SUSTAINABLE CARE IN THE ARTS
The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice a community of support. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care. - Johanna Hedva
Sustainable Care in the Arts is a symposium for artist caregivers of all kinds and genders, which includes monthly forums, and will culminate in a retreat and salon. This project is meant to support artist caregivers, and to foster a politics of care within a community of artists.
BACKGROUND
In the US, parenting is a privileged form of caregiving, and caregiving is disproportionately the burden of BIPOC women, while our government exploits women, under-funds healthcare and childcare, and our culture commodifies self-care.
Sustainable Care in the Arts was developed in response to a lack of cultural support and recognition for caregivers in the arts and in US culture.
The Western art world has a history of stigmatization of parents and caregivers - an attitude born from the lack of government-funded caregiving support.
An equitable art world must spread the responsibility of caregiving across people of all economic situations, genders and races.
Sustainable Care in the Arts aims to de-link caregiving from its gendered and stigmatized definition, with the idea that a universal culture of care is necessary for an equity in the arts.
This symposium will consist of a series of five working-group meetings throughout the spring of 2023; forums for artist caregivers to group critique, and also develop dialogue around the theory and politics of being artist caregiver.
Each forum discussion will draw upon texts from our reading list.
Guest Artist Nyeema Morgan and Curator Hettie Judah will present on their work, and their own experiences as caregivers.
All in-person forums include FREE childcare with youth art programming, to demonstrate a model of accessible care. Locations for forum meeting places include Pratt Institute’s Brooklyn campus and The Sunview Luncheonette in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
To sign up for the next Artist Caregivers Forum, contact Angela at amconant (at) gmail (dotcom) .
ARTIST CAREGIVER FORUMS
The Symposium will culminate with a Weekend Residency Retreat hosted by Denniston Hill, with work-time and space, workshops, and a salon-style group critique, and free childcare with youth art programming each day.
WEEKEND RESIDENCY
The Artist Caregivers Symposium operates on the understanding that caregiving is unevenly distributed, primarily falling on BIPOC women and low income communities. Equity in the arts must include a culture of care that spreads the responsibility of caregiving across people of all economic situations, with an awareness of systemic inequities caused by the social constructs of gender and race.
The Artist Caregivers Symposium aims to take its lead from the work of Carolyn Lazard, specifically their guide Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice. Lazard recognizes that "The ideal arts space is simple: it’s one in which art and culture are not sequestered from the lived experience of artists and their communities." To that end, they address childcare in their Accessibility in the Arts guide. "In an ideal world, cultural organizations wouldn’t have to provide childcare because it would already be covered by the state. Unfortunately that’s not the case, but there are some critical things that arts spaces can provide to facilitate access for parents, caregivers, and children."
We also look to How Not to Exclude Artist Parents, guidelines written by written by Hettie Judah and a group of 30+ artist mothers, which suggests that institutions and programs “make it standard practice to establish an artist’s family circumstances at the outset of a project, and have structures in place to accommodate their parenting responsibilities.”
Pratt Institute, Denniston Hill, Hunter College and the Sunview Luncheonette are situated on Lenapehoking, the traditional and unceded homeland of the Lenape people, past, present, and future.