The focus for this issue was on craft and artforms historically devalued by the fine art world. Often the work of women and indigenous communities, craft arts have been placed outside of the Fine Art label until its utility is removed, or placed in culture-specific spaces in museums that do not benefit or pay the communities the art comes from. For this issue, we commissioned work from Bint Bandora, Yun Chiu, Lehuauakea, Sanaz Masoumi, and Sara Victorio. We hired photographer Gianna Basile to work with the artists to document their physical works, and we worked with Molly Strohl again to photograph the issue for marketing the release.
Issue 7 of Berm was released on December 13, 2025 at the Portland Art Book Fair.
Budget details
Early in the year, it became obvious that we would only have adequate funding for one issue in 2025. We had ambitious plans to host a workshop with any additional budget that we may have received from donations, foundation support, or grants, but this money did not materialize. So we focused on making Issue 7 the best it could be—by providing support and photography for the contributors. In the end, we used the budget wisely and completed the issue within our allotted $5,000 grant from RACC.
Further details:
Printing / paper cost went down from previous issues. Issue 6, which included a die cut circle for one of the pages, was $1,175. For this issue, which did not have any special printing aspects, was only $738.
For the first time, we hired a photographer to take photos of physical works for this issue: Gianna Basile. Gianna's fee included her planning, coordination, and travel time.
We did pay one additional contributor for writing in this issue, which we did not print. This person was still paid for their time working on the piece.
| Description | Category | Definition | Cost Planned | Cost Actual |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Printing Fee, Brown Printing | Printing | Brown Printing | -$1,000.00 | $738.00 |
| New Work 4 page | Art | Commissioned New, 4-pages | -$600.00 | $600.00 |
| New Work 4 page | Art | Commissioned New, 4-pages | -$600.00 | $600.00 |
| New Work 4 page | Art | Commissioned New, 4-pages | -$600.00 | $600.00 |
| Materials budget | Art | $300 for each new art | -$900.00 | $0.00 |
| Craft Photographer fee | Art | Planning, styling, photography | -$700.00 | $700.00 |
| Medium Writing 1 | Writing | 600-800 words, 3.5-pages | -$250.00 | $250.00 |
| Medium Writing 2 | Writing | 600-800 words, 3.5-pages | -$250.00 | $250.00 |
| Medium Writing 3 | Writing | 600-800 words, 3.5-pages | -$250.00 | $250.00 |
| Marketing photographer fee | Marketing | Marketing photography | -$400.00 | $400.00 |
| Tabling Fee | Marketing | Portland Art Book Fair | $25.00 | |
| New Stickers | Marketing | Sticker Ninja, 200 stickers | $236.64 | |
| Accounting fee | Business | Payroll to artists | $170.00 | |
| LLC Renewal fee | Business | Lawyer fees | $225.00 | |
| RACC Grant | Income | Awarded grant in 2025 | $5,000.00 | |
| -$550.00 | $5,044.64 |
Tracked Time
As with previous issues, we continue to track our time in order to understand the efforts put in to making each issue. This issue spanned the entire year, and took up the space that would normally be spread across two issues.
For issue 7, we tracked at least 80 hours of work to produce and promote the magazine. This includes design, weekly meetings, grant writing, art book fairs, and conversations with artists. Our time tracking is not perfect and we likely spent more time than is reflected in our tracker.
What worked well?
Before we get into some specifics: This issue was fun as hell to make. Commissioning and then seeing the physical artworks come together throughout the year was extremely cool to experience when making this issue.
The Craft issue has been something that we have been planning, researching for, and talking about for about two years. Going into the theme, we knew that we wanted to commission new, physical work for the magazine—which we did, from both Sara Victorio and Bint Bandora. But to do that, we had to learn the value of physical objects and how to pay people a living wage to make them. To start, we reached out to contacts at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and Swana Rose PDX, which helped us to expand our pitch list of local artists who were working in the kinds of crafts we wanted to focus on.
Additionally, Wes went on a journey of craft making workshops, held by Landdd here in Portland. Wes felt it was important to understand hands-on the process of making as many types of works as they could. They took workshops where they made banderas taught by Natalia Ortega Gaméz, handbuilt nerokomi porcelain pieces taught by Julia Sherman and Thomas Sprott from Peaches, wool rug design taught by Javier Reyes, kintsugi taught by Jared Zhang, and perfume making taught by Angela Larisch. The hope was that experimenting and learning with hands-on craft would provide a better foundation for finding artists and designing a magazine focused on questions around craft.
