Earlier this fall, I had the pleasure of interviewing Carlos Diaz Stoop, Artist Advocate and Creative Producer, as well as founder of CDS Creative Productions. You may also know him as the Co-Director of Artistic Operations at DNAWORKS or as the Producer for The Bearded Ladies Cabaret. When I was first asked to contribute to November’s blog post series around production and administrative management, Carlos immediately came to mind. We chatted about the role of arts administration in the greater arts landscape, as well as useful concepts such as the producing triangle and skills audits. Check out some excerpts from our conversation below!
Why does the internal admin part always fall behind? Is it because internal admin is not as exciting as production work? Is it because administration could be overwhelming and not as exciting?
I love this question because I’m someone who is truly an administrator at heart. However, even I always find myself in this situation of the admin work falling behind and I think my full answer is twofold.
Part one is: there are way too many people that are doing administration out of necessity, not out of desire, love, or passion for it. I see this all the time with artists. Almost every artist starts out as a self-producing artist out of the sheer necessity of needing to get their projects shown, and not knowing how to find a producer or a booking agent or a personal assistant even. There maybe isn’t the optimal set of skills in order to do that work efficiently.
Part two is: even for the people like myself who have done a lot of administration at a lot of different places, it always piles up because it’s what most of the job is. One of my own personal life missions as a producer and an admin person is really getting organizations and artists to understand that the core foundation of a great artistic project is really, really well-executed administration.
Even an individual visual artist making a painting has a ton of administration that goes into that. Even down to the minutia of “I have to go out and purchase these supplies” is an administrative task. It is part of the art process in terms of selecting materials, but the thinking about pricing it out and, “How am I going to afford those materials and how do I want to store those materials so that I can use them long-term? Do I need to purchase studio space to make this? What kind of canvas am I going to buy or if I work in other mediums?” That’s all administration. It overlaps with the artmaking. If you want to do it really well, really thoughtfully, with a lot of care and empathy, it takes time and attention.
We’re working in a field where there’s never enough time, first of all, and second of all, you have to always be looking for the next thing. And so everything always stacks on top of itself because you’re always working on this, but then also working on things in the future…and then also closing up things in the past. I think any collaborative process – whether it’s artistic or otherwise – requires the whole community of people working on the thing to buy into the goals of it. It is the collective’s responsibility to make sure that it’s going to be successful. Whatever success looks like or is defined as, it’s not always about making enough money or seeing an X number of audience members. There’s a lot of different outcomes that can be considered Success.
Do you think setting realistic goals with an operational plan, streamlining internal admin work, can directly support the struggle to find balance?
I call this the producing triangle. You’ve got your three points: one is artistic excellence, one is budget, one is time, and you can only choose two of those three things. You’re always balancing, “What point on that triangle am I focusing on right now? Which two are overlapping in this decision?”
Under that umbrella is the ABC budgeting of a project. You want the total dream budget. If money was never a thing, this is everything we would want to do, and we would be able to afford everything. Then you’ve got B, which is a little bit more realistic. It’s still stretching a bit and would need a little bit of work to get there, but could maybe be achieved by one or two really invested donors. And then option C is we actually can’t get any of these things, but we know that this is the bare minimum essentials to achieve the artistic product within the timeline that we’ve set.
In my opinion, if a project or an organization is budgeting correctly – and ‘correctly’ is subjective, but my version of correctly – it means that roughly 80% of the money is in paying people because people are the ones that make things happen.
I want to see that a company or a project or producing organization is paying their people really well and that comes primary to the set pieces and the costumes and the touring, all of which are important, but are kind of meaningless if you don’t have the people to execute the project.
I’m happy to see that at least in the field and the fundraising landscape that a lot of foundations since the pandemic have been shifting priorities to really look at new leadership models or having BIPOC, 2SLGBTQ+ people in positions of leadership, to really support overhead and general operating costs more than project support.
That is a shift I never thought I would see in my lifetime to be totally honest with you.
I’m so glad to be a part of that moment because I do think fieldwide we’re seeing exactly this conversation that we’re having today, which is people understanding the importance and the incredible value that administrators and arts leaders bring to the execution of art.
It’s also a shift on the organization side, what we used to call strategic planning. I’ve heard a lot of places start to call it ‘sustainability planning’ which I think is a much more impactful framing to that kind of work. It is strategy but what’s more important is the sustainability of the ecosystem that organization is creating and fostering. I think there’s a lot more people buying into that and understanding that the sustainability of art making really comes from paying people. It’s imperative. So figuring out how to do that should be on the top of everyone’s mind.
You mentioned how sometimes working artists are not as in touch with their arts administrator side. For instance, imagine that as an arts administrator that you’re working with this group for the first time.
What do you think are the necessary steps to take to build that trust and sort of really encourage people to, like you said, take on responsibility with our arts administration work that is not necessarily the most instinctual thing in the world to them?
I think it’s always great to start with a little skills audit, it’s always really good to self-reflect and just say, “What are the things I love doing. Category two: what are the things I’m good at?” Because those aren’t necessarily always in alignment. Hopefully, we all find the thing in life that is an alignment between “what I love” and “what I’m good at.” We want to find the intersection of love and skills.
So I think what’s really important is doing a little skills audit around [those questions] and then, based on the results of that, really leaning into, “Okay, you said you love deadlines and communication, and you love being in communication with people, and you also said you’re really, really good and diligent about putting things in your calendar.” Great. That’s something that we don’t need to worry about. So, let’s just take that off the plate of things you need to focus on. “What you said you’re really bad at was getting back to your emails on time, right?”. And then you start strategizing. So, the suggestion could be like, why don’t you start putting email time in your calendar and just block out your work time so that this is when you have to handle emails today. Or schedule send, right? You could just write a bunch of stuff when you have a minute and schedule-send it and just let it do its own thing.
