What is the future of arts advocacy?
Screenprint by artist and art director Mónica Nadal
Earlier this month I was looking for something to give to myself, something to help wrap up this year. I found a print by artist and art director Mónica Nadal that seemed right for this time when so many of our competing and complementary interests have come to the front at once, when urgency has been a defining characteristic. A simple, elegant print reading, “Tu lucha es mi lucha.” Your fight is my fight.
I’ve been an artist for as long as I can remember, being in plays, designing work, and writing, writing, writing. My life has been made in rehearsal rooms, studios, galleries, critiques, clubs, and theaters. I’ve worked in arts organizations for most of my professional life, working to produce resources, events, and opportunities for artists and communities to connect. I believe that the work of artists and creative people fundamentally make the world better, more connected, more understanding, and more just. Artists and creative people have unique skills and networks to bring people together and make meaning, which has only been underscored by how important music, literature, film, dance, and storytelling have been to our collective wellbeing (our collective just-barely-keeping-it-together) in 2020.
All this cultural production is work, done by artists, who are workers. There is an article that has been heavily circulating in the last half of the year, titled “We Need to Treat Artists as Workers, Not Decorations.” In it, author William Deresiewicz writes:
“Art is work. The fact that people do it out of love, or self-expression, or political commitment, doesn’t make it any less so. Nor does the fact that it isn’t a job, a matter of formal employment. Chefs often do what they do out of love, but no one expects to eat for free. Civil rights lawyers do it from political commitment, but they are compensated for their time. Self-employment is still employment. Even if you don’t have a boss, and even if you do not hate it, it is work.
If art is work, then artists are workers. Most people don’t like to hear this. Non-artists don’t, because it shatters their romantic ideas about the creative life. Artists don’t either, as people who have tried to organize them as workers have told me. They also buy into the myths; they also want to think they’re special. To be a worker is to be like everybody else.”
But if there has been any hopeful truth to 2020, it is that we are like everyone else, and that we are in this together. Artists often do face unique combinations of circumstances in our work that make us vulnerable – self-employment and gig work, functioning between systems and corporate forms that are legible in policy, to name a few. Then, as this year has made so clear, there are circumstances that are not unique, but common cause – unreliable access to healthcare and insurance, housing insecurity, racial and gender discrimination, and more.
It’s a constant source of amazement to me that it took a pandemic, a crisis of this magnitude, to force governments to overhaul safety net systems like unemployment insurance. Artists created the gig economy and know the lack of support that has been there – why do you think there are so many funds for health insurance for aging artists? Policy and safety nets, tied to W2 and regular employment, haven’t kept up with the growth of gigging and freelancing as a portion of the economy as a whole, and the shutdown of the kind of in-person events where artists earn their livings has been disastrous in the arts sector. As reported in The New York Times on December 26, “During the quarter ending in September, when the overall unemployment rate averaged 8.5 percent, 52 percent of actors, 55 percent of dancers and 27 percent of musicians were out of work, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. By comparison, the jobless rate was 27 percent for waiters; 19 percent for cooks; and about 13 percent for retail salespeople over the same period.”
Fortunately, there was an existing Federal mechanism, Disaster Unemployment Assistance, that could be adapted into the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance that has buoyed the livelihoods of so many self-employed and freelance workers during 2020. Even with the implementation of PUA through the CARES Act, a policy loophole favoring W2 employment meant that workers who had a combination of W2 and freelance income – as so many creative people do – were excluded from PUA in favor of nominal assistance tied to their W2 employment. Arts organizations rallied to get the policy changed, led by SAG-AFTRA, IATSE, and others. Springboard for the Arts campaigned to get the change made, it passed with the recent relief bill, and Minnesota has opted into the payment going forward.
But when the pandemic ends, what will happen to this safety net for freelance and gig workers? Gig work has an appeal because of its flexibility, but that flexibility has also been pushed to the limits with venture capital-backed companies like Uber, Lyft, and Doordash, who recently spent hundreds of millions in California to pass a ballot initiative to stop an order to classify their workers from independent contractors to employees. Gig work is not going anywhere, and it needs to have more safety nets for a just economy – an issue where artists are at the forefront of the issue, with real experience, that can be a part of a broader coalition pushing for policies that will support the creative sector into the future.
