AC Discussion | Doing Well / Doing Good: Anti-Capitalism for Artists
On March 29th, arts workers Dawaune Lamont Hayes, Parker Krieg, Bilgesu Sisman, and Jared Packard got together for a conversation that examines how artists are aligning their practices with anti-capitalist orientations, and the movement lineages they come from, to cultivate relationships, rest, and regenerative economies. Watch the full conversation, or read through the transcript below to find links to additional resources, and share your thoughts in the comments section.
Title of Discussion: Doing Well/Doing Good: Anti-Capitalism for Artists
Panelist 1: Dawaune Lamont Hayes
Panelist 2: Parker Krieg
Paenlist 3: Bilgesu Sisman
Moderator: Jared Packard
Date of Discussion: March 29th, 2023
List of Acronyms: [DLH] = Dawaune Lamont Hayes; [PK] = Parker Krieg; [BS] = Bilgesu Sisman; [JP] = Jared Packard; [PF] = Peter Fankhauser
Transcript
[PF] Welcome everybody. I think we’re going to go ahead and get started. My name is Peter. I work here at Amplify and it’s great to have you all here for tonight’s Alternate Currents panel discussion, Doing Well/Doing Good: Anti Capitalism for Artists with our panelists Dawaune Lamont Hayes, Parker Krieg, Bilgesu Sisman and our contributing moderator Jared Packard. They’ll introduce themselves to you in just a minute.
For anybody who’s joining us for the first, Alternate Currents is one of Amplify's cornerstone programs that centers creative research, critical discussion, and collective learning to shine a light on artist-led change. It includes this discussion series, a blog, and a working group of ten artists who help shape the program and move it forward.
And tonight’s discussion is one part of a year-long investigation of how regenerative economies and alternative modes of exchange might bring about more just and equitable futures, not just for artists but for everyone.
Our panelists will be in conversation with each other for 40 or 45 minutes before we open the floor to questions, but the Q&A and chat functions will be active throughout so please feel free to share your thoughts anytime.
I’ll also mention quickly that a video and transcript of tonight’s discussion with links to additional articles and more resources will be posted to the Alternate Currents Blog in a couple weeks. You’ll be able to find it, and a lot of other great discussions like this one, on our website at amplifyarts.org.
So, thank you all again for being here. We really appreciate your participation and willingness to engage in critical discussion with us. Thank you to the Sherwood Foundation whose support makes Alternate Currents programming possible. And with that, I’ll pass it over to Jared.
[JP] Thank you, Peter, and Amplify Arts. You guys do such important work in terms of facilitating critical discourse in Omaha and the region. I’m grateful to be here and to be assembled with this motley crew. and looking forward to jumping into this conversation. To start off with introductions, I'm Jared Packard. I am an artist, a painter, and a curator. I'm based in Omaha where I've been for last four years and I'm really interested in questions around capitalism as they intersect with our practices and the way that capitalism forges, but also unmakes, identities. I think artists are able through those questions really nimbly and they’re uniquely adept to have those conversations.
I'll pass it to Dawaune. Do you want to tell us where you're from, a little bit about your practice, and what you're hoping to get out of today's conversation?
[DLH] Absolutely. Hello, everyone. My name is Dawaune Lamont Hayes. I was born and raised in Omaha and I'm currently in Chicago. I’m a visual and performing artist, graphic designer, and photographer. A lot of my work is based in the community and responding to community needs. So, I'm really interested and talking about abundance and regenerative economies and taking a spiritual approach to address some of these disparities.
[JP] Awesome. Thank you. Bilgesu, would you introduce yourself?
[BS] Yeah, hi, everyone. My name is Bilgesu. I'm from Istanbul, Turkey originally, and I'm currently working as the Programming Director at Film Streams. I'm also a screenwriter. My interest in the topic tonight goes back to my organizing practices based in models of participatory and direct democracy, an abolitionist framework, as well as the idea of the commons. I've been part of multiple organizations and efforts to bring those ideas into practice in the university as well as in like places like the Industrial Workers of the World chapter in Chicago. So, I'm looking forward to tonight's topic, because it's been something that I've been thinking about quite a bit, especially with regards to art exhibition and the role of nonprofits in either furthering, strengthening the tie between art and wealth or severing it.
[JP] How about you, Parker?
