Art in a Vacuum

Thanks to everyone who contributed their thoughts, time, resources, and energy to helping me put this together.

INTRO
Do Not Perceive Me
Somewhere over the years, to be called an artist started making me uncomfortable.

I’ve seen the term shift over my 27 years and have been called each iteration. Morphing from “artist” to “artsy” and now simply “(a) creative.” I’ve always found it pressing to understand what those terms really mean when referring to someone — and when they’re used for me.

In my adolescence, it meant being able to draw decent bubble letters, figures with depth. Then, it meant dressing different from my peers and being interested in obscure subcultures and music. Now, I think it means that my lifestyle sometimes includes freelance creative economy work, and you might find me out supporting a friend’s show opening, band gig, DJ set, or pop-up event.

Originally, it was hard for me to articulate what it was about being called an artist that bothered me. I do “create things.” So in a sense, it’s really not that deep. But ~ as an artist ~ I couldn’t escape feeling like I was being boxed in or judged. I’ve since come to understand that this discomfort was about more than just surface-level judgements based on my interest. It’s the implications of artistry that ma(d/k)e me uncomfortable.

Heady ✅
(seemingly) Unorganized ✅
Sensitive ✅
In search of authenticity and free expression (check) ✅

Simultaneously down-to-earth—relatable—yet somehow just different and distant enough from the everyday to be explained away by a connection to “Art.”

This idea of “distance from the everyday” is really what triggers my curiosity around it all.

There’s a conflicting sense of frivolity and reverence embedded in the subtext.

To assume artistry often assumes some kind of detachment from conventional systems of seeing, feeling, and being. But to assume this identity also detaches artists from materiality. Today, artists, arts workers, and everyone tangential to them exists in a vacuum. A space where everything is oriented towards the perpetuation of expression, Art, community, and progression, without critical engagement with the social conditions that artists and arts workers exist within.

Artists only have sociopolitical context as long as our criticisms begin and end within the confines of the artist statement, panel discussion, studio critique, wall text, visual references, or performance.

And so today, we find ourselves slowly bucking the starving artist narrative, forming unions, demanding institutional divestment from extractive systems, and seeking direct municipal investment—all in an existential effort to remind ourselves and our cities that the creative economy is not simply for building beautification initiatives and elitist cultural echo chambers. We are workers, and we are humans.

But what does our humanity look like in the Vacuum that is “arts community?”

PART 1
Long Road to ???

“I think a lot of people are scared of that.”

“When you’re not just showing up as an artist, you’re showing up as a person,” says Patricia Bordallo-Dibildox. They’re an artist and organizer in Kansas City.

I’m sitting with Patricia, and we’re bouncing long-winded half-thoughts off each other. We discuss the tensions of being in Kansas City and working in the Arts. Patricia was the first person I called when I was pacing the top floor of the central library, trying to articulate what exactly is a people-based arts community—as opposed to an institution-based arts community, and why that seems to be so ephemeral for artists here.

“It’s a reflex. That art practice reflex,” she says.

“It’s just how artists are formally taught to exist. Show-to-show, exhibition-to-exhibition. People are just looking to get into shows or get a grant. I did that for fucking years!”

Whether it’s for a show, a grant, residency, or degree program, it’s difficult to escape the treadmill that is Arts Industry, and the need to streamline your practice to be inline with the season’s institutional bounties.

“You’re taught to exist in reaction to what these institutions are doing, rather than existing outside of them,” Patricia says.

“But what are you doing for yourself or for others outside of that?”

While working at the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI), Patricia and her partners used their digital platform Front/Space to support the student protests organized by KCAI Solidarity and KCAI’s Black Student Union. Front/Space helped bring widespread conversation around artists who were being uplifted by the university and using racist anti-black imagery in their work. Ultimately, it was this alignment with the students and community members demanding accountability from the administrators that saw Patricia (and many of their coworkers) fired from their positions.

“That whole summer, I was trying to organize students, staff and faculty. Trying to get people to meet me where I was emotionally. It just wasn't happening,” Patricia says. “So when I got fired, it was a moment of reflection for me, saying ‘Okay, like, what does it mean for me to be in this community that I've been in?’ because clearly they don't give a shit!”

Reflecting on their time at the Art Institute and the numerous opportunities in which they participated over the years, Patricia began to recognize firsthand the tokenism, exploitation, and censorship prevalent in the Arts. Some of which they were subjected to, and some that they participated in out of admitted naiveté. But after talking with multiple artists and arts workers, it’s clear to me that this is a common sentiment that doesn’t just end within the walls of museums, galleries, or universities.

Cue Open Spaces.

