Autonomy, an independent think tank, published recently a report about ‘artist as-worker’ in the UK, emphasizing notions of “artistic labour, and highlighting the sector’s interaction with wider trends, such as the gig economy and marketization in education.”

Covid did not produce precarity, exploitation and inequality in the art world out of thin air. Rather, it exposed, amplified and accentuated a set of pervasive trends that have long characterized the labour conditions of artistic workers in the UK. All too often, these have gone under appreciated, under-explored – insufficiently criticized – by those both within and outside the industry. Artistic labour seems to be easily forgotten.

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“Despite tough lessons learned after Hurricane Harvey, most artists and arts and history organizations in the Houston area are still unprepared for the next disaster,” states a new guide by the Houston Arts Alliance designed to help local artists and nonprofits on how to become resilient now.

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Grantmakers for Effective Organizations recently released a publication that, as the website explains, “builds on the principles outlined in Strengthening Nonprofit Capacity and will take a critical look at the ways in which capacity-building practices can be grounded in approaches that acknowledge and center racial equity.”

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The Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) announced recently the inaugural Zoo Labs Fund grant recipients. According to the announcement, 14 unrestricted grants ranging from $5,000 – $50,000 were awarded to Bay Area BIPOC-led artist teams with music-based projects or businesses that are contributing to the region’s arts and culture environment in positive ways.

Besides receiving a cash award, details the press release, grantees will have access to mentors with expertise in a range of business topics and industries.

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Walking with a camera, the images found provoke and confound ceaselessly. And catching and maintaining the look and sound of an image has been a gift for Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, for whom filming is life enhanced.

She started inviting people on the street to perform local histories that they knew, and the result was what she describes as a “committed improvisation.” An archive that relied on people’s memory and imagination. To “pay attention to everything” is the task, and walking with a camera produces situations, the expansion of thinking and the discovery of previously hidden or forgotten historical layers.

“It is very important for me when I’m collaborating with others that what we are both paying attention to is the possibilities of expansion of thinking between us.” Those moments of shared discernment have allowed her to marshall the non-actors to retrace their stories and expectations, both social and political. “I know art has social consequences. The most important thing for me is what art does by itself – the new possibilities, the expansion of thinking that happens.”

In the process, she was surprised by the participants’ experience of the past filtered through the present, and its opposite: “I was questioning images of a romanticized agricultural past, of military domination, of a paradise spread by the service industry,” she says.

The surprise was that “none of those are what I’d experienced. What I’d experienced was our history of military occupation, bombings, slavery and continued racialization. We experience all of these events happening at the same time.” And in every encounter with the subjects of her instant creations, she filmed the results — history as a spontaneous combustion of memory.