all of her paintings. For one project, she had painted on door blanks. The body of work was substantial, I believe there were about ten. Several of them were stored in her laundry room, wrapped in blankets. I remember packing them into the u-haul last summer. “You know what we should’ve done” I joked, hollering down the loading ramp, “you could’ve called your friends and told them they could come pick up a painting at three, and then they could ‘store’ it for you until further notice.”

Somehow this germ of an idea of using one’s friends as a distributed network to ‘store’ artwork — after all, what friend of mine would actually turn down such an offer? — has gained in clarity and strength. After rolling the concept around for several months and exploring some ways that such an institution could actually be put together, I believe I’ve carved it down to a shape that strikes a balance among several concerns, namely that I wish to do something for the arts on a local scale, bolster the connection between artists and their community, avoid money, and stay out of trouble. In that order

I don’t do announcements well, so let me throw down some details. First, as I’ve been discussing this project with my friends, a long litany of questions has come up, most of which I think I’ve been able to address. And since I wish to be pragmatic, here are some highlights.

• I can’t purchase artwork from artists. The work has to be put freely into circulation by the artist.
• Artists who put work into circulation have to be ready to accept some amount of damage to their work, and the risk of losing a piece entirely.
• Artists should be able to recall their pieces if necessary, even if the piece is currently checked out.
• One day per week will be scheduled as the pick-up / delivery day; as volume demands, that can be revisited.
• Check out duration will probably start between 4 to 6 weeks.
• Patrons should be treated to a short bio of the artist who made the work and the artists should be encouraged to release their contact info to the patrons in order to create an open channel of communication.
• No forms of artwork will be excluded from circulation, permitting the artwork is durable enough withstand circulation. (I’m quite compelled by the prospect of “checking out” an installation or even a performance piece).
• Though this project will be serving the community of McMinnville, the artwork will be sourced from wherever I can get it.
• If a piece cannot be recovered, the patron’s contact info will be released to the artist. (When you check out a book from interlibrary loan, you’re often informed of the replacement cost
• Even though it has virtually no point, everybody will receive library cards!

Now, the things that I’m still wrestling with are the following:

• I have identified no satisfactory solution to keeping “fragile” work like photos and printed pieces pristine. As a photographer, I know how absurdly easy it is to kink a print. That’s what frames are for, right? But artists can scarcely afford to frame their own work. So I’m searching for the most inexpensive way of presenting flat work, something that’s likely to lead me down the path of suggesting that people simply dry mount their work to some sort of board.
• I don’t have time to put together a fancy website with a searchable catalog and online checkout. As awesome as it would be to design and implement my own system of a simplified library cataloging / checkout system in SQL, resources and good sense will find me doing most of the ledger work on paper, by hand, and probably updating some static content for the web component. (The complex and whimsically esoteric MARC specification, which is substantial and nuanced enough to satisfy even the most voracious cataloger, is absolutely mind-bending to implement as a relational database).
  But! I was shown ning today, and I’m excited about this social networking tool — not only does it fulfill my wish for providing a forum for patrons and artists, but it’s also extendible through some API, free, and I believe I can put static content up. So that’s a promising vector.

More updates to follow, of course. Thank you for your interest, and feel free to jump in any time if you have any thoughts.