Category Archives: Meta-Practice

Meta-Practice

“…these hack crowdsourcing campaigns that certain agencies are selling to [companies]. There are lots of folks doing very cool things with user-generated content, but to ask professionals to compete against each other for potential ‘exposure’ is completely different. It’s demeaning…”

—Dan Casaro, as quoted by David Griner, “Meet the Hero Designer Who Publicly Shamed Showtime for Asking Him to Work for Free,” Adweek, August 19, 2014

Showtime holding a spec design contest to promote a Mayweather fight!? Please. What nerve! They’re raking it in hand over fist by overcharging fight fans for over-hyped, disappointing pay-per-view events. I’d love to see a contest where they’re obliged to use the most voted-upon entry, and only terrible art is submitted. Cheers to Dan Casaro, speaking up for designers everywhere.

(Via CLF)

Telling mega-media corporations: NO SPEC!

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Meta-Practice, The Eve Of...

The Lecturers: Cybele Lyle

Just listened to A Conversation, a great series of three short videos by Bay Area-based artist Cybele Lyle. It’s part of The Lecturers, a project by SF/PR artist Pablo Guardiola. As I’m delving into full-time studio work in my residency, hearing Lyle’s thoughts about how artists influence other unconsciously through their studio activities, and verbally beyond the studio walls, was compelling, and made me think of the various communities of studio neighbors I’ve had.

The videos are a nice project. If the name suggests a video recording of an artist’s lecture, from a single camera on a tripod in the back of an auditorium, fear not. It’s produced as a video, with a voiceover and source material and references. None of that off-the-cuff, heh-heh, should-have-been-edited-yet-unedited footage. Recommended.

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Meta-Practice

“‘It’s very common for small business owners and artists to avoid expressly writing the terms of their agreement down, because they don’t want to think about their partnerships ending on bad terms,’ [intellectual property attorney Emily Danchuk of the Copyright Collaborative] says. This leads them to tiptoe around the terms of the agreement that they find onerous, ugly, tedious, or otherwise painful.

But ironing out these details is incredibly important, as the case of Hoefler & Frere-Jones amply proves. Danchuk says such agreements help put parties on the same page, making it less likely that an agreement will be breached in the future.”

—John Brownlee, “4 Lessons Designers Could Learn From The Hoefler & Frere-Jones Split,” Fast Company Design, February 10, 2014

Get It In Writing

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Meta-Practice

Notes on the Bronx Museum Artists in the Marketplace Program

Some reflections on the 13-week professional development AIM program.  

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I gained tangible advice and tools.

For example, in the writing workshop led by Martha Schulman, we workshopped our artists’ statements. Martha shared great, mechanical advice for writing (focus on verbs and nouns, use an inverse pyramid model) and strategies for editing (print it out and cut it up, or highlight different things in different colors). My statement was due for an overhaul; have a look at the result.

Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento’s legal and contract workshops were informative, interesting, and immediately useful—they helped me summon the courage to negotiate better terms in a contract. He’s a super engaging speaker and I recommend artists attend his workshops or art law performances anytime you have the chance.

In her funding workshops, Melissa Rachleff gave me great advice for in-kind donations for a project whose budget is only partially funded. She also organized group mock review panels using a criteria-based rating worksheet. It was terrifying yet effective to see proposals from this perspective.

There were other sessions that validated my existing or past practices, and others that my peers found beneficial.

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A cohort. Having relocated to NYC in 2010, I wanted to be a part of AIM to gain a sense of community. In this regard, AIM has been a great gift.

This year’s cohort of 36 artists is pretty awesome, for two reasons. It’s diverse: in age, educational background, media, conceptual interests, and geography (recent international transplants, born-and-bred-New Yorkers, artists from across four boroughs, plus Jersey). (It’s also 2/3 women!)

At the same time, everyone is smart and interesting, and their studio practices are advanced.

This combination offers huge potential for rigorous dialogues and cross-pollination.

Though the cohort was split into a Winter and Spring session, we were encouraged to organize visits each other’s studios to get to know each other. This was an opportunity that I didn’t want to let pass, so I started organizing with the help of Maria and Margaret. Everyone was interested and flexible. The dialogues were thoughtful and engaging, and I really hope they continue into the future.

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One of the first art world things I did when I moved here was to volunteer at Art in Odd Places. I met and “helped” BROLAB, a collaborative of AIM alumni. Their level of activity is inspiring. I’m eager to see what productive, alternative things can happen among our little group of like-minded, enthusiastic colleagues.

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Thanks to Lia Zaloff and Sergio Bessa for their hard work and vision in realizing AIM, and to the Bronx Museum and its funders for making this opportunity possible. And thanks in advance to Hatuey Ramos Fermín and Laura Napier, curators of the Bronx Biennial, for the exhibition to come!

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The application for AIM 2015 is now open. The deadline is September 5, 2014. The open call is competitive—good luck!

