AC Discussion | Art & Labor
On Friday, December 6th, we sat down with panelists Alexandra Cardon, Denise Chapman and Tyler Swian to talk about the value of cultural labor, why it's remunerated differently than other forms of labor, and strategies for collective organizing and cooperation that make employment conditions for culture workers less precarious in Omaha. Low pay, long and irregular hours, working multiple jobs to make ends meet, and a prestige job mentality institutions and organizations leverage against their workers emerged as shared experiences that define precarity within the arts. Our panelists noted that perceptions of intellectual, emotional, and artistic labor are easily conflated with notions of self-fulfillment that come from “doing what you love.” As Miya Tokomitsu says in her article, “In the Name of Love” that appeared in Jacobin Magazine:
“No one is arguing that enjoyable work should be less so. But emotionally satisfying work is still work, and acknowledging it as such doesn’t undermine it in any way. Refusing to acknowledge it, on the other hand, opens the door to the most vicious exploitation and harms all workers.”
Our panelists underscored the importance of openly and transparently discussing wage compensation within and across cultural institutions as a path forward to intentionally address systemic inequities that continue to plague cultural industries. They also discussed the value of collective organizing, labor unions, and working cooperatively as tools that help build consensus around labor issues at the institutional level, while persuasively communicating the reality that cultural work is work. At the end of the day, we can view conversations about the value of cultural labor as indicators of economic interdependencies Laura Zabel, Executive Director at Springboard for the Arts in Minneapolis, MN, points to in her article, “What Artists Actually Need Is an Economy That Works for Everyone” when she says:
“We have an opportunity right now, to really change how our culture values art, creativity and artists themselves. I believe we can do it by being an integral part of building new, more equitable and sustainable structures and systems that work for not only artists, but for lots of other people as well. To capture this opportunity, we need to look beyond small artist-specific solutions to systems level problems, and instead engage in the bigger, most urgent questions of our time.”
We work more effectively when we work together across disciplines, sectors, and geographic boundaries. Listen to the panel discussion in full below and leave your thoughts about strategies we can collectively employ to affect meaningful change by making the institutional and economic systems within which we operate work for most of us, rather than just a few of us.
About the panelists:
Alexandra Cardon: Alexandra M. Cardon is Eighteenth Century Art Historian. Her focus is on French Academic art at the turn of the eighteenth century. She currently teaches at the University of Omaha Nebraska in the Art and Art History Department and is working on her Ph.D thesis at the Graduate Center, CUNY, In New York City. She holds an MA in Art History and International Relations from the University of Saint Andrews, Scotland, an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art from the University College of London, England. She previously worked in the Modern and Contemporary Art Department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA, and taught at the Memphis College of Art, TN.
Denise Chapman: Denise Chapman is an Omaha based Theatre practitioner. She graduated from Creighton University with a BA in theatre. She went on to receive her MFA from the Theatre Conservatory at the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. She returned to Omaha in 2006 and worked with Blue Barn’s Witching hour for three years as Co-Artistic director/ensemble member and at the Omaha Community Playhouse as the director of education and outreach. She is an alumni of the fellowship program at the Union for Contemporary Art. She was an Artist in Residence at the Carver Bank project, a collaboration between Bemis and Theaster Gates and “Liveness is Critical” at the Bemis Center. Currently she is the Producing Artistic Director of Theatre at The Union for Contemporary Art and an adjunct professor at Metro Community College and the University of Nebraska Omaha.
Tyler Swain: Tyler Swain is a local artist, educator, and former Delegate, Union Organizer, and Organizer Trainer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He is a founding member of the Nebraska IWW General Membership Branch (GMB), has served on the General Organizing Board (GOB), General Executive Board (GEB) and General Defense Committee (GDC) of the Industrial Workers of the World, and as a Delegate for the Nebraska GMB, and Delegate at Large for the Wisconsin GMB during the IWW General Convention held in 2014.
This program is presented with the support of the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.