This report was published in September 2001.
Table of Contents
Forward Executive Summary Section II: Summary of the Artists' Quake Aid (AQUA) Report Section III: Artist and Gallery Case Studies Section IV: General Conclusions Section V: Key Concerns for Artists Section VI: Short Term Set of Recommendations Section VII: Long Term Recommendations/Issues Raised by the Earthquake Section VIII: Artists' Quake Aid Statistics Section X: Studio Preparedness Earthquake Tip Sheet Earthquake Preparedness ResourcesSection II. SUMMARY OF ARTISTS' QUAKE AID (AQUA) PROJECT
Artist Trust administered the Artists' Quake Aid (AQUA) relief fund program, through which a total of $40,000 was awarded to 48 artists in awards ranging from $250 to $1,500.
There were 58 AQUA applicants. Most of the applicants were visual artists, although several awards were made to choreographers and dancers who lost their studio space. The financial losses they incurred from damaged artwork, loss of work space and lost work time totaled just under $1.3 million. The breakdown from the application pool is as follows:
Total losses from relocation costs: $64,621
Total losses from inventory damage: $889,911
Total losses from equipment or material damage: $60,726
Total losses from lost work time: $155,595
Total losses of other expenses incurred: $115, 946
AQUA applications and work space surveys were made available in early April 2001, about five weeks after the earthquake. The public was notified about the availability of applications through listings and articles in newspapers and newsletters; on local television news stations; through email distribution lists, by cooperating agencies and by community grassroots efforts. The artists had approximately one month to turn in the applications. The due date was on May 1, 2001.
To be eligible for AQUA funds, applicants had to: Be a professional artist. A professional artist is one who produces work on a regular basis. Indicators may include consistent exhibition, performance, reading, publication or purchases of work;
Live, work or exhibit work in one of the Washington State counties affected by the earthquake;
Have suffered art or art-making losses due to the earthquake;
Be able to demonstrate or document such a loss;
Be 18 years of age or older; and
As per federal regulations, recipients of AQUA Aid could not be delinquent on federal debt (back taxes or federally-funded student loans);
In addition, all recipients were required to provide Artist Trust with a final report accounting for how AQUA funds were spent.
The applicants were asked to provide information on how the earthquake impacted their art making practices, work space, inventory, materials or equipment and lost work time. They also were asked to provide documentation of their losses. This was a struggle for many artists who were already emotionally exhausted due to their losses. Many had previously cleaned up their broken artwork or were not allowed to enter the condemned buildings where their work spaces were located. Artist Trust worked with many of the artists to help them generate documentation that demonstrated their losses. Such documentation included: red or yellow tag notices from the DCLU, copies of their leases, photos of their broken artwork, estimates for equipment repair or letters from their galleries.
The decisions of how to award the funds were made through a multi-disciplinary panel of five artists and Cornelia Carey, Director of the Craft Emergency Fund (CERF), a national relief funding organization for craft artists. The panel spent a day reviewing 58 applications and documentation provided by the artists. The panelists were instructed to base funding decisions upon the degree to which the Nisqually earthquake impacted the art-making practice of the applicants. Indicators of the degree of impact included but were not limited to:
Loss of studio/work space
Loss of inventory
Loss of equipment
Total financial loss
Impact on ability to work artistically
Together the panelists decided what type of loss presented the most significant need for artists. Their conclusion was to distribute the highest awards to artists who lost work space, because those artists were temporarily unable to produce art at all. All other losses such as broken artwork, damaged equipment or materials and lost work time were weighed on an individual basis. Full awards were given to a few artists whose losses of damaged inventory were extensive. (An example was a Seattle glass artist who lost $700,000 of inventory.)
Because it was an emergency assistance program, the artists received their AQUA checks as quickly as possible, by mid-May. All artists were asked to submit, by the following month, a final reporting of how the funds were spent.
Artists were extremely grateful; several wrote letters expressing their gratitude for the program.
