Set aside time to brainstorm what an “ideal” employment contract might look like, how to foster methods of organizing, and more with members of the New Museum Union.
arts and labor
Posted inArt
The Endless Work of Labor in the Age of Global Production
Through a wide range of artist projects and programs, Re:Working Labor asks us to locate our respective places in the global labor chain.
Posted inBooks
Poetry from the Picket Line
Two poets, veterans of university unionization campaigns, chart the growing crisis of the new intellectual working class
Posted inBooks
Lamenting the Demise of the Culture Class, Again
I can’t remember being so deeply frustrated by a book that I assumed I would like and find informative.
Posted inNews
NEA Captures Data on Artists with Day Jobs
Not long ago we wrote about a study that took up the question of who is an artist, examining some of the ways in which defining creative workers is difficult. On Monday the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) added to the conversation by releasing a new data set called “Keeping My Day Job: Identifying U.S. Workers Who Have Dual Careers as Artists.”
Posted inNews
Sydney Biennale Boycott Grows
Four more artists have joined the boycott of the Biennale of Sydney, and the protest of arts organizations connected to Transfield, a company that manages mandatory offshore detention centers for asylum seekers in Australia, is growing.
Posted inNews
UK Arts Workers Underpaid, but Satisfied
An organization called ArtsHub has conducted an arts jobs survey in the UK, and the results make clear just how difficult and unsustainable it is to work in the arts.
Posted inArt
Five Things I Learned While Teaching a Class on Arts and Labor
In August and September I facilitated a class focused on labor issues within the arts. Specifically, we looked at how and when artists receive or don’t receive payment for their work, and the broader implications of compensating artists. Because there was such a great mix of students in the class working across fields, as expected, I ended up learning quite a bit myself during the class.
Posted inArt
How Are Artists Getting Paid?
How are artists who have been systematically denied fair wages and access to basic services like healthcare and unemployment protections gaining access to those things today?
Posted inArt
What’s Going on at the SF Fine Arts Museums?
For more than six months, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have been in the news nonstop. Robert Flynn Johnson, the museums’ curator emeritus, summed it up pretty well when he called the museums’ situation “a state of Orwellian dysfunction.” And that’s just the news that’s been reported.
Posted inArt
A Clear Set of Demands: How to Be a Constituency of Artists
So far this year I’ve been to two different events that highlight different but related approaches to political organizing among artists here in New York. Just to clarify what I mean by organizing — literally bringing individual artists together into a larger community that can advocate for and create political change around some of the more pressing issues facing independent artists in the city (unstable housing, irregular employment, healthcare, etc), issues which many other groups in the city also face.