At the beginning of 2025, we transitioned our donation and funding support to an organization called Fractured Atlas, which provides services to artists and organizations under their 501(c)3 fiscal sponsorship programs. Throughout the year, we took advantage of the support Fractured Atlas provided to improve our knowledge surrounding how to pitch to foundations and larger non-profit organizations. This helped us to better understand what kinds of information we should include, focus-in on, and promote for funding the magazine in a more sustainable way. This educational element helped us grow our fundraising side of the magazine, but ultimately did not lead to additional funding (see What was challenging in the next section).
What was challenging?
Funding is still the largest area of struggle for creating the magazine. For 2025, we planned to release two issues and try to push ourselves to host a workshop around the issue's themes. In February, we were awarded a RACC Artc3 Grant for $5,000. This allowed us to start pitching contributors for the Arts & Craft issue, which was a huge relief. But it did not allow for any additional programming that we hoped to use to help expand our offerings to the Portland arts community. We are in the same exact position as we write this—waiting for the grant announcements from RACC, crossing our fingers in mid-January 2026.
While we did expand our knowledge and opportunities, by signing up with Fractured Atlas, we still struggled to build winning proposals and letters of interests for larger foundational support. Our hope was, with the fiscal sponsorship from Fractured Atlas, we would be able to apply for much larger non-profit-focused grants. Despite submitting dozens of letters of interest for both Berm and the Portland Independent Publishing Survey, we did not hear back from any foundations or institutions, which we think has a lot more to do with the severe lack of arts funding than our efforts. Arts funding during Donald Trump's second term, along with a fluctuating and nervous economy, has been nearly demolished, which means that the support for the arts often go toward sustaining more institutional establishments as opposed to artists directly.
Another thing that happened in 2025, with the addition of Fractured Atlas, was that we decided to move from Patreon (where we were handling a lightweight "subscription" through monthly donations) to Fractured Atlas' donation platform (where we could no longer offer a "subscription" if we wanted the donations to be eligible for tax deduction). During this process, most of our monthly subscribers fell off—some citing that they did not want to sign up for yet another service to make donations, which was very fair. With some personal outreach, we have managed to get about half of the subscribers back to a regular donation. But those are mostly friends and family supporters.
Additionally, we've found (really we already knew) that we're deeply uncomfortable with the process of asking our community for money. It's one thing to apply for grants, or send letters of interest to large institutional foundations—it's another thing to ask your community to give you $5 or $15 or more per month. This sort of recurring community support is the key to sustainability, and we hate the feeling of asking for it. We've learned we need to be more outgoing in our fundraising asks. Several people who supported us through Patreon didn't realize their support had ended in the switch to Fractured Atlas because, in our effort to not be annoying about fundraising, we only told those supporters once that the change happened.
In addition to the lack of funding, there is the state of the world and America to deal with. If you know artists, you know that 2025 was a very difficult year to make art in. Many artists, ourselves included, have been pulled away from their practice to address ongoing threats to many different members in their community. Overall insecurity (in the economy, in personal safety, in our ability to not be imminently sucked into ongoing wars) took a toll on many artists' output.
What did we learn?
We decided to slim down the total number of contributors in order to ensure everyone was compensated fairly for the types of work they were being asked to do, and help to make room for Gianna's time to coordinate, style, and shoot the physical objects featured in the magazine. This led to a layout that allowed for more space for each artist, which made the magazine's overall design feel more cohesive and fluid. We will experiment with this layout again in future issues.
Fairs and public events still tend to be our best sales strategy for the magazine. Being present and allowing for new customers to pick up the magazine, turn the pages, and get stoked about its theme has been the best way to make new connections with readers and artists. This year we attended the Seattle Art Book Fair and the Portland Art Book Fair (at Stelo Arts).
For the first time in our magazine's history, we had to deny a piece due to its promotion of the use of AI. This triggered many conversations internally about how to handle the current state of AI-hype and exploitation of artists. For future issues, we will include a specific statement about the use of AI in submitted pieces, or the promotion of AI-efforts in art. For clarity: we do not support, promote, or pay for art that uses Generative AI in any way. As a magazine that does not take submissions, we have been generally spared from interactions with this kind of dilemma until now.
The Editors