[PK] My name is Parker Krieg. I currently teach in the Exploratory and Interdisciplinary Studies program here at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. My background is in English and Environmental Humanities. So, my area of practice is in academia, the university for now. I started thinking more seriously about the politics of culture as a musician. I was in a DIY anarchist-oriented hardcore band in the early aughts, and we toured internationally. This is at the tail end, of like anti-globalization movement. And in places like Italy and Germany, we would play squats and social centers. It was there that I was exposed to autonomist Marxism as a kind of living body of critique and analysis of practices of production in different areas. So, I tried to bring that back to my work in academia historicizing ideas about nature and, as an instructor, introducing students to different disciplines and ways of knowing the world. I’m glad to be here.
[JP] We have such a spectrum of experiences and perspectives here! I’m excited to see where our conversation goes. As I was reflecting on tonight’s discussion, and I thought about my childhood. I grew up internationally because my parents did international development work, which is this opaque term that can encompass public health services, but also economic growth. It’s presented as charitable service to the world and only later in life, moving back to the States, did I realize that they were just spreading capitalism across the globe. Their jobs were funded by the American government and their work was to help other countries become more capitalistic, so that they could be better trading partners on a global stage. It was this weird inversion when I fully understood the context of what I thought my childhood was about.
I say that because capitalism is a complicated, complex thing. There's a lot of countries that wish for an economy like the United States’ economy. And yet, we are dealing with deep injustices and political unrest and, not to be melodramatic, but the end of the world with climate disaster. So, the stakes couldn't be higher. To dial it into the personal, I'm curious to hear a little bit about each of your practices, and the ways that capitalism has shaped how and what you create.
[DLH] I can start.
I'm in Chicago, like I mentioned earlier. I moved here in December of last year. Before that, I lived in Omaha for most of my life and I would say I started working as an artist within the last 10 years or so. And I started to figure out what my practice was. I always drew and did all these things, but I also realized that to me facilitation work and engaging with people about what they want in their environment, is part of my creative practice. I started leading a lot of urban design studies and conversations in North Omaha and responded to those findings in journalism and writing. And then I started NOISE Omaha and with that, I learned I wanted to connect people. All of a sudden, I was running a nonprofit because that was the avenue that was available to me. As soon as that happened, I was like, “Whoa, the nonprofit industrial complex is real.” And there's a lot of stipulations and relationships and politics. That help me look more closely at its foundation, which is essentially legal money laundering for corporations. Maybe that’s a little abrasive for some, but you know, here's corporate profit, gained through an extractive means, and funneled into a foundation for a tax write off and a pat on the back to say, “Look at all the good we're doing.” In reality, that good would have been done had those extractive practices not existed in the first place.
When I started connecting those dots, I was in the heart of North Omaha, talking with Black people constantly about homeownership, land trusts, cooperative economies, and the things that we that we desperately need when all around us, we have these machinations of rapid unilateral decision making that discredit community involvement. When the Downton Omaha library demolition conversation started last year, and I realized that Heritage Services and nonprofits with CEO boards were making these decisions, I was like, “Oh, wow.” And they're telling us “You should be grateful that this is even happening because of these great, generous donors.” The truth is, we wouldn't need them if the wealth in this country was more equally distributed and if people were compensated justly. They're not generous. They’re actively contributing to creating that imbalance.
All of that to say, I started to find myself kind of ostracized from the spaces that I was working in until my irregular income essentially evaporated because what I was saying was contrary to what a lot of institutions were comfortable protecting. That’s where their money comes from, so they turn a blind eye to certain things. And I understand that. At the same time, if we recognize that there's intrinsic harm in this, and that our public service institutions are only maintaining a system of inequity, then what are we actually doing? So then, when I applied for jobs, I didn't get calls back because those institutions are trying to maintain their hierarchies rather than disrupt or reevaluate them.
That led me to donation-based art. I started creating stickers, I started making posters. These are things that I've been doing for a while, but I’m investing more time in them now because if I can create an artifact that is symbolic and representative of who I am, and the things that I believe in, and if people are interested in having those artifacts around them, then I’m going to make them with the utmost integrity and be transparent about the process that brought me here.