This kind of advocacy requires the dual push – for artists and self-employed creatives to see themselves as small businesses and as community members, and for policy systems to be more creative and flexible about supporting work where and how it happens, not just in easily legible corporate forms. As CARES money came into municipalities, they had lots of leeway in how that money was distributed. Ramsey County created small business funds, including one specifically for self-employed and sole proprietor creative workers. Huge credit should be given to them for creating the funds, for convening a group of small business technical advisors to help get the funding out to people, and for adapting after listening to feedback about how the documentation process and demands could be alienating and exclusionary.
In the coalition of technical advisors were arts groups like Springboard, and organizations working with specific cultural, ethnic, racial, and immigrant communities, serving people who run businesses from their homes and cell phones, tracking sales in a notebook, relying on community for support, translation, and network. The Small Business Administration’s 2018 profile for Minnesota points to 1.2 million Minnesotans employed by small businesses, just about 48% of Minnesota’s workforce – and that’s just the businesses were counted, not necessarily including everyone in the peripheries of official existence. Being a worker in a more just economy means pushing for specific policy language seeing, including, and recognizing the kinds of business enterprises that get routinely left out of improvement grants, and business lending, who exist bridging sectors and corporate forms. Artists have direct experience with this, and share that experience with others. Continued advocacy for inclusive policies open up even more opportunities for growth.
All of this begs the question, what does the future of arts advocacy look like? Business policy language, Unemployment Insurance reform, these are not the traditional realms of arts funding requests, but they are critical to our future. We need more from our arts organizations and from our arts advocacy groups – not just specifically advocating for the sustenance of arts organizations through Federal and state funding, but collaborative, coalition-building leadership that ties the future of the arts and creative sector to an economic future that supports all workers. This may mean re-engaging policies that existed in the past, (such as the Get Creative Workers Working effort spearheaded by Americans for the Arts to find more Federal policy opportunities to engage artists and creative workers) or joining existing coalitions working for policy futures, or finding new ways creatively engage with policy.
Some of our greatest triumphs have already come through this kind of coalition-building. In Minnesota, the passage of the Legacy Amendment in 2008 was the product of enormous efforts to bring together the interests of artists, hunters, anglers, and environmentalists into a joint vision to fund our future. With highest-in-the-nation arts funding, we’re 12 years into that experiment, just about halfway to the expiration point in 2034. What are we doing to continue and expand that coalition for renewal? This year has also seen enormous organizing efforts by artists looking to find ways to make the funding more responsive, accessible, and equitably distributed – if this funding is going to be continued, it will be through relevance and broadening its reach.
Going into the future, we cannot reactively defend the gains we’ve made in arts funding, but need to proactively be expanding the pool of what is possible in the sector. The National Independent Venues Association came together because of the pandemic, and successfully wrote, lobbied for, and got passed the Save Our Stages Act, a $15 billion fund for independent venues and promoters. That’s almost four times the $4 billion that the National Endowment for the Arts has distributed in its 50 year history. If we had universal healthcare, imagine how would that free up artists from taking jobs for the health insurance. If we had a livable minimum wage, how much easier would that make balancing a day job and time for creative practice?
I point out these examples because they are where I have been most directly engaged in 2020, and because we need arts advocacy in a formal and organized way to be engaged with the critical issues of our time, and in coalition with other sectors. Artists are already there, whether in creating artwork to memorialize the movement for racial justice, advocating for renters rights, using visual storytelling to break down city budgets, or fundamentally trying to find ways to live their lives. Artists have been, and will continue to be, on the forefront of change movements.
So, heading into a new year, with the same ongoing challenges, our arts organizations that rely on the work of artists have to similarly find ways to move organizational, structural, donor power to face and address these questions. Where there are opportunities to engage in (the often slow, meticulous, detail-oriented) policy work, arts organizations need to figure out how to be there. Where there are coalitions at work, arts organizations need to be figuring out how to show up at those tables, and not simply rely on the labor of individual artists to show up for them. There are all kinds of roles to play, and what work is being done should be celebrated, but as 2020 has continually shown us, there is so more to do. Arts advocacy in the future needs to lead from the community, from a big vision of what is possible. Tu lucha es nuestra lucha. Your fight is our fight.