How to Hire a Mural Artist

In this episode I share tips on how to hire a mural artist for your next mural project. If you are still looking for an artist for your project, check out my video on how to find a mural artist. 

Show Notes: https://distillcreative.com/blog/11/29/21/how-to-hire-a-mural-artist

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Transcript

Stephanie Eche: 0:01

Welcome to First Coat, where we explore public art, how it's made and why it matters. I'm your host, Stephanie Eche, an artist and art consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. I interview artists, cultural producers, designers and funders, on how art in public space happens, and how to create more equitable and inclusive projects in public space. I also share my tips on how to curate and commissioned art projects for your business, how I run my art consulting business, Distill Creative, and how I'm developing my own art practice, you can listen to this episode, wherever you listen to podcasts, or watch it on YouTube. If you like what you hear, please leave a review and support this project on Patreon. I produce edit, and well, I do everything myself, so your support keeps this project going. If you're interested in my art, consulting services, or artwork, check out distillcreative.com. Thanks so much for listening and I hope you enjoy this episode. So you found your dream mural artist, but you're not sure how to hire them. Today, I'm going to show you how to vet and hire a mural artist so you can get your project started. Once you have narrowed down your search, and you know who you want to hire for this project, you want to do a couple of things. First, you want to check their references. If you haven't already reached out to the artist, reach out to the artist, share your creative brief, let them know what you're doing, how much you can pay them and take it from there. Next, you can ask them for some references, they should be able to give you a few references of other clients they've worked with, or even past professors or artists colleagues, this will give you a good idea that they're that they can do the work that they say they're going to do. And this is really important because you're going to be having them on your site doing a project and you want to make sure that they can do what they say they're going to do. This doesn't mean you shouldn't hire an artist, if they haven't done the project that you want to do before. It just means that you want to get a sense of the type of work they've done before for clients. It's totally fine if you're their first client for this type of work, you just want to get some idea of how they work with other people getting a few references is a great way to do that. You also might be able to find some reviews online, maybe they even have reviews on their website. Those are all helpful too. If you haven't already shared the creative brief with the artist and that way, you can make sure you're both on the same page of what you're looking for. And ask them to do a mural design, make sure if you pay them to do a mural design, this can either come out of the full budget, or be in addition to the budget, but make sure you are clear with them about that so, they know whether or not it's coming out of the full budget. But either way, you should pay them to make a design and this is because mural projects fall through all the time for lots of different reasons and you want to make sure they're getting paid for their work. Once they've given you a proposal and you're ready to move forward, you can do a contract with the artist. I'm not a lawyer, so I cannot give legal advice. But there are lots of great examples online for contracts for artists in general and even girl artists, the mural artists may already have a contract. So you can ask them if they have a contract. You don't want to give them this like super huge contract, you should make it as easy as possible for both of you to be able to get to the next page, you're going to want to do some research, make sure you have a contract prepared so that you when the artist can feel secure in what you're asking the artist to do and that the artist can deliver on this project, the artist may have a clause in the contract that says like, I'm only going to do two rounds of revisions, that should be fine, because you already did your creative brief and gave a clear direction from the beginning. So the first proposal shouldn't be too far off from what you're looking for. If it is, then you might want to go with a different artist. But again, that's why you pay the artist for the proposal design because it's possible that you end up going with a different artist. You should never use one artist proposal for a different artist to do that's crazy. Always respect your artists. They are the ones who created the work, don't use their work and have someone else paint it. There was a situation where actually one of my clients, we hired an artist for a project, they actually couldn't get into the country because of Coronavirus. So, with the artist permission, we hired a local artist to install that project. It worked out great. But we would never do that unless there were some extenuating circumstances and you always want to have the artist permission, anyway. I have some tips on my blog about what you should include in a contract with an artist you can find that it's pretty simple. You want to have like contact info, budget and timeline how and when the payments are made. Are you paying by check? Are you paying by Venmo? It'd be great if you can just transfer money to them. That's the best you don't want them to be waiting for a check. I suggest paying 50% upfront 50% at the end of the project. You also want to know if they need more money up front for materials like if it's a really complicated project that requires a lot of upfront costs. Figure that out ahead of time you don't want the artist to have to be paying out of pocket for your project. Obviously you want to include the mural design and site details in the contract. And then anything else that you require like insurance or some weird things that you have to do on site, you want to make sure that it's clear that the artist retains the intellectual property of the work and then whether or not you can use their artwork for your promotional materials. Now, you should never sell their artwork in any way, shape or form. But say you're putting a mural on a new building and you want to share the mural on the building and like you're leasing materials, you need to let the artist know up front that you're going to do that and have that in the contract so that you are both on the same page. I also like to have something that's like, you'll let the artist know if there's any other needs like that no matter what you need to let the artist know, make sure that they feel comfortable with whatever it is that you might ask now or in the future. You also want to have a note about how and who will maintain the mural. Some people use things like anti graffiti coating on the mural, I've had situations where people are trying to get that off in order to put a new mural on or to put something on the wall. And it's really expensive if it's a large wall, and if it's high up. So I suggest just setting aside some money so that you can do any repairs if need be. And then making sure you have the artist contact info and that and that they're cool with you reaching out to them if something needs to happen, and then you can pay them to prepare the mural. Or maybe they have someone else that they suggest to do that-talk that through with the artist. And then before work starts, pay your artist. So you should have already paid your artist a proposal fee, that's great. But if you want them to start getting to work on your on your mural, you need to pay them something upfront, it could be 50 upfront 50 At the end, like I said before, 30 upfront 30 In the middle 30 At the end, figure it out with the artist but you want to pay them before they start doing the work again, because sometimes murals just don't happen. And if for whatever reason you had to stop the project in the middle of it at least the artists got paid half of it. I don't want you to stop the project but I know that that happens especially with big development projects, things get moved around budgets get moved around. This is why you need to pay your artist when you sign a contract- don't make them wait around for your payment and I understand that some payment systems it takes like a month to get them through let the artist know that ahead of time so that you can plan for that and so it's not this big surprise when they think they're going to get a chunk of change and they're not if you have any questions about how to hire a mural artist email me stephanie@distillcreative.com. Also, Distill Creative does this for clients. So if you want someone to curate and project manage your whole mural project, you can hire me just go to distillcreative.com. Alright, thanks bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of First Coat. If you like this podcast, please leave a review. Make sure to subscribe to the First Coat Podcast wherever you listen to podcast and follow us on Instagram @ irstcoatpodcast or @distillcre tive. First Coat was a pr duction of my company Distill reative. Check us out at dis