The Negotiation Table: Artists' Labor, Cultural Power, and Institutional Accountability

“The Negotiation Table” contends with the challenges that arts workers face in building ethical art practices in the context of an exploitative fine arts industry. This paper also acts as a living record of multiple artist-led protests pushing for fair labor practices, cultural representation, and institutional accountability. The arts industry is structurally designed to rely on unpaid artists’ labor, which is further weaponized to gentrify cities. Marginalized artists must contend with a two-fold problem: there is a dire need for our work to exist, and the systems around us readily prey upon what we create. In response to these problems, I enter my work with the questions: Whom will this work benefit? What role will it play in the surrounding ecosystem? How can individual changes inform collective action, and how can collective action lead to institutional accountability and transformation? I have created a new body of work, which I call my Negotiation Tables. My methodology involves taking hand-carved woodblocks and transforming them into sites of negotiation. This transformation is in response to the history of how print became indoctrinated in the fine arts, in contrast to its use in political campaigning, protest, and community activation. Working through my methodologies, I reflect on what it means for me to challenge print, as a Taiwanese-Chinese American and woman of color who has been made artificially rare in white dominant spaces. I have centered my research on the act of negotiation, and the critical transformation in my work is about how we, as artists and arts professionals, move away from an industry based in artificial rarity to one of abundance.