The Institute for Community Understanding Between Art and the Everyday (InCUBATE) is an experimental research institute and artist residency program dedicated to exploring new approaches to arts administration and arts funding. Acting as curators, researchers and co-producers of artist’s projects, their main focus has been to explore ways that artists, both past and present, have incorporated models of resource allocation, community building, funding structures and forms of exchange as part of their artistic practice.
In 2007, Ben Schaafsma, Bryce Dwyer, Mathew Joynt, Roman Petruniak, and Abigail Satinsky started InCUBATE with a few simple ideas and questions about money: How could they better understand the lack of funding for alternative and innovative cultural work? Is it possible to develop new infrastructures to qualitatively affect artists’ lives?
Their activities have manifested in a series traveling exhibitions called Other Options, a creative research residency program, and various other projects such as Sunday Soup (a monthly meal that generates funding for a creative project grant). Their core organizational principle is to treat art administration as a creative practice. By doing so, they hope to generate and share a new vocabulary of practical solutions to the everyday problems of producing culture under-the-radar.