Since coming to Chicago, I've been able to connect with other artists doing similar work. I've been following the work of the Theaster Gates, who's based here on the South Side, and his practice of redirecting our capital and using it for direct reinvestment in South Side districts through the Rebuild Foundation, which is a nonprofit. He's also a professor at University of Chicago, where he works with students and the challenges they face with the university system. I've been able to do similar work with Creighton University, my alma mater--talks about North Omaha and redlining and they pay me for that time. So, I've been able to find some interesting channels where I’m being compensated and supported but all the while I'm also asking, with the capital I do receive, what am I investing in. I've stayed away from conventional investment models, because they're not reflective of my personal values. Instead, I’m looking to mutual aid and cooperative structures to hold the energy and the capital that I'm able to invest.
All of that's a long way of saying the pressures of capitalism have shaped my experiences quite a lot. There is struggle. I have to learn how to do a lot with a little, but that's also the work of an artist. I really believe in an abundance mentality and that we're being prepared to receive things in a different way right now. That’s my spiritual practice intersecting with my creative practice. Wealth isn't just money in the bank. True wealth comes from relationships and community. It comes from having your basic needs met. Before being beholden to the capitalist system we know today, people were able to meet those needs in community. That was their first insurance and that’s the position I'm coming from.
[JP] Thank you. There's a lot to tease out there. What really struck me was the irony that organizations couldn't uplift your voice, even if they appreciate what you were saying, just to maintain the status quo. That cuts to the core of the complexities of how the system actually functions.
[BS] To build on that and maybe bridge to Parker, I came to the US to enroll in the graduate program at DePaul University in Chicago. There way graduate students were paid was through a teaching stipend. So, I was thrown into the adjunct system pretty early on. For those of you who might not be familiar, those are temporary positions without a guarantee of job security, usually without benefits, usually in an overextension of your time and capacity. So, for five years or so, I was part of organizing efforts to get some kind of health care for grad students at the university. We had some wins but we lacked a solid enough base of support to unionize, because of the barriers that the university administration put in our way. With the pandemic, my shifts took the form of a career pivot because I realized that the job market for academia is very bleak and I was feeling very disconnected from the general public in my work. So I decided to almost build from scratch and go into the film industry, not on the production side, but more the behind the scenes side like development, as well as analysis and criticism.
My credentials weren't worth shit, to be honest, when I was trying to make that switch. It sounds really weird now, but I did six unpaid internships within the span of a year just to build up that experience. I was able to like switch to a part time job from there but it was at a startup that was using 150 unpaid interns per semester for the kind of work that they needed to get done. It felt really weird to be in a position where I made it out of that pool but was still swimming in a system that perpetuated that kind of like inequity.
Then, my move to Omaha came as a response to accepting a job at Film Streams. I was really looking forward to it and no longer dealing with that part of capitalism but, as Dawaune was saying, the nonprofit industrial complex reared its ugly head. There have been parts of my job that I really enjoyed and project I'm proud to have spearheaded, like a program that gave space for nonprofits and other community organizations to host events at our space with financial support, paying honorariums for speakers and whatnot. But I feel like film, the art form film itself, being an industry, even from its very, like early days, makes it complicated. Even in an arthouse space, even indie film, which started as a reaction to the mainstream film industry, capitalism has been able to integrate it into its own system.
On the side of like being a creator, to get a film made, you need investment. That's either going to come from some kind of grant funding, which is meager and very competitive, or you need capital investment, which is, again, almost impossible, because people are looking to invest in things that they know are going to make profit. You're not able to demonstrate that unless you're not taking any risks and you're able to build on things that have already been successful. So, all of that, I guess, describes the way that I have been working within the confines of this economic system.
[PK] Bilgesu, you're giving me flashbacks to my time in grad school at the University of Oregon. It has one of the oldest graduate employee unions in the country. I think it was founded in the early 70s. In my six years there, during one of the bargaining sessions with the University, the University tried to essentially take over the health insurance plan that that the union itself, the graduate employees, had managed for a decade or more. And of course, the University wanted to manage that and cut it down. They also wanted to strip out parental leave, and medical leave from the bargaining side, which all the other state employees of Oregon received. So, there were a number of these issues. Because of that, they stretched it out over two years and that resulted in one of the longest graduate employee strikes in the country, up to that point. Eventually, we won but that was not the first time I saw examples of what’s now called the neoliberal university, the post-welfare state university, that is increasingly gutted of state funding, which has all kinds of belt-tightening implications--cuts to the humanities, cuts to education that doesn’t directly produce an object of value. I think that relates to the conversations we're having here about how artists can explore new forms of value creation, and kind of valorize forms of value production in areas that don't often get recognized like gendered forms of labor, environmental labor, and creative labor.