Open Spaces was a city-wide initiative in 2018 that brought international artists to Kansas City to present work and perform alongside local artists from late August through October. The festival was intentionally spread throughout different locations around the city, in an effort to challenge KC residents to engage with their environment in new ways, especially through sculpture, installations, and performance. Together, local nonprofit KC Creates, Kansas City’s short-lived Office of Culture and Creative Services, former mayor Sly James, and curator/art director Dan Cameron sought to establish a vibrant new era in Kansas City. This city-wide biennial arts festival was the first step in their decade-long arts convergence plan.

“I want to stress again how monumental of a task this was, and I feel like many people who were working on the ground were just doing their best, but were set up for failure,” says Brandon Forrest Frederick.

The organizers of Open Spaces sought to cement Kansas City’s trajectory as a cultural capital worthy of international acclaim. But when the marketing vision met the logistical reality, Kansas Citians were left with what felt like an impressive but seemingly forced two-month long commercial for a Kansas City in which none of us existed. “Culture,” “creativity,” “community,” and “the importance of the arts” were repeatedly referenced, yet the community who knew of and attended the live events seemed to be largely made up of arts administrators, city officials, and the philanthropists helping fund it all. What resulted was effectively an echo chamber created to persuade city officials that their investment in the Arts (i.e., throwing money at a NYC-based curator without any local connection to make Art Happen in our city) was worth it.

“From my perspective, the thing that Kansas City always seems to get wrong, is that they look at a place like New York, or wherever that’s bigger and they just try to duplicate that thing going on there,” says Brandon.

“Instead of investing and growing cultural movements that are already happening, we instead import others to create their own vision here. They specifically excluded any artist-run space from being a part of this, which was a huge lack of vision and care in your own community.”

While the number of artist-run spaces in Kansas City has declined dramatically in the past five years, at the time of Open Spaces, there were still opportunities to engage with this segment of the community. Unfortunately, as Mel Mitchell describes in their 2019 piece on Open Spaces, collaboration with the city brings its own standards for acceptable venues and staffing requirements, which limited the spaces that could qualify as partner organizations for the festival.

“Ultimately, it alienates the community that it’s supposed to be about or for, AND it makes people outside of the arts community look at projects like this, see absolute failure, and recognize it as a waste of resources,” Brandon continued.

Brandon worked as a preparator during Open Spaces at multiple locations, but quit one jobsite in particular because of unsafe conditions. Architects assessing the environment for Nick Cave’s “Hy-Dyve” decided the old church they were in wasn’t safe for scissor lifts. This meant that Brandon and the others working on the site had to use ladders to access the 40-foot windows that needed to be blocked out. After witnessing another worker nearly fall from the height, Brandon had a close call of his own.

“I was working, going up the ladder, and as I was coming back down, I slipped a little. The ladder moved, and I was very, very close to falling. At that moment, I decided that $18/hr for this was not worth it, and I quit that jobsite.

Brandon emphasizes that he never saw Nick Cave, who he doesn’t believe knew about the safety issues, and also that the site manager “was just trying to make it work with the resources he was given.”

Brandon was paid for his work, but there were others who were never compensated, despite repeated attempts to contact organizers. “The consistent vibe was that there wasn’t enough money to be doing what we were doing, and everyone just had to figure out how to do it,” Brandon said.

This kind of push for dynamic urban environments engaged with the Arts is exactly what Toronto-based collective Creative Class Struggle discusses on their site. Urgent, top-down pressure to make something beautiful and attractive to mobile, high-wage workers creates opportunities for exploitation and displacement of local residents.

In Kansas City, we’ve seen it through the gradual push of artist-owned spaces out of the Crossroads Arts District, and we currently see it progressing with the street car expansion, a 351 million dollar project that will chauffeur people via aerodynamic trolley along Main Street, through (South) Plaza, Midtown, Crossroads, Downtown, and River Market areas. Hitting many of Kansas City’s major cultural centers and arts institutions along the way, this streetcar expansion has already welcomed out-of-state property developers along its route. Purchasing the land will raise property values, negatively affect housing affordability for anyone in the area, and likely increase policing of the homelessness in the areas. It’s seen as a win by many, from the perspective of connecting Kansas City’s major business centers and bringing development to attract new residents and growth: the vision brought by Open Spaces. But the street car mirrors show a Kansas City absent of residents whose reality is based in current issues like housing affordability, wage discrepancies, and equitable busing.

Something that came up in my conversation with Patricia was our mutual difficulty of saying “community” earnestly. The word evokes phantom pains. Reminding you of something you’ve felt intimately, but now suggests something that’s no longer there.

Many local arts institutions and the boards that lead them have vested interests in aligning their politics with that of the city, even when that means that the artists and arts workers with whom they work are negatively affected.

