Picture caption: Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, South Carolina, founded 1816 by freemen, including Denmark Vesey. In 1822, Vesey was hanged for his involvement in planning a revolt that would kill slaveholders in Charleston, free black people, and sail to Haiti, then the only black republic in the Americas. One Saturday morning in August 2002, I walked up a busy avenue in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn to Sista’s Place, a local gathering site for all of us who would board buses to Washington D.C. to attend the Millions March for Reparations. The [...]

The role of educational institutions in shaping and defining artists is being questioned and critiqued by the very professors, students and alumni who make up these institutions. One of these critiques, the nationwide movement to organize and unionize adjunct and contingent university professors, has been building for nearly two years from late 2013. A second critique became public on May 15th with the withdrawal of the first-year class from USC Roski School of Art and Design’s MFA program who noted the ‘accelerating trend’ of their school’s reliance on adjunct faculty and the growth [...]

Hi, thanks for coming to one of the most depressingly titled conferences I’ve ever heard of.  You are brave.  I’m going to talk about ‘artist as debtor in a roundabout way’, because if you take on a lot of debt, you probably assume you have a chance of earning some income to pay it off.  I’m going to discuss some imaginary numbers I arrived it in my recent drawings for Creative Time on artists payments, which also incorporate some actual research from BFAMFAPHD, who I am happy to be in conversation with today. They provide a solidarity model for working collectively around these [...]

Artists  Report Back is often dismissed by deans, faculty members, and artists alike as a “vocational” argument. They say that by comparing rising tuition with future work (where we compare $120,000 on art degrees with the reality that nationally only 10% of arts grads make their primary earnings as artists), we reproduce the familiar rhetoric of economic justification in our contemporary cultural value debate, what Belfiore has articulated as value arising from measurable impact (often economic impact) rather than from the value of art as a public good.[1] We at BFAMFAPhD agree that [...]

This talk addresses some of the changes that have both pitched artists industry-wide into a debt-driven milieu and simultaneously worked against shared ideals of criticality and cooperative organizing; It points out, however, that these more collaborative tendencies are always latent and subject to reawakening. I Education and Political Agency In the early postwar period the cost of public higher education in the United States was relatively low. For me it was zero. In the 1960s I attended Brooklyn College, where tuition was free, while a state Regents Grant paid for my books. (I would not [...]

As early as 1984 art historian Carol Duncan pinpointed a fundamental, though typically overlooked feature of high culture: that the majority of professionally trained artists make up a vast surplus whose utter redundancy is the normal condition of the art market. “We can measure the waste [of artistic talent] not only in the thousands of “failed” artists–artists whose market failure is necessary to the success of the few–but also in the millions whose creative potential is never touched… This glut of art and artists is the normal condition of the art market.” —Carol [...]