Re: Follow-up

Hi █████████,

Recognizing the limitations of your capacities is important, and I am grateful that you did so before undertaking the position. I find it also miserable that artists and cultural workers are paid so poorly in artist-run positions, and my project is an attempt to draw visiblity to this crisis. It should be illegal for an organization to operate with staff who are paid far less than their on-paper hours worked, but the way that the current funding system is set up, it creates a void where an hourly wage should be, replacing it with the lure of project after project grant. I agree with you wholeheartedly that you should be paid properly for the work that you already do, rather than heaping more onto your full plate. With regards to my own project, and the position, however, I think that you are falling on your own sword without a complete picture of the situation. For this, I feel truly disappointed.

I speak for myself and don’t want to implicate the Gallery, but your message contains several assumptions that I take objection to, primarily because they deny or disregard my own status in the project as an artist.

I am also precarious, poor, and struggling to support myself. This project constitutes a major component of my own living expenses for this year, notwithstanding that I am also working to realize this project while my own income from it is less than half of what I budgeted to pay the prospective employee. 

As things currently stand, we have no viable candidate for the position. Your withdrawal, rather than making my decision easier, as you imagined, actually jeopardizes the possibility for the project to transpire, and consequently my own livelihood. I find a source of bitterness in your repeated claims during the interview that you aim to support artists, when you ignore that being involved in this project itself is a way of doing just that: supporting myself (a trans queer artist), yourself, and Teresa, as we are all practising artists with different marginal identities and insufficient income.

You also recommend that I hire a less experienced person. To that I want to say that the “other candidate “ was not younger, less experienced, or more marginalized, and that they also declined, leaving us in the current position of having no candidate. The project, as an art project, is not a training position. It was not constructed to make more work for FCG staff, which training someone less experienced would require. As an artist I object to your presumption that you know what my work needs better than I do, and your suggestion that I hire someone with less experience seems to imply that.

It would have been far more respectful of my artistic work, and of the time and energy of FCG staff, had you expressed your ambivalence earlier and directly.

As it stands, the open call led to a dead end and I am uncertain about the future of the project. Obviously this is not your fault, but I want you to know the context and impact of your decision since you have framed the situation for yourself in such a way that is inaccurate to the actual state of affairs, while the consequences of your decision are real, and have caused me significant stress.