The haze of tension surrounding the Art Institute has been especially dense in the past few years. We’ve seen students call out their Board of Trustees, whose (now former) chairman was also chair of the Kansas City Police Foundation. Students have also called out the school’s failure to acknowledge their role in perpetuating the celebration of racist imagery within their walls, as well as their interest in supporting unaffordable housing developments around the university. This has displaced residents and made near-campus housing inaccessible to many students.

The Art Institute unfortunately shares this miasma with its neighbors, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, all located within a few blocks. The former’s grounds were used as a repository for KCPD vehicles as they policed the 2020 protests of George Floyd’s murder. Nelson-Atkins also faced criticism by workers laid off in the midst of the pandemic, who noted no adjustments to the salaries of its higher paid staff. Kemper Museum had its own issues the previous year, involving a board member with financial ties to an immigrant detention center in Rhode Island.

These spaces are some of the primary actors to which the city defers everything Art-related. They are the foundation upon which Kansas City’s arts community currently rests. To address the ways in which artists and arts workers are spoken over, exploited, and tokenized by both city officials and art institutional representatives is a much tighter knot than an equity task force, DEI training, or decorated street car stop can unravel.

2* from 2012 to 2018 average rent in KCMO increased 4%, between 2020 and 2022, rent increased 11.6%  , 5* 2015 – Grand Arts , 5* 2019 – KCAI dorm construction and opening

PART 2
Validation and an Open Bar
I did not go to Art School. I attended a state University where I tried to toe the line between satisfying my parents, engaging my genuine interests, and hoping I’d be able to pay back student loans with my career prospects.

Fast-forward through realizing diplomacy and DC internships were not in my cards, and finishing undergrad. Working in marketing at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art felt accurate, even if it wasn’t in line with my undergraduate degree.

My job did involve creativity and some tools of the trade, but I was not fully putting my heart on the line with my own artistic expression and ideas, which honestly was something I liked about it. I was able to be in proximity to the Arts, artists, and community engagement, while getting a steady paycheck, which, at the time, was the most I had ever been paid at a job.

Photos taken when I worked at Kemper Museum (2018-19)

It was in this space that what I understood to be the local “arts community” began to take shape, for me — the local network of artists, collectives, and artist-run spaces, as well as the nonprofits, galleries, university, or museums that often employed, sometimes funded and usually educated, or otherwise patronized these individuals/operations. It’s also where I started understanding the vacuum.

During my time at the Museum, the vacuum took many shapes, including my work with Open Spaces, but most blatantly, it was the rhetoric around inclusion. While being a reasonable and worthy initiative that was always discussed, inclusion never seemed to get the time, attention, or material support that it requires. After leaving my position in Summer 2019, I came to understand the conversation a bit deeper. The difficulty around expanding our audiences wasn’t just about getting new faces into the museum by dropping handbills in different parts of town, or even by bringing different kinds of exhibitions (even though those things are important). It was structural. It was about the Museum’s (lack of) capacity for flexibility. How willing (or not) were they to relinquish some sense of authority by acknowledging their insularity? By being transparent with their staff about their commitments to financial stakeholders, or leaning into the tension when called to account?

I’m preceded by at least a decade's worth of genuine local cultural documentation, analysis, criticism, activism, organizing, social posts, shit talking, breakroom convos, porch hangs, email threads, panel discussions, retreats, meltdowns, and much more.

But it all feels different in this moment. Endlessly tired, jaded, or clocked-in, everyone is trying to hold on to a semblance of community while straining to keep in touch with what it even means to take care of yourself right now.

With so many of our DIY/artist-run spaces having closed or under threat of closing, it’s more crucial than ever to consider the ways we can expand our interpretation of community. How are we pushing each other to lean into more expansive expressions of our artistic practices? When rigid social bubbles dissolve, you can find solidarity in many places.

“I find solidarity in circles like the KC Tenants Union,” says local artist Sundiata Moon.

In 2020, after splitting with his partner and encountering consistently high rent costs, Sundiata was houseless. This experience sparked his interest in social housing, leading him to join KC Tenants, where Sundiata is not just a member of the tenant union, but also documents their events. Still new to organizing, Sundiata is trying to find the sweet spot where his artistic practice contributes to the well-being of his community.

“I know art has its limitations. I’m running into more and more walls everyday,” he says. “[I’m] trying to figure out the role of art in organizing spaces. Not just one of commodity, but [one of] expanding the dialogue of decolonization through shared memory,” Sundiata says.

“In this particular battle [housing], I feel like it is my duty, as an artist who has also been impacted by this issue, to amplify these narratives in the way that I can,” he continues.

Patricia, who also organizes with KC Tenants, speaks to a similar existential struggle. However, instead of merging the two worlds, Patricia chose to loosen the grip on their involvement in the Arts to embrace something new.

“I spent two years being like, ‘What is my life, if not being in this art world?’ And then, as soon as I was able to show up and really contribute in impactful ways that are helping [KC Tenants] and helping me, I was like, ‘Oh, shit! I can exist in really great ways outside of whatever was going on in my life prior!’ But it was scary.”

