Graphic by Oscar Guerrero.

Art Worker May Day: Observing Art Labor and Capital
Virtual event organized and moderated by Lee Painter-Kim

Monday, May 1, 2023 (May Day)
1:00 pm Pacific / 4:00 pm Eastern / 9:00 pm Greenwich Time
To receive the Zoom link, please RSVP.

Since 2019, art workers in over 25 museums have formed unions in response to precarious life conditions, including oppressive workplace environments, lack of living wages, and basic benefits. This phenomenon echoes a national surge in labor organizing. This panel event will consider how the culture sector can often exploit the idea of a "calling" to the arts to mask low pay, inequitable conditions, and uncertain advancement. It will also explore how this aligns with trends in the larger global economy, outlining a historical materialist framework of art labor in capitalist art systems.

PANELISTS
York Chang works as both a visual artist and as a union-side labor attorney. As an artist, he has exhibited his work at institutions, galleries, and fairs, including solo exhibitions at the Orange County Museum of Art and the Vincent Price Art Museum. He is a recipient of the California Community Foundation Fellowship and the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Master Artist Grant. As a labor attorney, he has negotiated union contracts and organized labor strikes. As a student grassroots organizer at UCLA in the 1990s, he helped organize the recognition campaign for the first UCLA graduate student employee union, as well as direct action campaigns to fight attacks on immigrant rights and affirmative action, including statewide UC student walkouts in 1995.

Dani (Danielle) Child is author of Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism (Bloomsbury, 2019) and is currently working, as editor, on The Routledge Companion to Art and Capitalism. She is a senior lecturer of art theory and practice at Manchester Metropolitan University. Dani is currently a Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded project: 'COVID-19: Impacts on the cultural industries and the implications for policy'.

Jason Ide is the Contract Coordinator at Teamsters Local 399 in Los Angeles. Prior to that he served as President of Teamsters Local 814 in Brooklyn for twelve years. Before that, he worked as a union art handler at Sotheby’s auction house. As President of Local 814, Ide led a long and ultimately successful fight against Sotheby’s when they locked out their union staff in 2011.

Nizan Shaked is author of Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (Bloomsbury, 2022) and The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2017). She is a professor of contemporary art history, museum, and curatorial studies at California State University Long Beach.

Anuradha Vikram is a writer, curator, educator, and UC-AFT union member based in Los Angeles, CA. Vikram is the author of Decolonizing Culture: Essays on the Intersection of Art and Politics (Sming Sming Press, 2017) and the upcoming novel Use Me at Your Own Risk: Visions from the Darkest Timeline (X Artists Books, 2023). Vikram is co-curator of the upcoming exhibition with the Getty Pacific Standard Time: Art and Science Initiative in 2024, entitled Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption with Victoria Vesna and UCLA Art Sci Center. Vikram is also co-curator for the 2024 Portland Biennial with Jackie Im at Oregon Contemporary, and is developing an exhibition for LACE in 2025.

ORGANIZER + MODERATOR
Lee Painter-Kim is a writer, organizer, and art worker. From 2011-22, they worked for and closely with numerous emerging, mid-tier, and bluechip commercial art galleries and artists in New York and Los Angeles. They organize where they can and when they can to build collective power around labor, gender, and race. Their work has been published by Routledge, Dio Press, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Monument Lab, among others.

GRAPHIC/IMAGE DESIGN
Oscar Guerrero is a writer, artist, and museum worker focused on building robust equity programming in museums and bringing wage and labor justice to art workers.

CREDITS
Program description by Lee Painter-Kim, Nizan Shaked, and Anuradha Vikram. Graphics/image by Oscar Guerrero. Hosted by CUE Art Foundation in partnership with Art Handler Mag, jobs.art, and Stop DiscriminAsian, and other anonymous groups promoting the event privately within their communities.