Project Spotlight: Contemporary Art League
The Contemporary Art League was co-founded by Los Angeles artists who believe that, together, we have the power to change the material conditions for artists and arts workers. “We want our community of art workers to be able to live dignified lives with a commitment to creating and caring for visual culture, and we want that for ourselves, too.” Read on to learn about their vision for a “cooperative trade organization” for L.A. County artists, and how to get involved!
WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY ART LEAGUE, AND WHY DO WE NEED IT NOW?
Contemporary Art League (CAL) is a cooperative trade organization building unity, solidarity, and equity within the field of contemporary art in Los Angeles County. CAL is a long term effort to reconfigure the hierarchy, opacity, and ingrained scarcity perspective that adversely impact cultural production, presentation, and preservation. Calls for genuine inclusion and meaningful equity can’t be addressed without deep systemic evolutions, and CAL is one of many new efforts afoot that are meeting the moment.
WHAT BROUGHT YOU TO THIS WORK? WHY IS IT PERSONAL TO YOU?
The CAL co-founders have spent a combined 40 years working in various capacities in the field. Multiple factors in our interwoven professional and personal lives brought us to initiate CAL, but the confluence of the coronavirus pandemic, racial justice uprisings, escalating climate emergency, and deepening of pervasive economic precarity in 2020 were the external forces that were the catalyst for the formation of CAL. This work is personal because we’ve devoted our lives to art, and most of the people we know and love have, too. We want our community of art workers to be able to live dignified lives with a commitment to creating and caring for visual culture, and we want that for ourselves, too.
WHAT IS A “COOPERATIVE TRADE ORGANIZATION”?
CAL is a trade organization in the sense that we exist to provide community services, professional resources, and advocacy opportunities to workers in a particular field; in our case, that is the field of contemporary art. We chose to establish CAL as a cooperative business because we see the potential of cooperatives to offer alternatives to conventional organizational hierarchies, as well as channels for the redistribution of wealth so that we can work toward a more formalized solidarity economy within the field. As a coop, we will eventually be offering member ownership and worker ownership of CAL itself, and we also intend to be a home for other coops; entrepreneurs within the field will have the option to establish interdependent businesses as coops within the CAL framework.
WHAT VISION DO YOU HAVE FOR THE ART WORLD? HOW DOES THIS PROJECT MOVE US TOWARD THAT VISION?
We envision an art world where art workers who have committed themselves to the field are empowered to make professional decisions and life decisions that are best for their own career goals, as well as their own well-being and their families’ well-being within a field that is supportive without diminishing its criticality and excellence. We envision an art world where success is defined by practitioners themselves while we work collectively toward mutual benefit so that visual culture as it’s expressed in fine art models a generative path for the ongoing project of democracy. CAL moves us toward that vision by lateralizing ownership, increasing transparency, and redistributing wealth within our field.
HOW CAN FOLKS GET INVOLVED?
+ Get free, confidential help with Covered California and spread the word about Help with Health Insurance
+ Volunteer: Healthcare, Outreach, and Capital working groups meet the first, second, and third Tuesdays of each month at 5pm PST. Email us to join: info@contemporaryartleague.com
+ Sign up for The Art Worker
+ Follow, tag, comment, and share on Instagram
+ Introduce us to any formal or informal groups of art workers who you think might want to connect with CAL. Our email address is info@contemporaryartleague.com.
+ Fund us: We need funds to grow and build CAL with our community. Click “donate” below or on our website to make a tax deductible donation through our fiscal sponsorship with Fractured Atlas.
