Arts Confessional is an ongoing writing project that asks artists, curators, organizers, and administrators to share their personal and professional experiences around value, communication, and labor in the arts. This is an outlet for your stories about compensation, neglect, expectations, roadblocks, equity, and ways in which you feel you have been misinformed, wronged, taken for granted, or misused in your particular field.
But this is also a space to share success stories. There are plenty of people taking thoughtful approaches to making work happen with limited resources in a way that feels equitable and mutually beneficial. I want to celebrate those stories as well.
As an artist advocate and someone who simultaneously occupies the roles of independent curator, writer and administrator, I believe that in order to address questions of value and communication between artists, organizers and institutions we must call out the problematic actions and success stories from a range of perspectives and reflect on real-life situations. Those stories can then be used as points of departure into conversations that will hopefully help us learn from our mistakes and incorporate better strategies into our work.
So, hold no punches and tell me all about it. Be as honest and open as you feel comfortable being. And I will task myself with the challenge of responding with thoughts I might have on the situation or reach out into my knowledgable network to get input. And if you say it's okay, your experience and my response will maybe be published on Sixty Inches From Center. And feel free to name names if you choose, but please know that no names will ever be made public and all names will be removed when the stories are shared.
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