Breaking It Down: The Digital Residency
Welcome to Club Rambutan’s Breaking it Down (BID) series, where we shed light on the different areas of operations that make our organization the following three things:
A Creative Collective (Event Planning, Social Media, Rambutan Roundup Newsletters)
A Digital Residency (Cohorts, Artist Resource Group (ARG), Alumni)
A Magazine (Formatting, Shipping Logistics, Packaging Design)
This article will explain all the components of Club Rambutan’s Digital Residency.
The internal reporting structure of the Digital Residency. Click here to view more.
First, let’s start with terminology, with some examples from Cohort 2’s slide deck for Onboarding Day:
Cohort
A group of individual artists who are selected to join the Digital Residency.
A cohort number is the same as its issue (i.e. Cohort 2 artists are in Issue 2).
Also refers to the overall 6 month timeline that it takes to produce one magazine.
A cohort officially begins on Onboarding Day and concludes with a “launch party” in any of our branches (so far, it’s San Francisco + Phoenix).
Cohort Artist
Each artist in a cohort must complete an original work within their time in residency. Their final piece must align with the issue’s theme and meet our print standards in order to be published (for free!).
They primarily work with the Creative Director and Artist Resource Group (ARG).
Alumni
Once a cohort artist successfully completes their digital residency, they remain in our alumni network.
Will still retain access to the ARG’s job boards and continue to be featured on ‘OUR CREATIVES’ page.
Next, let’s go over Club Rambutan’s selection process for Cohort Artists.
Our Cohort Artist applications are always announced via our official Instagram account (@club.rambutan) and are integrated onto the home page of our website. We usually leave the apps open for two weeks, and then the Creative Director and Editor in Chief will review all the final submissions together. All applicants will receive an update afterwards, but those chosen for the next and final stage of the vetting process will be invited to a video interview with both leaders within the following week.
Questions are not provided to interviewees ahead of time, but the final selections for the upcoming cohort of our Digital Residency are heavily influenced by how the artist aligns with our three guiding principles (learn more about them on our home page!):
Skill Sharing
It Takes a Village
Creating for a Higher Purpose
Overall, Cohort Artists are imperative to the production of each issue for the mag. Their physical artwork is more than just the content you’ll read in the magazine, but are powerful stories and experiences.
This is the exciting part! Because we know that our Cohort Artists come from all sorts of intersectional backgrounds, by providing them with a very broad theme to work with, the magazine collects very different interpretations of what it means to each of them.
Finally, here’s what our Digital Residency can offer our Cohort Artists.
A glimpse of our ARG’s internal monthly job board for Cohort Artists.
Unlike typical artist residencies, we are based completely online. Although our long term goal is to one day establish a brick and mortar studio, for now our co-working space looks like biweekly Zoom meetings with our Creative Director and Artist Resource Group (ARG).
Here’s some things we’ve done so far, want to revisit and improve, and have plans to do…
Hosted a professional panel for Cohort 1 with speakers Pacqui Pascal, Ana Peralta Chong, and Nidhi Naroth.
Created a social media campaign in Cohort 2 for our artists to directly sell their work to our followers (and keep 100% of all profits!).
Researched for and collaborated with our cohort artists to curate exclusive monthly job boards, which began in Cohort 3.
Did we mention all cohort artists get a free copy of their magazine?
Secure donations from art suppliers to send free welcome packages to our future cohort artists.
Keep finding other ways to continue inspiring our cohorts!
The overall org chart depicting Club Rambutan’s updated official team structure. Click here to view more.
Interested?
Cohort Artist Applications are always announced on our Instagram and on our site’s homepage, usually every 6-7 months. Stay tuned!
For more questions, shoot us an email at hello@clubrambutan.com.