That's one point I would highlight in terms of capitalism impacting practices. But to make another point, during my time there, I was also part of a student housing cooperative across three houses with 80 plus students. I was focused for three years on making sure students in that housing cooperative had all their needs met, and as a conflict resolution coordinator, I saw all the ways that students were really struggling just to just to make through school, even the ones with scholarships. That's also what brought me here to Omaha. UNO’s Exploratory Studies program is precisely for making resources available to vulnerable students and showing them the broad picture of what education can provide. But, at the same time, that's the frontline of what some consider the scam of the contemporary University. Working within that institution and being in the front of the classroom, you have access to things that students don’t, and you give them as many opportunities as you can find in your position, but it's still It comes down to that neoliberal transformation of public institutions writ large that goes back to what Dawaune mentioned. Public institutions are increasingly pushing elements of the social safety net onto private individuals, private organizations. We expect artists to somehow be social workers now and to do work that they shouldn't be expected to do, necessarily. So, I think that's the connection there with my experience in the university and in the nonprofit world.
[BS] Could I just add one thing to that? I think what also connects the three of us is witnessing the ways in which the private funding model is basically taking away tax dollars that would go into public goods, such as universities, and public support for the arts. I was doing some research last week on this question and found that up to 74% of every donated is tax subsidized. That means any money that wealthy people put into these specific foundations, or donor advised funds, is taking away from what would have otherwise been tax money that pays for public goods.
[JP] As all of you were sharing, something that stood out to me was that in each of your accounts, there was a refusal, whether that was through strike or pivoting to a different career or leaving the city, there a rejection. And I think the deviousness of capitalism would be to frame that as failure in its privileging of productivity and efficiency and output. I'm interested in spending a moment to reframe failure as a generative practice, rather than something that is hurtful or harmful. How does that land with you all?
[DLH] Absolutely. I think to be generative or regenerative or to heal, you have to reject things that are not conducive to those states of being. That can be difficult when you've got to eat and pay rent. And that's where the compulsory nature of capitalism happens, where your basic needs are tied to capital. But I’ve found that through rejection, I’m learning what to protect. I'm going to focus on what my wellness looks like and be fine saying that doesn't involve this environment right now. I found that I've been able to put myself in environments that are more generative and have meaningful conversations about investment and design and our and our place in it when I’m working in community.
I don't own a car, you know. there are a lot of things I do a lot of things I don't have. I've learned to adapt, but I have to opt out of lots of things in order to survive. Like, I can live off $50 for the next so many days but there are things I won’t be able to do. That has also pushed me into looking into food pantries and SNAP benefits. Why doesn't everyone get these things? Why don't we make sure everyone has food to eat? Once I was able to say no to certain things and turn my attention to others, I realized there's infrastructure that does exist, but it's not being supported, or funded because capitalism is a very exclusionary practice. It's all about how much can a few people accumulate, and how they hoard that wealth, rather than seeing the planet and our experiences as human beings as collective abundance and something to be shared.
I think with the pandemic and everything that’s followed, we're starting to realize we don't have as much community as we need. When things start to break down, when banks are busting, we realize that insurance companies aren't going to save us. Banks aren't going to save us. Social media companies aren’t going to save us. It's going to be your neighbor; it's going to be your family; it's going to be your community. That is one of our most valuable forms of wealth. There's a great book called True Wealth that talks about mapping our life systems and ecological systems. It looks at mycelium, animals, water molecules, and brings that all the way back to who we are as human beings. Wealth doesn't have to be stolen or extracted or garnered through terror. We can generate wealth through healing land, healing each other, cleaning water. There are actually startups looking at how they can use the blockchain to encourage forms of remediation and cleaning up water sites and thinking about how can doing good can mean being taken care of. Instead of the inverse where the more you extract, the more you get back, the inverse it true and the more you give back, the more that you get. You see that indigenous cosmologies and ancestral practices. That’s what people have been teaching for thousands of years and now we've finally come to a moment of reckoning.