That fear of stepping outside our Arts Community is the fear of uselessness outside of our accustomed modes of production. And if there’s anything that triggers the anxieties of artists, it’s the idea of our labor as useless. But recontextualizing our work outside of the Institutional Arts, we can see that through our respective training or practices, many of us are skilled fabricators, documentarians, designers, cleaners, writers, and educators. We are individuals with deep skills of perception, analysis, caretaking, communication, and collaboration, who have been taught to endlessly critique and devalue our own skills before stepping into a room.

The intersections of our identities as artists and workers in Kansas City require that we demand more from our city, our collaborators, our peers, and our employers, because socially, Institutional Arts communities exist in a vacuum. There are material consequences to not being explicit about our collective vision and actively working towards it.

This is not an appeal for local museums or arts nonprofits to change how they work, because if precedent serves any indication, that’s a losing battle. Also, I’m not interested in making that appeal personally, because that’s a conversation for the Museum / arts nonprofit community — whoever that may be.

For most artists, opportunities at galleries, universities, nonprofits, or city-sponsored events are not even the labor that sustain our livelihoods. And the highly competitive nature of grant and residency programs create but brief moments of relief for a handful of us. This being the case, I cannot understand my connection to these spaces as forming my community. Politically, economically, and socially, our interests are largely not the same.

In my conversation with Cambria Channing, a Kansas City-based artist and arts administrator, and a former KCAI student and employee, Cambria spoke about how especially within the past two years, dealing with the pandemic, depression, and isolation from so many people with whom they used to spend so much time, their perspective on community has changed in scope. “Community can be one person. It can be three people. It can be my neighbor. lt kind of depends.”

“The things that continue to get me through… It wouldn't be without people who are sending you a text to check in, making a meal together.” Cambria says.

“There's realness. There is care, and you can find it. It's not gonna be in an email from these places. But there are people looking out for one another. And I find solidarity in that. Absolutely. It's the human experience.”

Another person I spoke with, a local artist, organizer, and former student at KCAI who prefers not to be named, echoes Cambria’s thoughts.

“I think we need to build networks of community care. We need to start rejecting what is handed to us by the people in power, and start relying on each other more. Trusting each other more.”

My interests lie in the demands of local artists and the spaces that we create for our community: as workers, as people, as parents, as students, as tenants, as patients, as entrepreneurs, as neighbors, etc. etc. In understanding ourselves as capable individuals with multiple intersections who are also part of a broader collective fighting for safe and equitable living conditions.

Historically, creative economy labor has been undervalued to the point where many creative workers feel uncomfortable even asking for payment beyond reimbursement for supplies. Ann Haeyoung summarizes it well in her 2019 Creative Independent essay, “How to work within power structures that don’t work for you.”

“In short, using passion and fulfillment as excuses to justify low wages is nonsense,” she says. “And for artists, all it means is that we become a cheap supply of labor for museums, galleries, art schools, the art market, and creative professions more generally.”

In the 2021 report “Artists as Workers” by Autonomy, a UK-based independent think tank, author Charlotte Warne Thomas expresses that in order to begin addressing poor work and living conditions, the “artist-as-worker” must first acknowledge “the work that artists actually do, and the conditions in which they labour.”

We see examples of this taken on by the Chicago-based effort Chicago Art Census, which is a city-wide data collection project meant to serve as an “advocacy tool,” “fighting for better working, living, and making conditions, and creating opportunities for coalition-building across art sectors.”

In Kansas City, we may not have city-wide data collection projects happening on the arts sector labor (or do we?), but we do have a history of DIY and artist-run spaces and events documented over the years in various ways, as well as a network of extra-institutional individuals and spaces carrying on that work today.

“Whether it's related to art, or our community as a whole, we all have the collective power to imagine new possibilities under which our mode of existence changes to be more like what we dream of, rather than what is in front of us,” says the anonymous artist.

In Kansas City, we’ve felt the tension for years—the city serving as a revolving door for artists whose long-term sights eventually land them elsewhere. The fatigue and uncertainty pervading our community as we apply for the same opportunities year after year, or learn about the newest artist-run space that’s been priced out of existence or burned-out its organizers.

To make Kansas City a more sustainably livable place for artists means making the city a more livable place for everyone. There’s a deep need for new approaches to how we use our individual and collective power as artists. Many of us will be in the usual institutions, making our way as is necessary. But to separate our spiritual investment from the walls of those institutions, and even from the walls of our insular arts circles, is and will be a much larger conversation.

As artists, we must be conscious of our own humanity, as well as the artificial divides created by Arts Industry around our labor, in relation to others outside of the Arts. But it will take more than a grant application workshop to get you out of that vacuum.