Occupy Museums, Arts Activist Bundle (2018, Detail).

Continuing the focus on economic realities from our Debtfair campaign — where artist’s works are presented alongside information about their debts, jobs, and daily financial struggles—  we turn to the economic realities of arts activist groups and the issue of the institutional capture of our work along with strategies for long-term sustainability.  As social capital seems to rise for protest art in the Trump era, actual resources needed to do our work remain scarce while many channels of potential financial support are considered vulgar in relation to the purity of our practice. This is the razor thin line that activists walk within a hyper-market city and globe.  So we ask, how do you make your decisions from both an ethical and practical standpoint in order to sustain? As our practices are more urgent and harder than ever, we propose this question as a pathway to deepen our analysis of the picture of power in which we are included.

Thursday’s discussion will feature ABC No Rio, the Guerrilla Girls, Decolonize This Place and other groups discussing their models of sustainable art activist practice and building a sustainable web of mutual support.