Valuing Labor in the Arts: A Practicum

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Valuing Labor in the Arts: A Practicum

This past April, ARC presented Valuing Labor in the Arts: A Practicum. This event hosted eight artist-led workshops in the UC Berkeley Museum of Art that developed exercises, prompts, or actions to engage questions of art, labor, and economics; the program also included a series of commissioned writings by critics and researchers whose work focuses on artistic labor and cultural economies in a special two-part issue of Art Practical, a leading Bay Area online platform. Both the publication and practicum asked: What kinds of tactics allow artists to create a sense of agency regarding the economics of creative production? What are the key questions artists should ask themselves in defining standards for valuing their labor? How might artists and cultural producers disseminate or appropriate successful models to accomplish their own projects? How do different artistic forms (visual, public, relational, choreographic, theatrical) engage and revise different types of art economies?

Read a profile at Grantmakers in the Arts

Valuing Labor in the Arts: A Gathering
"The struggle to ensure that art work is recognized as real work and compensated accordingly is an essential one, and it continues through the efforts of art collectives and organizations, the actions of artists, and countless individual decisions to accept or reject engrossing but unpaid jobs."

— Elyse Mallouk, “On Laboring for Love”

"The Valuing Labor in the Arts practicum offered eight workshops on topics ranging from “Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.)” — an effort to establish living wage standards for artists — to “Collective Actions/Moving Thought,” which used a movement-based process for examining labor and value in the arts, to “Gauging the Gray Area: Standards for Artistic Labor,” a workshop, organized by Lauren van Haaften-Schick and Helena Keeffe."

- Frances Phillips, 2014 Program Director, Arts and the Creative Work Fund, Walter and Elise Haas Fund

Topics

Past Events topic page, Creative Writing topic page, Performance topic page, Visual Arts topic page