Volunteer your Heart out!

I have noticed recently, an alarming trend on artist work pages.

These pages are search sites that post arts jobs for designers, musicians, actors and arts administrators, in addition to many other varied jobs. I and many other artists browse these sites to pick up contract work in our off time, or look for a part time position that enables us to work on our craft while still paying our bills.

In Toronto there is not enough work to go around if you are an artist, particularly if you are a performance artist. In the last year, since the global meltdown, work has been even harder to come by. There are thousands of artists that cannot survive now, that had been barely surviving two years ago. Every artists that lives by their trade alone is constantly juggling many jobs at once while looking for more.

Back to the alarming trend...of volunteerism. On sites like workinculture.ca, every day companies are posting “jobs” for volunteers to fill positions that should go paid. These companies are proudly broadcasting, "Do art work for free!"

Some of these postings are for singers, designers, curators, and team leaders. And, to add insult to injury, the companies are asking for your resume, so that they can browse your work history in order for you to volunteer.

Times are very tough in traditional job fields with cutbacks and layoffs and job sustaining programs, but times are downright abject if you are an artist. More than ever we need companies to pay for the services that we provide, not only to keep economic transfer happening, but also to affirm that the work artists do is valuable and necessary for our community experience. This type of internship needs to stop. There are legitimate ways to make an internship work but to replace a paid worker for a volunteer for the same job does not qualify as legitimate.


If you've found yourself in this position, here are some ways to start a reversal:

1. Pay for a service that your company requires.
2. Don’t suggest to an artist that playing for free is a good opportunity for us to get exposure. We get exposure by playing on youtube and one hundred other ways.
3. Be creative about using art, performance, design, writing, etc. in unconventional ways.
4. Figure out how to get the community involved to help pay for something if your company can’t finance the entire venture/concert/design project. Get a sponsor, ask people to pay for portions of work, it’s similar to the idea of a patron.

Talk to artists, we generally want to be involved in making something happen. We can be flexible and sometimes have ideas of how to make integration happen between business and art.

Let’s work it out!

Artist in Canada

It’s funny business being an artist in Canada. If you doubt, just ask any artist how many different things they have to do to make a living.

Perhaps acting, music, painting, and other performance mediums are the only career paths where you can train for a lifetime and still make less in a year than someone working full-time for minimum wage. In addition to making very little, musicians suffer the injustice of being undervalued in Canadian society.

Imagine training for hours a day, taking a degree, and then coming out of school with no prospects for work. You must do you art on the side so that you can survive. Then, potentially, several years (or more) down the road, you have enough experience that you can quit your day job and do only your profession, and you still make less than $600 a week.
The busiest and best musician in town can have no money in the bank, and be unknown to the general public. Think for a moment of the Canadian performers that you are familiar with. Who in ballet, contemporary dance, painting, mixed media, film-making, acting, writing, rock music, jazz, world music can you name? Who is Toronto’s Poet Laureate? For every one person that you can name, there are 1000 others also trying to make it in the arts business.

Musicians become known to the public through making recordings and playing free festivals and putting music out through the internet. Once we have interested you then we hope you’ll buy our records and pay ticket prices to come and see us. Each record costs us a significant amount of money to make, upwards of $15,000 and often double that, just for a basic record. We apply for help from arts councils but they are very selective and many musicians do not get help. Making a record is daunting financially when you are not making extra dollars and you have to feed your family.

The art that we make is special because it costs us so much to make it.
Who brings tourists to our cities? Artists, of course. As much as we despise dirty streets, we don’t travel to a city to see how clean it is. We travel to cities to feel the vibe, and to move with the energy in the streets. We go for shopping and concerts, shows and festivals. Designers, musicians, poets, artists, dancers, film-makers and performance artists are the heart of our cities. We need people like you to come to hear and see shows, visit galleries, find out who are the designers in the city and buy their clothes, furniture and other wares.

Artists coming from all countries on the planet, congregating in Toronto and making art that comes from integrated living is what sets Canada apart from every other country on earth.

--
(Pier Giorgio Di Cicco is our Poet Laureate in Toronto)

Employment

We've been hearing all over that we are living in very uncertain economic times and I've been thinking about the nature of self employment, particularly for artists. 

If you've been there, looking at a whole new year and wondering where your money is going to come from and knowing that you only have plans to make money on your craft, it can be a little daunting. 

Imagine now, for a moment, that you are one of Canada's artists, maybe one of the ones that aren't expecting to make more than $23,500 this year before taxes (as published in the 2007 Toronto Canada Council Annual Report).  What if your vision is to make a CD of your songs (upwards of $20,000)  or you want to make a movie (upwards of $100,000)?  Where is that money coming from? AND, if you do make it and manage not to have collection agencies on your butt for the next five  years, how do you know that it will make a single cent to put in your pocket?

I hear lots of people say "oh actors! oh musicians! oh artists!  so heady, so irresponsible."  The artists I know are all working jobs that they would rather not to make their rent or mortgage payment.  "So does everyone" you may say.  

I'd like to take a moment to recognize all of Canada's artists that are trying to write, speak, dance, play, learn, perform and educate all while trying not to freak out about how they are going to pay February's bills when all the work is drying up in January!

Be brave, press on!