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Citizenship, Meta-Practice

Intersection for the Arts as We Knew It

San Francisco’s relentless economics cuts close to the bone, dismantling Intersection for the Arts.

I had the honor of exhibiting at San Francisco non-profit art organization Intersection for the Arts in 2004 and 2012.

Backlit curator Kevin Chen speaks at the opening of "In Other Words," 2012. my Positive Signs drawings are on the wall behind him.

Backlit curator Kevin Chen speaks at the opening of “In Other Words,” 2012. My Positive Signs drawings are on the wall behind him.

 

In particular, curator Kevin Chen has been a major ally to me (he’s the “k” that kicks off this sequence of artistic advancements on Works Make Work). Moreover, he’s been a thoughtful, dedicated contributor towards keeping SF’s art programming current, diverse, and critical. (Here’s a great 2008 SFGate profile that captures his essence, i.e., “Placid, soft-spoken, with a low, late-night-radio kind of voice, Chen brings to his work a combination of sangfroid and compulsive work ethic.”) He’s worked countless late nights personally installing exhibitions; his work as a curator has really been curator/exhibitions manager/installer/art handler/framer. He could also be found delivering erudite introductions to Intersection’s jazz performances, and donating his time and expertise to classes and likeminded arts nonprofits. He’s a practicing artist, drawing detailed graphite drawings inspired by San Francisco’s skyline.

I came away from my first exhibition at Intersection’s Valencia Street location impressed with the staff’s commitment to excellence and inquiry despite a shoestring budget.

They’ve stayed afloat amidst recessions and busts, but they won’t survive San Francisco’s current climate intact. They’ve laid off curators including Kevin, and will suspend programming. See Christian L. Frock’s “San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts Suspends Programs, Lays Off Curators” on KQED Arts (May 22, 2014) for more info. For many artists, this is another painful, irrevocable loss in the art community, as documented in Frock’s “Priced Out” series.

Since I moved away in 2010, people ask if I’ll return to the Bay Area. Its clearly hostile conditions, and the tolls they’re taking on the arts community, do not beckon.

What is to be done? Perhaps, as MA implored,

Everyone, go to galleries, museums, performances, and any and all cultural events!!! Invest in your local cultural institutions before they are gone…. please!

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Meta-Practice, Values

Middle grounds

Grappling with how to find a middle ground in an art career.

In the Bronx Museum AIM program, about a third of us don’t necessarily aspire or expect to be represented by a blue chip gallery, or run an art studio as a vertically-integrated business with permanent staff. At the same time, we do want something more—I think we would like to avoid still working as adjunct professors or art handlers when we’re 50. These jobs are too demanding and precarious for artistic growth and financial viability.

I’ve also spoken to undergrads about professional practices. I advised them to devise their own self-concordant goals and to be wary of adopting conventional success models not their own.

How to find a middle ground—where artists can flourish in an expensive city and an economically polarized art field—seems to be the puzzle we’re all trying to solve.

In the popular imagination, artists tend to exist either at the pinnacle of fame and luxury or in the depths of penury and obscurity — rarely in the middle, where most of the rest of us toil and dream….

The middle — that place where professionals do their work in conditions that are neither lavish nor improvised, for a reasonable living wage — is especially vulnerable to collapse because its existence has rarely been recognized in the first place. Nobody would argue against the idea that art has a social value, and yet almost nobody will assert that society therefore has an obligation to protect that value by acknowledging, and compensating, the labor of the people who produce it.

—A. O. Scott, “The Paradox of Art as Work,” N.Y. Times, May 9, 2014

Actually, there’s a small but growing contingent of us “almost nobodies” that would claim otherwise, such as the #payingartists campaign by Artist’s Network in the U.K.

For me, the issue is crystal clear: if a non-profit organization receives funds to hold exhibitions, some of those funds should go to the artists who contribute the actual artwork—without which an exhibition would not be possible. And, when artists contribute to exhibition-making with our time and labor—registration, transportation, installation, curation, writing, photo documentation, administration, etc.—we should be compensated with a fair and living wage. Larger institutions pay staff, freelancers, or outside service providers to do these tasks; funders should enable and require organizations of all sizes to pay the providers of the labor required by the institution’s programming, regardless of who it is.

Fair compensation would be a start in creating a middle ground for artists. It’s not an outlandish, and I think it’s rational and appropriate.

[Buddhist economist E.F.] Schumacher calls for economic solutions to globalization that are founded on principles of self-empowerment, self-reliance and decentralization, and local control. He advocates for decentralized working methods, or “smallness within bigness,” in which interrelated but autonomous units work together toward a greater goal. Furthermore, he presents the philosophy of “enoughness,” a Buddhist approach to economics that advocates for self-sufficiency: producing from local resources for local needs at a modest scale, appropriate for a balanced life.

—Abigail Satinsky, “Appropriate Technologies,” Art Practical, April 3, 2014

Addendum: See Christian L. Frock’s “Beyond the Studio: What Do Artists/Writers/Curators Need?” (KQED Arts, May 12, 2014).

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