Coping & Creating | Pandemic Guide for Artists: Sessions 3 & 4

Session 3: Crowdsourcing Creative Survival
When COVID hit, RealTime Interventions froze in its tracks. Like many others, this live-arts company led by Molly Rice and Rusty Thelin suddenly had no performances. The community- and performance-based work dried up, and the processes they leaned on to generate them were suddenly impossible.

Learn from Molly and Rusty’s experiences with crowdsourcing during the pandemic. They leaned on their audience, partners, and other artists to create new work in new forms. How can you apply this open-arms spirit to your process, to create the connection we\’re all craving, as well as innovations in your art?
Molly Rice and Rusty Thelin
Molly Rice and Rusty Thelin are a presenter team. Collectively, we are RealTime Interventions.

RealTime Interventions creates theatrical events and public experiences that connect human beings through empathy, via processes and practices of performance-based art. We seek to generate human connection, curiosity, and wonder, and to help audiences re-see their surroundings in unexpected ways. Our work is shaped by the immediacy of live and real-time art, and the creative possibilities that arise when people gather. RealTime makes performance-based art with a wide array of collaborators, from theater artists to refugees to rock bands to our neighbors down the street. We create vibrant “companies” with every new project, made up of people from diverse realms of experience united by the story we are telling together. Learn more about RealTime at realtimeinterventions.org.
Session 4: Grassroots Fundraising during a Pandemic
Have you already tapped into the competitive foundation community for funding and expended your social capital crowdfunding online? Presenters Edith Abeyta and Joseph Hepner will share tips and advice on how you can implement grassroots tactics and mutual aid networks to raise money and materials for community-based art works and projects.

Abeyta and Hepner raised over $36,000 for Arts Excursions Unlimited, a free monthly art excursion program for Hazelwood residents, by implementing grassroots tactics, mutual aid networks and determination. They share their experiences and encourage us all to use our own agency to accomplish our goals through a community art lens.

A 30-minute Q&A will follow this session.
Edith Abeyta
Edith Abeyta is a visual artist living in North Braddock, Pennsylvania. Her current practice is centered around people, identity, and negotiating relationships with the built environment. This manifests as temporary installations, sculptures, and experiential life events. She frequently collaborates with other visual artists, poets, scholars, and the public. Abeyta has been working as an artist in residence with the Office of Public Art at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh – Hazelwood since June 2014. Her work with Hazelwood residents has directly resulted in a multi-year project, Arts Excursions Unlimited, a free monthly arts excursions program, an art studio and, temporary public art.