AC Interview | Erin Foley
We sat down recently with Erin Foley, Finance Manager at Film Streams, to talk about the relationship between art and labor and working toward more financial stability in cultural fields. Listen to the conversation that unpacks ideas around wage disparity, transparency, and collective organizing below or on Amplify’s Anchor page.
Transcription
Interviewer: Peter Fankhauser, Program Director at Amplify Arts
Interviewee 1: Erin Foley
Date of Interview: Nov 16, 2019
List of Acronyms: PF = Peter Fankhauser, EF = Erin Foley
[PF] You're listening to Amplify Arts Alternate Currents interview series. Alternate Currents open space for conversation, discussion, and action around national and international issues in the arts that have a profound impact at the local level. This interview series is just one part of the Alternate Currents blog: a dedicated online resource linking readers to topical articles interviews and critical writing that shine a spotlight on artist-led policy platforms, cross-sector partnerships, and artist-driven community change. Visit often and join the conversation at www.amplifyarts.org/alternate-currents. Today we're talking with Erin Foley, Finance Manager at Film Streams, about the relationship between art and labor and working toward more financial stability in cultural fields.
[EF] My name is Erin Foley and I have a background in the arts. I went to undergrad at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I studied sculpture, sound, and visual and critical studies. After undergraduate studies, I ended up teaching for nonprofits in Chicago through Urban Gateways and after School Matters doing design-build, drawing, and painting in grades K-12 and also some like post high school students. I also worked as a studio manager for [artist] Michael Rakowitz, where I fabricated work for him for his shows at his gallery in New York, Lombard-Freid Projects. I worked on the Istanbul Biennial, the Sharjah Biennial, Tate Modern Hakavai, House of World Culture in Berlin, so I got a lot of professional experience. Then, after five years, I applied for grad school and ended up getting a fellowship to the University of Southern California where I did a lot of kind of experimental studio practices and got back into, you know, working in the studio, working on my own stuff, and sort of fell back into painting and woodworking.
Then, after I curated a show at Control Room (Los Angeles), I ended up moving back to Omaha and, you know, kind of taking a little pause, reassessing, applying for jobs around here in the nonprofit sector at museums and art institutions. I ended up going back to school for accounting because I had been working for Mercer Management and got some bookkeeping experience that sort of led me back to doing another bachelor's degree. I finished my degree and [now] I'm the finance manager at Film Streams here in Omaha. I also [teach] a sculpture class at UNO and I [taught] a few other classes at Iowa Western, as well when I was finishing up my second undergrad [degree].
[PF] I want to ask you a little bit more about that transition from working as an artist, and for other artists, into this other field where you're working a lot with numbers and finance, but before that, I wanted to ask about your experiences working for other artists. You brought up Michael Rakowitz and I know that you've worked for some other people. How would you characterize the way that you were compensated? There's this idea that we position a few people, at least in the international art market, as these kind of creative geniuses and we don't talk a whole lot about all of the cooperative and collective labor that goes into producing these projects, especially when it comes to teams of studio assistants, and people who work institutions, etc.
[EF] Yeah, and I did work with him very closely for five years. I would travel to other parts of the world with him and his wife and we'd be there for 10 days. Sometimes they'd only come for a part of it, but I would oftentimes be there ahead to finish up fabrication and install and then we'd spend the openings, and the dinners, and the royal dinners together and travel around Sharjah figuring stuff out, so we ended up becoming very close. Oftentimes he'd refer to me as a friend; he has given me art pieces; he would mention wanting to collaborate in the future, so I think it gets gray because a lot of advances that happen in the art world--or any place--often happen through nepotism, or through knowing the right people, or being in the right situation the right time. As a 25 year-old, I was having dinner with the Sheik or a curator at Tate Modern. There's a lot of cultural capital involved or social capital, like connections or networking, that are really kind of invaluable. In terms of how I was paid, I was very young. I didn't really know how to ask for a raise; I didn't really know how to value my time in my work. I think there's this idea that if you don't want it bad enough, someone else is going to want it more. It does end up getting really kind of gray in terms of how you're compensated.
I was in a typical hustle--freelance, constant 1099s--whether I was getting paid through Michael or through the institutions that commissioned the work, I was never really certain like where the money was coming from. I knew it would be there [but] I would also work a three months stint with him and then be like, "Oh great, now I know I'm done and I'm exhausted. Now I need to go apply for more jobs!" You're just constantly balancing and I never got to a place where I full-time with Michael. I also was able to teach and do other projects on the side while I was working for him, but yeah, I also had to wait tables to pay off some student loans. It is the gig economy and hopefully that will change. I don't know what Michael's practice is like now. I think another factor, just to be fair, is that he moved to Chicago and he was just married. He was trying to build a life [so] they could have a family and stuff. He had responsibilities.
