- Talk to your coworkers.
- Find out what your coworkers are dealing with—at work, at home, all of it.
- Listen to them. Support them if you can.
(a) Everything worthwhile is done with other people. (Mariame Kaba) - Tell them your salary. Note the differences.
- Consider who is responsible for the differences.
- Get a group of coworkers together.
- Meet away from work, outside of work hours, off of work accounts.
- Figure out where your needs overlap.
- Talk about who makes the decisions. Talk about what their priorities are.
- Share the work.
- Ask questions.
(a) Who’s here? Who isn’t and should be?
(b) Who would be an artist if they didn’t have to make rent?
(c) Creativity—like freedom—is something that can’t exist on its own but only because we are in relation. We all deserve the time and space to be creative because creativity is how we share the world. (Art Workers’ Inquiry) - Learn who funds your institution, where the money comes from.
(a) It’s not just the war and prison profiteers who are the problem. Anyone with that much money is the problem. - Learn whose land you work on, who used to live there.
- Don’t just learn the answers to these questions—use them. Your fight isn’t yours alone; it’s connected to all other struggles for justice, and will fail without them.
- Know the risks, but do not let them stop you.
- Do not trust your boss.
- Do not trust anyone who sides with bosses over workers.
(a) tl;dr: you don’t need or want / the people who you know / aren’t “with you” to be / with you. really, you don’t (Wendy Trevino) - Know the law. Don’t rely on the law.
- Rely on yourselves, on each other.
- Move strategically. Move collectively.
(a) I care less about my own exceptionality and recognition and more about the end of the world as we know it, or what Denise Ferreira da Silva astutely calls the enactment of a Black Feminist Poethics. (Hentyle Yapp) - Museums are not stewards of art, of a common good. They are repositories for private property. Do not forget this.
- Be vocal with your support. Stand together.
- No new institutions. No old institutions. No reformism.
- Try to change everything.
- Start over. Keep going.
Dana Kopel
She/ Her/ Hers
New York, NY
Dana Kopel is a writer, editor, and union organizer living in New York. Her writing appears in The Nation, The Baffler, Frieze, and other publications.
She/ Her/ Hers
New York, NY
Dana Kopel is a writer, editor, and union organizer living in New York. Her writing appears in The Nation, The Baffler, Frieze, and other publications.