There’s so much AI and automation now that there’s lots of things to help you that usually have some costs associated with them, but are almost always going to be less expensive than hiring a human to do it for you. I understand that AI is a tricky complicated thing, especially in our field. There’s a lot more industry-wide thinking and conversation that should happen around that. But I’m a big proponent of using as many tools in your toolkit as you need to be successful.
It’s funny because people ask me, “My god, you’re working three part-time jobs. Isn’t that a lot of stuff?”. It is, but also it isn’t because the cadence between all those jobs is different. There are some days that are busier than others for one client versus another. There are some days that are not as busy for any of them. There are some days that are just completely out of control for all of them at the same time. That just happens. But it’s really about taking stock of that ebb and flow. And again being super transparent with everybody around what you have capacity to do and what you can’t do. And just reminding people that you’re a living breathing human, not just a work machine.
I have to do the work with dedicated quiet time, and that’s hard for me. I don’t like drawing hard boundaries like that, but that’s all part of that skills assessment. One of my skills is making myself really available, and people know that if you call me or you write me, you will get a response. Even if the response is, “I’ll get back to you within two weeks from now.”
I like to be pretty accessible for people, but my recent audit on that has been that my capacity is diminishing a bit, even though every single day I say, “God I wish there were 27 hours today but there’s only 24.” So I have to make those 24 hours go as far as possible for me while also recognizing that as much as I love work–and I am a little bit of a workaholic–I also love my personal life. I love spending time with my husband. We love going out to dinner, love to travel. We love to spend time with our nephew. We’re in the middle of adopting. There’s lots of stuff that we also want to focus on.
That’s a really important part of that skills audit as well. It’s not just what are your skills in your work life, but what are your skills in your personal life? And how do you ebb and flow between those two things without completely overworking yourself.
What’s replenishing for you? What’s the kind of work that’s just nourishing? Without taking into account, “I’m good at this. I’m not as good as this”. What’s just really fun for you?
I have been finding the most joy in the last year of working with the Bearded Ladies Cabaret in Philadelphia. They’re a queer cabaret company. As an organization, they are so values-led in a way that I have never experienced before in 10 years of being in the workforce and almost half of those years producing with a lot of different organizations, a lot of different art forms–they are the most values-led group of people I’ve ever met both in the way that business is run and in the way that the art is made. There are a lot of people that get it totally right in the rehearsal room, but then their business practices on the back end are horrendous, traumatizing, don’t pay well, really overworked, underpaid. I’ve lived that at some jobs because that just happens sometimes.
But [Bearded Ladies Cabaret] gets it right in every aspect. They don’t get it right 100% of the time because we’re all humans trying to make it work. And of course, sometimes we mess up. But things like on the business side, even as a part-time person, I have access to benefits, which is crazy. And they have additional PTO days that are solidarity days where you can take a paid day off to go protest, to go join a rally, to vote, to go do a civic engagement activity.
They’re really great at making “know before you go” guides for their audience. They’re really, really great at doing an intake with all of the artists to make sure we get pronouns right. We’re really, really good about care and safety in the space that we’re going to be in. The artistic product is just excellent. It’s so good, and it’s totally different every time and it’s this really fun hybrid of cabaret, theater, drag, music. It’s amazing. And then outside of the artistic excellence, it’s really lovely people to work with who really recognize the humanity in each other and say family comes first.
So I’d say that’s the biggest thing filling my cup. Then outside of that, just in my personal life, I feel really filled by having moved down to Virginia. We moved here a little over two years ago to be closer to our nephew. It was absolutely the right decision. We see him two or three times a week. We have family Mexican night every week where we go out to dinner and then we hang out together and we watch movies and stuff. It’s great.
I always say everything has a cost and it’s rarely ever a financial cost, right? It’s usually a cost of time, energy, togetherness with friends, family, loved ones. It’s usually costly in terms of stress on our bodies, on our minds. So, it’s really figuring out for yourself how much are you willing to spend?
We work in a field that is so based in an exchange of values, right? Which at every moment can feel super exhausting. I like to remind myself as much as possible, it’s actually not that serious. We want to make everything serious and life-changing and “we’re changing the world.” And we are! People laugh at me when I’m like, “I change people’s lives, tens of thousands of people at a time because sometimes that’s how many people are coming to see shows.” People will roll their eyes and laugh at me. I’m kind of serious. I am changing hundreds and thousands of lives one show at a time.
But also it’s not that serious. We’re not medically saving lives. We are altering lives in different ways. Some of the artwork does save lives in terms of suicide prevention and community gathering and all that kind of stuff is important. But also it’s not that serious if you get a contract out a day late or accidentally mess up somebody’s payment. Now, it is serious if you do nothing to fix it. That’s a problem. But it’s okay that it’s been three days and you haven’t responded to an email. It’s okay that you’re totally disconnected for a vacation. And I really struggle with doing all of that. So, I try to remind myself, “it’s not that serious.” We’re just making some art. It should be fun and engaging and fulfilling and cup filling. It should not feel exhausting and stressful and we’re run ragged all the time and that we’re spending so much of ourselves to make it happen. That’s not what it’s supposed to feel like. So, let’s not make it so serious all the time.
Because of how long-term our impact is, that gives us a bit of a reminder to ourselves to give ourselves grace in all of this.
Totally agree.