[PF] And he was operating in that same gig economy.
[EF] Right, yeah. He's also operating like that and he doesn't know "Is this gonna be the last project or I have the next year planned out but what's next what's and this curator [who] is getting me all his shows, what if they pass away?" There's a lot of unknowns, a lot of uncertainty.
[PF] Did that uncertainty or those instabilities have any bearing on your decision to transition to accounting?
[EF] Yes, definitely! [Laughter] I guess I just sort of reached an age where I was you back here and the jobs that I had been applying for in the Omaha nonprofit art world, at least with just a BFA and an MFA, weren't going to give me, or provide enough for me to live off comfortably as an independent person. I think I'm lucky for having had the experience with Michael and knowing what the hustle was like. There are some great things about it and I was really fortunate to, besides having to wait tables on and off for a couple of years, I was able to support myself in the arts. I was [also] working 70 or 80 hours a week, you know, and I was barely like pushing 50,000 and Chicago. Coming back here [I realized] there are not the same opportunities--I'm not gonna be able to get jobs fabricating; I'm not gonna be able to pick up like aren't handling or installation jobs. There just isn't the same gallery system and there's not the same amount of museum jobs. I kind of realized [that] I love art, I love everything about it, I just don't understand the money. So I ended up doing some bookkeeping and I liked it. In a way it's kind of similar to a studio practice. You can be alone in your own world. It's a lot of focus and attention to detail and you can kind of get lost in it. It's not as much fun to study, that's for sure, but I knew that it was a stable job and it would provide me with financial stability for my future. If I could just make it as an artist, I'll know how to handle money now! [Laughter]
[PF] That's a good skill set to have and probably a skill set that a lot of people engaged in creative fields sort of end up naturally developing by necessity, but one in which we could all use a little more training and specialized knowledge.
[EF] Definitely. I remember one of my first larger freelance jobs in Chicago was to build, design, and paint a billboard for Reckless Records, a record shop I worked at, and I was like, "Wow this is so cool!" It was really fun and exciting and then the end of the year came and I made good money and then it's like, "Oh, I owe the government $600." I didn't know I would have to pay taxes on it. I just didn't know. I'd never had an independent contracting job before and I didn't grow up with examples of that sort of [employment] structure. I just really was oblivious to it and it [learned] through mistake, after mistake, after mistake. With things like getting a 1099 from Germany and [another] from London and [another] from California, I had to go to an accountant to do that stuff. There's no way I could figure out all that. I wanted to ensure that I was doing it right, doing it correctly, [but] I wasn't factoring in the cost of the accountant, or the cost of like healthcare, or the cost of taxes into the rates I was setting. I felt like I was just sort of expected to handle that on my own.
A lot of times too you see, and I don't want to pull the curtain off anything or really reveal the myth, but a lot of people in the art world are getting financial support elsewhere, not just from the freelance jobs they work or the sales they make in a gallery. They're getting subsidized through multiple different [ways] like family inheritance or trust funds or spouses. Sometimes they've had another life and they were [worked] in investments or finance before they ended up in the arts and so they have a different sort of freedom when it comes to how they handle money.
[PF] So are there other kinds of structural either supports or deficiencies, when we're talking about tax law and some of the harder finance principles, that encourage individualization in cultural fields?
[EF] I don't think the tax laws really encourage individualization in the arts. They have a hobby tax, which is what you end up doing for the most part. Unless the majority of your income is coming from sales of your work, you can't really define it as business income. It's gonna be a hobby and so you ever have differing...you can't write off as much money. You don't get as many deductions. There are just different rules to it in terms of how you classify yourself as a sole proprietor or get incorporated or become an LLC. Each have different rules. I never got to that point. I probably should have when I was working for Michael and teaching but again, I just didn't really know and I didn't have the best guidance. I didn't have any guidance. You're also so busy and just kind of learning things that it doesn't make sense. I don't think that the tax laws we have are are set up to promote individualization.
[PF] It's interesting to me because it seems as though those structures that are in place don't encourage individualization, which makes me wonder why more artists and people in cultural fields don't consider collective organizing, or working cooperatively, or employing other strategies that could alleviate some of the financial burden.
[EF] I completely agree with you. It's not set up for individualization. There's this corporate model where you have a full-time employee and the company pays part of their FICA, the company pays a percentage of their premium for health care, dental, and vision, a 401k or 403b, and this integrated structural savings and benefits package for retirement and health that's definitely not built into an individual's plan if they go out on their own. Corporations have kind of set this structure up for the insurance companies and for fiduciary companies, so an individual is likely working with the marketplace and buying it on their own and it's quite expensive because just as if you buy a single item versus a bulk, you can kind of get wholesale [pricing]. Now there's a lot of health averaging companies are doing and health savings plans. A lot of them are switching over. It would be wonderful if either a non-profit, or some sort of organization, would manage health care and retirement plans for artists. You could buy into it and pay a premium. It would really just depend on how many people were actually interested in doing that and how consistent it would be. Maybe you're [working] freelance for a year, and you buy into it, and then you end up getting a full-time job and your [new] employer is going to give you health insurance, then you drop out of it. But I think definitely possible and it would be an advantage.
