 When I was awarded my first public art commission, I felt like a hunter-gatherer trying to compete on The Price is Right—only instead of guessing the price of a washer-dryer, I was assigned a fixed budget and tasked with generating an appropriate artwork. It was abstract to the point of absurdity; I just couldn’t figure out what $40,000 was supposed to look like.
Even as public art and public art opportunities become more widespread, the financial side of things generally remains opaque. Although I’ve never bought a washer-dryer, I’ve seen enough ads to know roughly how much they cost; on the other hand, I’ve eagerly examined hundreds of public artworks…without ever knowing the costs involved. I could probably guess the weight of many public sculptures more accurately than I could guess their project budget! I’d be even less confident guessing how much of that budget ended up in the artist’s pocket. Leaving aside conversations about commodification, elitism, and cultural values, I’d like to emphasize how detrimental this secrecy can be to anyone hoping to get started in public art: in the absence of concrete information and examples, many of us underestimate costs, overdeliver on designs, and dig ourselves into budgetary holes. So for the sake of transparency, I’m going to choke down my culturally-conditioned discomfort with talking about money and share the budget and expenses for my recent project (Connected Community at the Miller Community Center in Seattle), with further comment on specific expenditures below. Total budget $46,000 Insurance $500 Fabrication supplies $1,400 Paint $600 Tools $1,000 Local mileage $250 Crate $800 Shipping $4,500 Travel for installation $3,000 Installation service N/A Seattle city taxes $3,500 Supplies / Tools / Paint / Mileage: One advantage of the technique I used for this piece was that the raw materials are relatively cheap. When I first planned the piece I hoped to use more reclaimed materials but the lull in shipping during the pandemic meant I had to change my plan and purchase new material instead. The pandemic also meant that the new material was harder to find, more expensive, and more expensive to ship than when I originally designed the project. I had to purchase a lot of new tools specifically for this project, but most of them are things I will be able to use again. I split paint out from the rest of the supplies so you can see that it’s a significant expense—even for a very small amount of paint. This was my first time purchasing paint and the cost surprised me! Local mileage comes from running errands to pick up tools and supplies—and this was when gas was much less expensive than it is at the moment. Crate / Shipping: Both of these expenses were much higher than originally anticipated. Because I moved cross-country during the project, transporting the piece back to Seattle was a challenge. I priced out all of the options and decided to hire a shipper rather than driving the piece myself. Because of the shipping backlogs and driver shortage I had a lot of trouble connecting with a specialty shipper; we ended up hiring an installation service (see below) and using a shipper that they arranged. The rising cost of plywood and construction foam meant the crate itself was another unexpectedly high expense. Travel for installation / Installation service: Given the difficulty I was having with long-distance logistics, my project supervisor and I decided to hire a professional art installation service. The cost of this service came out of a contingency fund, which we were able to access because the project had been impacted by circumstances I could not have foreseen from the outset. I don’t know exactly how much the installation ended up costing, but it was roughly a third of the total project budget. For any future projects, I would factor this cost in from the beginning, whether I ended up using the service or not. The installation service received the crate and arranged for all the equipment we would need on-site, but I still needed to travel to Seattle to participate in the installation. Again, in the future I might change my design so that my presence would not necessarily be required for installation. . Seattle City taxes: After I moved away from Seattle, the city pre-deducted sales tax from the payments it made to me. I’m not sure how common this practice is, but I’m mentioning it here as it had a significant and unexpected impact on my bottom line. What’s missing from the expenses list? In my previous post on public art, I suggested making a pre-project inventory of your existing assets—that is, things and people who can help you save time or money on the project. Assets crucial to the success of this project included: free studio rent and utilities, access to a wide range of expert advice, access to a sandblaster, access to a wood shop to prep parts for the crate, access to a forklift to get the crate out of my studio. If I had had to pay out-of-pocket for any of these, the project expenses would look very different. The biggest invisible line-item of all was my time and labor. I did almost everything myself and I did it painstakingly: research and design, technical samples, fabrication, accounting, paperwork… I logged my time closely enough to be able to more accurately predict how long a future project would take. After much fumbling and figuring out, I would certainly be able to do things like fabrication more quickly next time, but I also spent a lot of time on tasks that were out of my control and probably always would be: correspondence, meetings, chasing service estimates, travel. Going forward I plan to triple or quadruple my estimate of how long it will take to do any task that involves the participation of other people. So was this project profitable? Yes and no. If you just look at expenditures, I’m in the black. If you factor in the replacement cost of all the in-kind assets I brought to the table, the profit margin drops. Divide that by the hours I put in, and I still wouldn’t have gotten into debt, but I would not have been making a living wage. But while this might not have been a lucrative project, I can’t consider it a total loss. I’m not out any money; I did lose some time, but I learned something from (almost) every minute of it. It also gave me the opportunity to see my work at a scale I’d never attempted before. My second public art project has left me much better equipped to handle a third. If I manage to land one, I hit the ground running with a more realistic notion of how to design a project that is a more suitable fit for the given budget.
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