You gotta read this New York Times article. Here's an excerpt:
“It’s easy to talk about artists in lofty and spiritual terms,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “Without denying the higher purposes of the artistic vocation, it’s also important to remember that artists play an important role in America’s cultural vitality and economic prosperity. Artists have immense financial and social impact as well as cultural impact.”
It triggered this memory for me.
It was my idea to have the Artists at Work theme for the 2002 Chicago Artists Month, the yearly tribute to Chicago artists produced by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs under the dynamic Lois Weisburg, and the exquisite maestro of public events, Cynthia Quick, along with many others, Janet Carl Smith, Greg Knight, Greg Cameron, many outside and inside the department who are too numerous to name but do an incredible job coordinating everything!
I had been invited to join the committee the year after I was a featured artist, representing Sapphire and Crystals, a collective of African American professional women artists. 12 programs out of around 220 submitted are selected to be featured each year. Representatives of the programs are photographed and shown on the widely distributed poster and brochure, etc. The photographer in 2002 was Marc Hauser (that's the photo he took; I hold a rose). I was excited. I knew nothing about this event, except I had gone to the CAC's Art Open and felt it was a noble idea. It's a lot of art, but I have learned to filter what I look at. The Chicago Artists Coalition spawned CAM. The city expanded it into it's present state.
I was excited about CAM. When I told my artist friends who live and work on the South Side of Chicago about it, they said they did not know about it. I made it my mission to let people know about the theme, the deadlines, etc, and encouraged people to prepare for the month. Well, they got involved. And now CAM really does include the entire city and not just the north side and downtown areas...
Artists at Work was my working theme. I just wanted to emphasize, during the month-long event, that what people witnessed at art shows was the result of hours and hours of artists' labor and thought. Yes, it's creativity, yes, it's special talent and skill, but every artist who is honest has had periods of struggle, everyone has had to learn, if they produce anything worth seeing. All together this boils down to work. Not magic, not just a gift from God, not just "genes". W.O.R.K.!
Artists at Work turned out to be the title for the month since the committee could not come up with a better way to describe what I intended. The city continues to present Artists at Work forums.
The New York Times article also recognizes that artists work. And this piece tells you the facts and figures. Do you make the money the average artist does? (If you are a dancer, you might want to take a painting class.) Any artist considering architecture may want to go ahead with that.
And hey, M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts) is a terminal degree. That means that's as good as it gets for studio artists, that it is our PhD.
Though the article says equivalent degrees in other fields may mean more money, more money, more money!
But hey! We do this stuff for love, right!