[PF] Let's say an organization did decide to kind of take on that responsibility and implement some sort of health care policy that artists could buy into and that freelancers could buy into. What would that look like and how would it structurally be different from the freelancers Union, for example?
[EF] I think that you might be able to be a little bit more competitive, possibly. I guess you could just write [the policy] yourself and maybe write it open enough, if it wasn't tied to a union. I think you would have some flexibility. You would definitely want to have a staff for HR stuff. It's really important and those contracts are not always the easiest things to read and get through. With all the fine [print], you want someone who can look through the details, but you also want some checks and balances on that person. I think we would have to have some sort of [oversight] board and a small administrative staff potentially. Then, for all the people buying in, there's got to be some sort of reconciliation [process]. I think you'd also want a lot of transparency in terms of what the premiums people were paying provide. You know a sixty-five year old with pre-existing conditions will have a different premium than a healthy eighteen year old with no pre-existing conditions. I think you would really want to try to do health averaging where the premiums got averaged and everyone who was on an individual plan paid the individual cost and everyone on a family plan paid the family cost so you could kind of balance things out. The idea is that, over time, when that 24 year old becomes a 65 year old with pre-existing conditions, they can still afford to have health care.
I don't know how different it would really be, in my mind, than what is already happening in an HR department at a corporation but I think that it would be be great if the government would for a part of it, or do something like that, but until then, you might be able to get some great patrons or philanthropists to help get the movement started. We found a gap in the ecosystem something's missing. Artists are not getting paid equitably. They aren't provided benefits. It's not the same structure of security that other you see in other fields and I think part of that is the history of art. If you look at, going pretty far back, art has definitely been a space for those who are privileged enough to go study painting, or work in the Royal Court, or the Sistine Chapel. There's a long history of [arts funding from] nobles, patrons, royalty or religious institutions and it really isn't until relatively recently that we have alternative sources for funding and revenue.
[PF] Do you think that's the reason for which artistic and creative labor have been assigned a kind of different monetary value than other forms of labor?
[EF] Yeah, I think that's a huge [part]of it and I also look at Hollywood. Look at the pay difference between an actor that makes it and is worth like billions of dollars or versus the person who's barely getting into second city for a couple years in making like $45,000. That's probably a good situation, or we're thinking of it is a good situation compared to nothing at all or not getting paid. I think that wage report [2010 Census] said 48 or 50 percent of artists made no income off of their work. I don't know why, in arts and entertainment, it seems to be this like feast or famine. There's such a huge gap between making it and not making it.
[PF] There's not a whole lot of middle ground for people to occupy
[EF] Exactly. You can think about that in like other fields. If you go into finance, you can easily get a starting [salary] out of school at $45,000, trading on Wall Street. Then, if you do really well, if you have that one thing that works out, you could make a couple million dollars in a day that set you up for the rest of your life. You do see it in other fields, it's just far more dramatic in the arts. I think the problem that you see in art is that there's no middle ground. You do have these positions at nonprofits where you can work as an education coordinator or in development at a museum or institution and yeah, you're working the arts, but you're also still kind of just doing an admin job. You [see] those same positions at other companies.
[PF] And that's kind of an interesting dichotomy too because I feel like the bulk of the work, or the labor that people who have those positions produce, looks similar, like you said, to the type of labor that people produce in a lot of other industries, but it's compensated very differently. I think it's interesting too, when we talk about wage disparity in cultural institutions, to acknowledge that those wage gaps really preclude a lot of people from taking jobs in the arts, specifically women, people of color, and those who have been denied access historically.
[EF] Definitely. There are huge gaps. You look at the spreadsheet that's been going around listed in the articles. A co-worker of mine actually showed it to me this summer and now I've been seeing it in the media. You look at what an executive director at a big museum can make--easily six digits [while] someone in the education department is making...
[PF] Barely four? Just kidding. It's more than than. [Laughter]
[EF] I mean, yeah. I know but it's still very close to a living wage, if you consider that $15 an hour. But I don't know how you live on $15 an hour in New York, unless you don't sleep.
[PF] You don't! You move.
[EF] I mean, totally. Another article that I read on the Alternate Currents blog, which I think is so wonderful--the blog and the articles that are posted--was about transparency with salaries and with posting salary ranges and positions that are available. I think that's great because if you're working at an institution and you know you're know trying to move up and coming from a position that's like $40,000 [a year], and you're thinking you'd only ask for $50,000 or $55,000 but [you see a new position posted] at like $65,000, at least you know that's the range and that's what they've budgeted for. I think like growing up as a woman born in the early 80s, I wasn't taught to ask for things. Tread lightly don't make waves, be lucky, be happy, always be nice, always smile, always be polite. At the end of the day, that really doesn't get you anywhere.
