My name is Stephanie, if you are new here. I'm an artist and art consultant. If you are looking for original artwork for your businesses or development, I'm here to help. I curate and produce site-specific art projects for businesses and real estate developers.

One thing I do often is make budgets! Budgets may sound boring, but they are one of the first things you need to figure out when working on a public art project.

If you are a business looking for an artist to do a project for you, you will want to know how much it's going to cost you. If you're an artist you’ll need to know how much money you need if you are applying for a grant or if you are self-funding a project. If you want to get donations from someone to fund the project, having a budget will make it a lot easier.

Here are my steps for creating a public art budget.

STEP 1 : What’s Your Overall Number?

If you’re a business, all-in how much do you want to spend on this project? If you are an artist, how much do you you have or can you raise for this project?

STEP 2 : List Out Your Line Items

List out everything you need to create your art project. This step can may seem easy, but there are a lot of things you might not think about while creating your budget. Here are a few things to consider including in your budget:

Artist Stipend -- if you are a business hiring an artist to do a site-specific commission, you may want to get a few proposals from a few different artists before you choose one. Great! Make sure to pay them for their proposals.
Labor/Artist Fee
Materials -- all materials used
Installation
Signage
Permits -- many art projects in public space will require a permit, make sure to research what is required in your area
Consultants -- art consultant (like me), architectural drawings, electrical drawings
Photo & Video documentation -- unless you are doing it yourself
Insurance -- pretty much any public art project will require insurance
Legal Fees -- unless you can do this in house, you'll need a contract between the business and the artist if you are
Contractors -- assistants, specialty services
Travel
Contingency - a percentage of the overall budget to cover any unforeseen costs (5-10%)

STEP 3 : Add A Cost For Each Line Item

If you don't know the cost, do research to get a quote. This might mean asking someone who's done something similar at your company, asking another company who's done something similar how much it cost them. Researching on the internet — you may even find the same exact project and how much someone spent on everything.

If someone did a project that's similar to yours, but they're not revealing the cost, just feel free to reach out to them, they might be happy to share, because they probably know how hard it was for them to figure out.

You can also reach out to me, and I can help you out. I charge a fee for budgeting for these types of projects.

STEP 4 : Total It All Up

STEP 5 : Get Feedback

The last step is to review and get feedback. Share it with your team, ask some colleagues, maybe reach back out to those people you reached out to when you were doing research, you can reach out to me and be like, Hey, this is the budget I'm thinking of for this type of project. Does this make sense? And they'll help you see any holes or let you know if you need to add more money somewhere.

Going through the process of making a budget for your public art project will be so helpful for you because it'll give you time to actually think through the project and make you feel really confident when you start reaching out to artists and curating for the project.

Your Host | Stephanie Eche, CEO & Founder of Distill Creative

Stephanie Eche is an artist and art consultant based in Brooklyn, NYC.
Follow Stephanie on Instagram (@distillcreative or @stephanie_eche), Twitter (@stephanie_eche), YouTube (Distill Creative), LinkedIn, and check out her art website.

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How to Budget for a Public Art Project - Ep 24