How do you launch a career as a young artist? Paid programs in Colorado want to help.

Clove Love was always a director. They turned Barbie playtime into plays and made music videos with their friends. As a junior in high school, Love, who uses they/them pronouns, got their first shot at theater direction, working on a short comedy called “Sure Thing” under the tutelage of a teacher. That led to more directing opportunities during their senior year, then to a dual degree in theater education and theater studies from the University of Northern Colorado. 

Then they graduated. 

“And I was kind of, like, floating. But not a good way,” Love said. “More like an ‘I have no idea what I’m doing, oh my gosh someone help I feel like I’m gonna fail at everything’ kind of way.”

The following spring, Love was selected for a Diversity in the Arts internship through the Art Student’s League of Denver, a 10-week internship for undergraduates and recent grads, which matches emerging arts leaders from underrepresented backgrounds with host institutions around metro Denver. That changed everything.

A lot has to go right to make a living in the arts. Over the past few years a crop of paid programs for young creatives, from teens through recent college graduates, have sprung up to offer a glimpse into what it takes to launch a career. Unlike traditional arts programming or summer camps, these programs focus on skills like collaboration, curation, budgeting, pitching, planning, networking and follow-through in the arts industries. In other words, participants learn parts of the job that make up “the messy middle,” as Michael Stout, community engagement director for Carbondale Arts, called it. 

“It’s not just this glamorous gig of having an idea then presenting it to the public,” Stout said. 

Stout runs the teen creative apprenticeships in Carbondale, an opportunity for 14-19 year olds to collaborate on a project under the guidance of local artists. The teens are paid $14 an hour to attend weekly, four-hour studio sessions from January until June.

“I’ve been in the position of being a working artist, and I know that there’s so many opportunities to present your art for free,” Stout said. “One of the reasons that paying the teens is really important is it ingrains from an early age the value of art and the value of an artist. Their perspective, their talents and skills are meaningful to society, and should be valued in a way that they can sustain themselves.”

Programs that emphasize work skills are increasingly important as arts colleges around the nation try to figure out where they fit into the higher education ecosystem, often by shrinking degree offerings, creating more flexible learning plans, and merging with larger colleges to stay afloat. 

And art schools are expensive. Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design estimates full-time program costs of just over $90,000 in tuition — and bills itself as an economic choice, compared with tuition at schools like the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia ($146,240), the School of Visual Arts in New York ($205,560) and California College of the Arts ($237,480). 

There are also programs like the Creator’s Studio at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, which looks for participants who didn’t attend college, don’t plan on going, or who tried it out and decided it wasn’t a good fit, said Christina Chambers, assistant director of programming at the MCA.

They’ll still accept college students, Chambers added. But the curriculum teaches business skills that are hard to come by outside of college classrooms.

Failure is always an option

The programs, especially the teen-focused programs, also impart soft skills that can carry over into other aspects of the students’ lives. Participants in the MCA’s Failure Lab, for instance, are encouraged to experiment, to take risks and, occasionally, to fail. The selected group of 15 teens works together with museum staff and a local artist to curate two shows over the course of a school year. (The first show from this year’s Failure Lab cohort opens Dec. 18, at the MCA.)

“We hope to make it more apparent that we all fail, and we all make mistakes, and we have to kind of create a resiliency in ourselves to keep going,” Martinez, who oversees the program, said. “I think that motivation is important (to learn), especially when you’re a teen, and you’re not sure what’s next.” Another word for that resiliency is “grit,” and it’s something that teachers around Colorado have been struggling to instill in students. 

The MCA also hosts the annual Failure Awards, where high school students can demonstrate their willingness to take risks through creative projects, and compete for a $20,000 Failure Award Scholarship, to be put toward college tuition or further education. 

The capital-A Art world

One thing that sets these programs apart is that they pay participants — albeit, wages and stipends that hover at or slightly below minimum wage in their respective counties. But it’s a step up from the still-ubiquitous unpaid internships that plague the arts industry and narrow applicant pools to those who can afford to work for free.

The MCA’s Creators Studio offers a $720 stipend upon completion of the eight-week program. The Diversity in the Arts internship pays participants about $18 an hour, or the Denver minimum wage. Teen programs at the MCA, including Failure Lab and Moxie Mag, pay their participants $300 per school semester. Metropolitan State University in Denver also offers an arts internship for high schoolers that pays $600 for the school year, split into two payments.

In the past few years, major museums have actively — and vocally — diversified their staffs, boards and exhibitions, whether that’s through hiring curators from different backgrounds or acquiring the work of more women for their permanent collections. While representation is important in these spaces, it’s the networking and behind-the-scenes relationships that really move the needle.

By establishing ongoing relationships, the MCA and other organizations are lowering the barriers into the sometimes exclusive, often intimidating, art world. 

Love interned at Curious Theater, a small company in Denver, where they worked closely with Jeannene Bragg in the administrative office. Love has continued working with local theater companies post-internship on administrative tasks, stage direction, intimacy coordination and a host of other roles for more than a dozen shows. They were also hired by Athena Project Arts as a program coordinator through a connection of Bragg’s. They credit the diversity in the arts internship with the career they have today. 

“I really want to emphasize the importance of generosity in the arts,” Love said. “Just having in mind how you can pass that ladder down to emerging artists that need that leg up, that need to get their foot in the door, that just need an opportunity to show that they are talented, because they are.”