About
We are a design research studio that develops didactic media, exhibitions, publications, and other forms of intellectual property for artists, nonprofits, and creative businesses.
Book free 15-minute consultation
Book sliding-scale hourly consultation
Staff
Wye Coday
Senior Researcher
wye@nor.la
Evan Kleekamp
Operations and Development
evan@nor.la
Client Services
Product and Publication Development for digital, print, and subscription products.
Ghostwriting for business plans, grant proposals, fundraising and emial marketing campaigns.
Business Management including lead generation, coaching and consulting, triage and austerity audits, strategic communications, web portfolio development, and competitive research.
Statement of Purpose
We pride ourselves on the quality and thoroughness of the investigations we develop for artists and creative businesses who seek to grow their enterprise and repair their relationships to money, power, labor, and personal identity.
Unlike many art professionals, we encourage artists to develop fully integrated businesses that hold no illusory distinctions between artistic expression, studio practice, commercial labor, and business administration.
This means conducting audits, interrogating financial objectives, setting measurable goals, and preparing our clients to advocate for themselves — and their businesses — with confidence while also supporting the development, production, distribution, and sale of their artwork.
In our view, this integrated approach represents a movement toward transparency and financial stability in an industry that is widely disingenuous, opaque, and exploitative.
It is also an optimistic gesture that demonstrates our commitment to advocating for artists who seek to make an independent living through their creative practices.
Statement of Method
We describe ourselves as a design research studio because we use research methodologies to define and counter the structural inequity and economic disenfranchisement that plague the arts.
Our artworks extend our research practice. To date, they have taken the form of grant proposals, photographs, sculptures, catalogue essays, legal interventions, lecture performances, and recorded conversations. We also advocate for what we described as “post-institutional” business models that allow artists to diversify their sales portfolios.
Rooted in the core of our approach is our belief that artists must reconcile their relationship to money if they want to have uninterrupted time to produce their work.
Statement of Equity
Artists with nontraditional backgrounds are encouraged to contact us for specialized consultations. We proudly work with and support neurodivergent, queer, disabled, and otherwise economically marginalized groups.
studio@nor.la
newsletter
newsletter
About
We are design research studio that develops didactic media, exhibitions, publications, and other forms of intellectual property for artists, creatives, startups, media companies, small businesses, and nonprofits.
Staff
Wye Coday
Senior Researcher
wye@nor.la
Evan Kleekamp
Operations and Development
evan@nor.la
Book free 15-minute consultation
Book sliding-scale hourly consultation
Services
WE BELIEVE IN WITCHCRAFT
SUPERCHARGED ARTIST STATEMENTS AND DIDACTIC MATERIALS
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WE BELIEVE IN WITCHCRAFT is a 90-minute workshop for artists aiming to strengthen written materials about their work. Artists preparing to update their web portfolio; apply for fellowships, grants, and residences; publish critical writing about their practice; or otherwise produce supplemental media are encouraged to attend.
WE BELIEVE IN WITCHCRAFT holds that, once honed, the act of writing is a heretical means to peer into and manipulate the future. Surveying a range of genre-defying artist statements, biographies, press releases, essays, and chapbook-length publications, the workshop examines how these texts compress feral intuitions into allegories that offer potent critiques, dissolve creative blockages, and attract institutional support.
Of course, no NOR RESEARCH STUDIO workshop would be complete without a reprisal of the money-making strategies central to our investigations. Unlike other writing workshops, WE BELIEVE IN WITCHCRAFT focuses on supplementary materials that typically accompany artworks, using concepts from intellectual property law to preemptively integrate those materials into a body of work and transform them into a streamlined application- and proposal-production process.
WE BELIEVE IN WITCHCRAFT is an unrepentant evocation of bibliomancy and telekinesis. Like the imaginary poison pills that can ward off hostile corporate takeovers, the self-reflexive, didactic, and poetic texts surveyed in the workshop demonstrate how the gripping, sticky effects that statements with material consequences engender are frequently more real to the human psyche than reality itself.
Sessions and Tickets
SUPERCHARGED ARTIST STATEMENTS AND DIDACTIC MATERIALS
+
WE BELIEVE IN WITCHCRAFT is a 90-minute workshop for artists aiming to strengthen written materials about their work. Artists preparing to update their web portfolio; apply for fellowships, grants, and residences; publish critical writing about their practice; or otherwise produce supplemental media are encouraged to attend.
WE BELIEVE IN WITCHCRAFT holds that, once honed, the act of writing is a heretical means to peer into and manipulate the future. Surveying a range of genre-defying artist statements, biographies, press releases, essays, and chapbook-length publications, the workshop examines how these texts compress feral intuitions into allegories that offer potent critiques, dissolve creative blockages, and attract institutional support.
Of course, no NOR RESEARCH STUDIO workshop would be complete without a reprisal of the money-making strategies central to our investigations. Unlike other writing workshops, WE BELIEVE IN WITCHCRAFT focuses on supplementary materials that typically accompany artworks, using concepts from intellectual property law to preemptively integrate those materials into a body of work and transform them into a streamlined application- and proposal-production process.
WE BELIEVE IN WITCHCRAFT is an unrepentant evocation of bibliomancy and telekinesis. Like the imaginary poison pills that can ward off hostile corporate takeovers, the self-reflexive, didactic, and poetic texts surveyed in the workshop demonstrate how the gripping, sticky effects that statements with material consequences engender are frequently more real to the human psyche than reality itself.
Sessions and Tickets
NOR RESEARCH STUDIO, Blouse, 2019. those who use the law against those whom they deem primitive or savage should be subject to the law’s most primitive and savage aspirations.tif