[PF] I hadn't considered that. Maybe that social conditioning makes that prestige job mentality easier to swallow or internalize?
[EF] Oh yeah, definitely. I feel like my experience in Michael's studio, where I was manning--you know, at first it was just me doing the fabrication and then it got to a point where we needed to produce a lot more work, so I'd hire other assistants and train them and get them going. I did find that the males just out of art school were more comfortable asking for money, for more money, than than I was or had been.
[PF] I bet we could dig up research that indicates similar phenomenon across a bunch of different sectors.
[EF] Yeah, and that's another interesting thing. You see this inequity within the arts specifically but I do think it is echoing a lot of other fields. I think it's more dramatic and you see it a lot more severely [in the arts] but I was listening to NPR the other day and they were talking about larger corporations trying to switch more into a gig economy with more temporary workers. I forget the term they [used].
[PF] Contingent workers?
[EF] It wasn't quite that, but it's that's exactly what it is. They're able to hire someone and not treat them as an employee, so they don't have to pay benefits, they don't have to pay FICA, they don't have to pay taxes, and then there's no repercussion. If they fire them, they don't have to have a reason to fire them, and then they don't have to pay unemployment. You know, it just doesn't seem like [that's] going to be better for the country as a whole or for the world as a whole. These corporations are making more money and workers are not having their basic needs taken care of, or they're constantly struggling to find more work, or they don't have [job] security and could be laid off at any moment. It doesn't help them be more active economically. It doesn't help them be more active [members of] a society. How do you give back and contribute if you don't know when your next paycheck is [coming]. Maybe you had a good year and made $50,000 dollars. What's gonna happen in the next three years? You can't go out and buy a new car [for example] or give to a nonprofit. I don't know. Peter, what if you could choose an economic structure for the future? Would you choose socialism?
[PF] That's a good question. I'm not sure I know.
[EF] I don't know either.
[PF] I don't know if there's any good answer because the thing is that all alternatives are pre-figurative politics and the way in which we're viewing them is constrained by our current framework. So we're seeing potential alternatives work in response to Late Capitalism.
[EF] Definitely. I don't know much about or have a lot of experience with coop structures, but I think one of your questions was [about] the benefit for collective organizing within arts and culture and more structural support. Why [don't we look at it] like a microcosm? Why aren't more artists getting together and buying buildings together collectively, at least to build some equity or to have affordable living and work space. Rent is just such a huge life operational expense that if there's a way--and I think it's hard to just do it--but if people did it together, it would just kind of lessen the burden and everyone can gain some benefits. I also researched CDFIs, Community Development Financial Institutions, which are financial institutions set up to help people making lower incomes to get set up to buy home. We have eight in Nebraska and I just learned about a housing one here in Omaha. It's the only one in Omaha. I think that maybe one thing I would say is that there probably are some resources out there people aren't utilizing or don't know about and as a collective, should get better about researching and learning about them, and then sharing information.
There could also just be some different standards and some different [that determine] salaries. I remember being a young marketing student in high school and reading about Ben and Jerry's a rule that the highest paid employee isn't paid more than five percent more than the lowest paid employee. I don't know if that goes for their board or other things, but there is a way that you can set standards and write codes that address the distribution of wealth.
[PF] So maybe we'll wrap up okay one last question: when you think about your work in cultural fields, your history and all the jobs you've worked leading up to this point in your life, what does job security look like for you now as opposed to when you were 25 years old working for other artists?
[EF] Job security now, for me, is so much different than when I was 25 and a lot of it is because I have an accounting degree, I have a business degree. It is a very flexible marketable degree and combining it with my background arts [allows me to] actually have a real niche, in a way. That's part of the reason I did it. They always eat accountants! [Laughter] You can always get a job, so yeah, I'm not set up if I lost my job tomorrow and I definitely need a lot more experience. I really like the situation I'm in now and I do feel like I am far more aware of planning and [more] disciplined about putting monthly savings away and attacking debt and setting up retirement. A lot of it has to do with learning stuff for the past 10 or 12 years, making mistakes and learning from them, and then also having some better examples and some better role models, not just from the art world, but from the business world.
[PF] That's important, that kind of cross-sector learning.
[EF] I definitely feel more job security, but who knows! I think that everyone has a different relationship with art and a different level of concern about finances. For some people, money isn't gonna stop them from continuing to be involved in arts. I do think it's good that we're addressing it because it is a problem for a lot of people.
[PF] I agree, yeah. Thank you for spending your time with us today.
[EF] Thank you!