[BS] And it's no surprise that this is the case, because capitalism, as the specific economic organization of relations of production, is about breaking down our collective capacity for action. It uses our collaborative capacities at work to further the creation of surplus value through extraction. So, when we're talking about your question, Jared, and those pivots being seen as failure, it can be seen as failure, or it can be seen as success, but it's also always going to be mapped onto the individual in this neoliberal ideology. It's your failure, or it's your success as an individual, which goes hand-in-hand with this absolute expectation, and maybe even the necessity of our present moment, to constantly market and commodify ourselves in order to succeed on the labor market. The conditions of that reality constantly individualize us, isolate us, set barriers to finding community and fostering community. You know, a strike is a community; a food pantry is a community; finding like solace in like your loved ones outside of productive relationships is a community. But it is really hard to find those communities and to create those communities because rent is expensive. We're being kicked out urban spaces, which are increasingly just playgrounds for the rich. We're not able to connect to each other because the majority of our time is taken away from us and dedicated to sustaining our being and working so we can have shelter and food etc. We come home and we're drained. We don't have the time or the energy, and sometimes even the will, reach out to the people who are closest to us. Your partner will be sitting at the other end of the couch, and they're looking at their phone just trying to chill out because tomorrow is another workday.
And it’s no coincidence capitalism privileges the conditions which isolate us from our communities. It is not only that the working class is not organized enough, but the capitalist class is actually extremely well organized, because they are constantly trying to either uphold the status quo, or strengthen it, to continue these exploitative extractive relationships where we are pushed further and further into isolation while they are further and further conglomerated and condensed into the minimum number of like stakeholders that get to like control and determine the lives and livelihoods of most of the world's population.
[JP] I don't know how I could follow that up, except to maybe ask, why are artists turning to alternative economies and regenerative economies now in a much more direct and explicit way?
[PK] I’ve been thinking about how artists in the past have responded to capitalism, and I've always been more drawn to artists and writers who emphasize complicity with things. They're always going to have more interesting critiques than the ones who start by trying to extract themselves from the situation. In the past, we have satire and the reappropriation of consumer images in art as a form of movement building. And now we have the example of something like NFTs and crypto and artists actively engaging some of the more advanced sectors of the financial economy and pushing that further to take what those sectors are doing with the value form itself. Crypto is sort of pulling apart in different ways use value, exchange value, and then speculative investment value, and forcing these digital objects to operate differently through smart contracts or staking mechanisms, that Dawaune was talking about. I'm interested in those sorts of complicities as a critical practice as well.
[JP] That makes me think of Clement Greenberg, the mid-century American critic who talks about artists as tied to patrons and the wealthy elite by an umbilical cord of gold. It’s so good, you can't cut it. I think there's some truth to that even still, but as you just pointed out, Parker, I think it’s far more complex now. To that point, you’ve all touched on some of the alternatives to capitalism and I want to give some space to flesh those ideas what excites you about them.
[BS] I’m very much interested in like neighborhood councils, workers councils, which then translate into community wealth initiatives like land trusts and housing co-ops. I think these are operative models worth experimenting with and I don't feel like we need to reinvent the wheel. There are successful practices that have been going on for years now, like Cooperation Jackson, that I think artists could really take inspiration from.
A little note on that previous question of why now: I feel like it's because we cannot deny the fact that the way art distribution is now organized, like a musician making a fraction of a cent when you listen to their album on Spotify, is making people realize that we literally cannot depend on big corporations to get our art out and make any kind of like living. It's beyond exploitative at this point where creative production is, on the one hand, exalted in ideology, like these individual geniuses or whatever, but when it comes to actual compensation, literally nothing is given. Audiences are also accustomed to thinking they should get this for free, because that's been the model. Anything that could sustain artists, public funding for example, is rare, if not gone altogether. People are in dire situations, and that's why it feels like urgent to try something else. What's currently happening is not working at all. Not at all.
[DLH] I'm really dedicating this year to traveling to different communities in cities, where I have friends and spending time in those environments to see what those networks are and how they operate. A good friend of mine, my college roommate, lives in Gainesville, Florida. And we were talking about starting a consulting practice and how that might look and came to the term ‘integrative sustainability.’ Sustainability, as a concept, is nice but when we think about is an integrative, what does that mean? Well, why not start with the self? Where are you? Who are you? What do you value? What are your habits? What do you actively practice on a daily basis? What are your rituals? What do you feed yourself? How much water do you drink? When you discard something, where does it go? Why do you throw it away? Could you compost it? Could you recycle it? We talk so much about shifting responsibility away from individual actions to corporations and big polluters, and I absolutely agree. At the same time, we also need to address our own actions and decisions that affect our communities.
