The Arts Are a Team Sport: Inside the Fine Arts Center for the New River Valley's Artrepreneur Program

There's a gap that most arts organizations can identify but fewer have actually tried to close. It's the distance between making art and making a living from art — between creative skill and the business fluency required to sustain a practice. For artists working in smaller communities, that gap can feel especially wide, not just because resources are limited, but because there often isn't anyone around who's navigated it before.

The Fine Arts Center for the New River Valley (FACNRV), based in Pulaski, Virginia, has been serving the arts in its community for 48 years. Recently, I had the chance to sit down with Executive Director Brandon Phillips, Board President John Ross, and Blacksburg Gallery Director Katie Shepard to talk about a new initiative they've launched to address exactly this problem: the Artrepreneur Program.

What I heard was a model worth paying attention to — not just for what it teaches, but for how it was built, who it serves, and the unexpected partnerships that are making it possible.

Starting With the Artists

One of the things that struck me most about this program is that it didn't begin with a curriculum. It began with a question: what do you actually need?

John Ross, whose background is in instructional design, applied that lens directly to program development. Before a single session was planned, the team conducted surveys and interviews with artists across their network, asking them to rate potential topics on a scale of 1 to 10 and identify what was missing from existing programs. The answer that came back most clearly wasn't a skill set — it was community.

"The community was the number one thing they wanted," John told me.

That finding shaped everything that followed. Yes, the program covers the practical business skills artists consistently said they lacked — pricing their work, building a digital presence, writing grant applications, developing a business plan, understanding bookkeeping. But the cohort model, and the ongoing connection it creates, is the point. The eight weeks of structured sessions are the beginning of something, not the end.

What Eight Weeks Actually Looks Like

The curriculum is sequenced deliberately. Week one focuses on artist identity — participants develop an artist statement and start finding language for their work. Week two moves outward into the community, with artists going out to identify places where their work might live and build relationships beyond the studio. By the end of the program, participants will write proposals for those placements, drawing on the documentation and writing skills they've developed along the way.

In between, the sessions cover the full landscape of what it means to operate as a working artist: digital presence, financial literacy, show logistics, business planning. The sessions are hands-on. Katie Shepard, who runs her own arts business and directs the Blacksburg Gallery, described facilitating a session on art shows by setting up her own display inside the Fine Arts Center's big tent — and then having every participant do the same from scratch. Tables and chairs, pseudo-art made from dishes and tablecloths, working through real decisions about layout and presentation.

The program also brings in experts from outside the arts world, including facilitators from the Small Business Development Council in Roanoke, who add a layer of practical business expertise the arts center couldn't provide on its own. That outside perspective, John noted, has made the sessions feel real in a way that purely arts-focused training often doesn't.

And when things come up that there wasn't time to cover? The team is already adapting — recording short screen-capture videos on topics like framing and matting, sending them out as supplemental resources to keep participants moving forward between sessions.

The Partnership No One Expected

Here's the piece of this story that I think deserves the most attention from anyone running a small arts organization: the economic development connection.

When FACNRV began developing this program, John took it to Pulaski's economic developer, reasoning that artist business training is, at its core, an economic development project. That conversation led to Lydia Crockett, director of Small Business Solutions for Pulaski County. She saw the program immediately — not as an arts initiative but as a small business development initiative serving a population she didn't normally reach. She provided a small startup grant to cover planning, logistics, and materials. She connected them with the Small Business Development Council in Roanoke, which brought in instructors and resources. And she helped design a significant incentive built into the program's final week.

Artists in the cohort pay a modest tuition — $10 per week, $80 total. But Pulaski County residents who complete a business plan in the final week qualify for a $1,500 small business grant. The business plan session is taught by a representative from the Small Business Development Council, and participants receive free one-on-one follow-up time to complete it.

This is what cross-sector collaboration looks like when it actually works. The economic development community, as John pointed out, also understands something that arts funders often don't: you need to be able to pay people to run things. Many arts grants fund projects but leave organizations unable to cover the staff time required to execute them. Economic development funding, in his experience, accounts for indirect and overhead costs in ways that make programs actually sustainable.

The Community Underneath the Curriculum

Katie Shepard offered what I thought was the most precise framing of why the cohort model matters: "We have this idea in our mind that the arts are a solo sport, but they're really a team sport."

She was speaking from experience. When she started her own arts business, she described feeling completely lost — not knowing which shows to pursue, how to price her work, where to even begin. The isolation wasn't just a rural phenomenon; it's what happens when artists leave educational environments where critique, feedback, and peer connection are built in, and suddenly find themselves working alone.

The Artrepreneur cohort changes that. When participants don't know something, they have a group to spread the research across. When someone's underpricing their work, they have peers who will say so plainly — with the credibility of people who are actually in the same field. When they feel like they can't negotiate better vendor pricing on their own, they have a collective that can.

Katie gestured toward an even bigger possibility: an artisan's guild that could advocate collectively for artists across the region — negotiating show fees, setting standards, making the arts a more economically viable career path in communities where it currently isn't. That's a long-term vision, not a program outcome. But the Artrepreneur cohort is the kind of structure that makes it possible to imagine.

What Pulaski Needed

It's worth pausing on what the Fine Arts Center has meant to Pulaski specifically, because it gives the Artrepreneur Program context it wouldn't otherwise have.

FACNRV has operated in downtown Pulaski for 48 years — at this point, John noted, they're the longest-running business downtown. Several years ago, the area underwent extensive infrastructure work: roads torn up, pipes replaced, sidewalks gone for years. Foot traffic collapsed. Visitors stopped coming. Through all of it, the Fine Arts Center kept going — free kids' classes held wherever there was parking, free concerts, ongoing support for artists even when the center couldn't operate normally.

That history is part of why artists responded so readily to the Artrepreneur Program when it launched. The organization had demonstrated its commitment to the community over time, and the community had seen what happens when it loses that anchor. The program isn't starting from zero — it's building on nearly five decades of relationship.

A Model Worth Replicating

When I asked each of the three guests what they would say to a small arts organization thinking about doing something similar, the answers were consistent and practical.

John's: It doesn't matter what size you are, you can do this. The program took three years to develop and launch — it was a long-term strategic priority, not a sudden initiative. And the economic development partnerships that made it financially viable are available, in some form, in most communities. Many of those services are free or publicly funded. Most arts organizations just haven't thought to knock on that door.

Katie's: Tailor it to your community. The framework is transferable; the content has to be local. Artists can tell the difference between a program designed for them and a generic business curriculum that's been repackaged. Start with the people in your specific community, find out what they actually need, and build from there. That process of co-design also builds the excitement that gets people to show up.

Brandon's: Dream big, and don't be afraid to adapt. No program survives first contact with its participants unchanged. The willingness to respond to feedback — to make supplemental videos, to adjust session length, to add topics that weren't in the original plan — is what separates programs that grow from programs that stagnate.

The Artrepreneur Program is currently underway at the Fine Arts Center for the New River Valley, serving its first cohort of artists in Pulaski and Blacksburg. More information is available at facnrv.org, and the team welcomes questions from other organizations interested in replicating the model at info@facnrv.org.