So, you go from people to place, your neighborhood. What is your connection within your neighborhood? Do you know your neighbors? Do you facilitate interactions? Do you go to gatherings? When you're at those gatherings, what kind of conversations are you having? Are you just complaining about the workday? Or are you talking about the connected parts that inform a broader sense of place and space, and therefore planet? There are things happening in Jerusalem right now that are nuts. I have friends who are there, and I'm not, but what I can do is pay attention to how I'm responding to this information, witnessing how they’re showing up in the streets to protest. That happened because those interpersonal relationships were leveraged into revolutionary ones. That helps me remember to ask, if all the power goes out of my block, who am I responding to? Who's Responding to me? Who's checking in on me? Do I know? I think that’s integrative sustainability. I invite us to all think of the relationships we have with ourselves as individuals, and how that translates to our relationships with the people around us--our coworkers, our family, our friends--and our place in our immediate environment.
Groups like BFF Omaha started with an individual and now as an organization, it’s worked to secure cultural district designation for Benson and it’s turning it into something that sustains and supports artists. I feel like that's a good example of a nonprofit leveraging community and creativity to gain more ground rather than cede it. That's what a lot of where my mind goes.
I'm also doing bartering and making donation-based work. It was 66 cents each to make one of these stickers. You can give whatever its value is to you. That helps me do is sustain myself and buy food and pay for my transit card, so I can continue to be present for conversations like this one. So I'm going to end by saying that you have more influence on yourself and in your community than you think you do. Those networks are some of our most powerful ways of creating outside, or transmuting the energy received from capitalism into new systems, new paradigms, or old systems and old paradigms.
[PK] I moved back to Omaha in the middle of the pandemic. Before then, I was in Helsinki, Finland. And, and so I felt like, really, it was just this last year that I was actually here. So, I want to turn more of my writing and my energy to contributing to discussions like this and making my work as an academic more useful to an actual community and giving up that ideal of a tenure track position, which really doesn't exist anymore, and stopping to stop writing for that, to make my own labor and put it towards different ends. Not overthrowing capitalism necessarily, but maybe helping to build some community here.
[BS] I’d like to make a very small like addition to what you were saying, Parker. I’m saying this to myself too, but I think we should be nurturing our courage and standing up for ourselves and for our fellows. We should remember our work, the work involved in art. We should remember both our fellow human and non-human beings and risk going against the grain. I'm trying to be less cowardly in my life. I think that's like one of my ultimate goals, to preserve my integrity, my dignity, and become more courageous as I age. I feel like that's really like what makes life worth living to me. We should remember to foster care for each other, especially when we're at our worst, whether that’s the financial worst, the emotional worst, mental worst. We ought to be good to each other and be there for each other as much as we can.
[JP] As the title of this talk is “Anti-Capitalism for Artists.” And there is something about, in a certain kind of art world, the genius individualism of an artist being commodified and packaged and sold as this keen insight into the world and how it functions. And unfortunately, I think that's what most people think the art world is. And yes, I think artistic practice requires a certain kind of individual vision and a unique perspective, but I wonder more about how creative practice can embrace care and community and alternative modes of exchange that don't fall under this capitalist Ayn Rand-style rugged individualism out to conquer the world. That was a little bit of a ramble, but to tie it back to the title of this discussion, I'm curious to hear your thoughts about the responsibility of artists in a capitalist society?
[DLH] You know, I think about this a lot. Should we even be making objects? I think I'm moving from objects to artifacts, and thinking a lot about how the things that we are making right now are symbolic, and representative of the change and the transformations that we are creating. I've had to really come back to myself and remind myself that I am always worthy. I am always abundant, no matter what. My account may be negative millions and this and they want this, and they want that, but those numbers and those documents aren't me. They're reflective of a system that doesn't recognize the value that is intrinsic to me, and the relationships that I create. And so, I come back to my own personal spiritual practice in my artwork. What are my foundations? What is my ritual? How do I share my work when I’m in a place to share it? When am I in a place to give it away? It doesn't have to be a big grandiose dissertation or fit into art world vernacular. Just ask yourself what it means to you and share it. Then you'll find other people who believe in what you're doing and why you do it. That’s how I've been able to personally move my income streams and receive them from people who truly believe in what I'm doing rather than having to appease a system that I don't want to be a part of.
[BS] I don't have a lot to add here, but a thought experiment popped into my head: What would an art strike look like? What if tomorrow, every creative worker stopped creating? What would that world look like? And what would that mean? For people who create and for people who seek out creative work to experience it and have it in their lives? I'll just leave it as a question and something to about, a little prompt for a social sci-fi story.
[PK] That makes me think of the question about the role of artists in a capitalist system. Maybe it's to provide some sort of model, or many models, for other kinds of knowledge workers, care workers, environmental workers, in terms of how they relate to their labor, and in recognizing those differences and similarities across different sectors of society, maybe artists work to coordinate labor resistance. How can we foreground the existence of a commons, while also emphasizing the fact that artists need to be compensated for what they do, what they contribute?
[JP] Those are really beautiful thoughts and questions to round out our conversation. It’s also a reminder that so much of this feels so daunting, and to talk about the scale and scope of how systems impact us as individuals and as communities. I find, for myself, my hands feel clammy when I start to think about what I am even going to begin to do. So, to reground ourselves in collectivity and community is optimism for what we can offer to each other and to ourselves. I think it's a lovely way to wrap up our conversation. Thank you to the three of you for your generosity and thoughtfulness tonight!
Bye, everyone. Take care.
*This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
About the Panelists:
Dawaune Lamont Hayes: Dawaune was born, raised, and loved on the land of the Umoⁿhoⁿ, Omaha Nation, The People Who Move Against the Current. They are a Regenerative Artist and Cultural Curator who works at the intersections of natural expression, historical reconciliation, and restorative futurism. They explore visual and performing arts, from burlesque dance to digital photography and collage to visualize their experience and those of their ancestors. As a Spatial Practitioner, they believe in helping people reconnect to the natural world and embracing the innate joy of being an animal in space, without the limiting burdens of consumerist modernity.
They live by the mantra “Clean Air, Clean Water, Good Food, Good Weed, Best Friends.” Wherein they find peace in the essentials of life and symbiosis with people, place, and planet.
Their photography documents young people, especially Black Men, in relationship to Mother Nature in urban environments while finding peace between the concrete.
You can learn more about Dawaune’s work at www.dawaune.one.
Parker Krieg: C. Parker Krieg teaches in the Exploratory Studies program and English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He previously taught in the Global Studies program at UN-Lincoln, and held a postdoctoral fellowship in environmental humanities at the University of Helsinki in Finland, affiliated with the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science. His research and teaching focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture, environmental justice, and cultural memory studies.
Bilgesu Sisman: Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, Bilgesu is a writer, researcher, educator, and film programmer with a background in philosophy and a deep love for cinema. Bilgesu’s work as a creative writer and filmmaker focuses on female-driven narratives, often in the form of psychological and philosophical mysteries, thrillers and fantastical fiction that meditate on our encounters with the unknown - whether personal, existential, or socio-political. As a PhD candidate in Philosophy at DePaul University, Chicago, her thesis explores the political history of necroviolence (i.e. posthumous corporal violence) and argues for its formative role in state power. In addition to political philosophy, Bilgesu taught courses on subjectivity, psychoanalysis, affects, memory, trauma, and film theory. She currently works as the Interim Programming Director at Film Streams in Omaha, Nebraska.
Jared Packard: Jared Packard is an artist and curator based in Omaha, NE where he is the Exhibitions Manager at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Packard completed his BA at Clark University and his MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has curated the NEA-funded unLOCK: Merging Art and Industry, Lockport, IL; an urban curatorial experiment, Stumble Chicago; the nationally traveling exhibition, ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection; and (Re)Flex Space, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL. He has shown his work at ADDS DONNA, Chicago, IL; Baltimore Gallery, Detroit, MI; Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL; Centre International d’Art Contemporain, Pont-Aven, France; Hillyer Art Space, Washington, D.C.; Shiltkamp Gallery, Worcester, MA.