U-M Creative Currents

Artist Pay Project

• Arts Initiative • Season 3 • Episode 2

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Today on Creative Currents, you’ll learn all about how artists get paid. In this episode, Mark talked with Makeda Easter about her project “Making It: $napshots from the Artist Pay Project,” an anonymous journalistic series that explores how artists navigate financial realities. 

Makeda is an award-winning journalist and artist who works at the intersection of arts and social justice focusing on how to make artists' lives better. Makeda's work is a powerful blend of storytelling, activism, and cultural exploration. Her writing has appeared in publications such as: The Los Angeles Times, Dance Magazine, and American Theatre.

On this episode of U-M Creative Currents, we'll tackle questions like pay equity, working for exposure, and how to answer the question "Is the offer of this job worth my time?"

*Production note: Apologies about the audio quality on this episode—we ran into some technical difficulties during this recording.





Season 3, Ep. 2: Makeda Easter


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[00:00:15.105] Mark Clague:
Welcome to Creative Currents, a Michigan Arts podcast where we explore collaborative creativity and the power of the arts to spark meaningful conversations. I'm your host, Mark Clague, and today we're joined by Makeda Easter. Makeda is an award-winning journalist and artist who works at the intersection of arts and social justice. Her work is a powerful blend of storytelling, activism, and cultural exploration, and her writing has appeared in publications such as the Los Angeles Times, Dance Magazine, and American Theater. Makeda's newest exhibition I guess what I'm interested in is how you as an artist and creative got interested in artist pay. 

[00:01:15.024] Makeda Easter:
Yeah. So my career has been like very windy a lot of different jobs. And in my mid 20s, I fell into journalism, not fully by accident, but it was really unexpected. I was living in Austin, Texas, and working for the university there as a science writer. And I enjoyed my work as a science writer, but have always been interested in the arts because I grew up playing music and dancing and I still dance still dance today. So I am like deeply passionate about the arts and a lot of my friends are artists so um when I worked at the LA Times I ended up on the arts and culture desk and I was covering arts um I was also like taking dance class a lot um so I met a lot of dancers and um I talked to a lot of artists for stories because I was covering like art institutions in LA um and also working on stories about artists who were doing really interesting work I thought they were doing really interesting work and so this topic of paying would always come up and it wasn't this you know that wasn't the topic of the stories I was doing at the time but it was just kind of a real life thing of people sharing um just the difficulties of making a living as an artist and then also like I mentioned having artist friends and getting a deeper inside look into um the process I think specifically with dance I knew people who were commercial dancers which means they dance in music videos or in film and tv And some of the professional dancers that I knew, they just were describing the audition process where it would be hundreds of people in a room and maybe two people are selected to work on this really big project. And then their dancers are the lowest paid of all the artists. So they're not getting paid a lot. They're getting mistreated on set. And then even like, you know, the best dancers that you see, like the most incredible, like phenomenal dancers, they weren't, a lot of them weren't just constantly working. it was like a gig here and then months later another big gig and then maybe even like six months or a year before situation how do you pay the rent especially in LA incredibly expensive place so I think this topic of how people are making it was just something that had been in my mind for a while as I was living in LA and I guess like Shortening the story a little bit, I ended up at the University of Michigan doing a Wallace Fellowship and Center for Racial Justice Fellowship. And so when I was in these fellowships, I had the time to step away from just like the pressures of real life and just working like a nine to five or like working a lot. Like I could sit back and think about what I wanted to pursue. And this idea of artist pay, it just came back. It's something I wanted to pitch to my editor at the L.A. Times, but then COVID it happened. So it just kind of like, not disappeared, but kind of went to the back of my mind. So when I was in these fellowships, it kind of came back up. And I think at the time, there'd been even more conversations about pay transparency, and just like the lack of equal pay, or like fair pay for artists. So that's kind of how I, you know, came to the idea of the artist pay project.

[00:04:38.685] Mark Clague:
So interesting how Los Angeles inspired your work, in part because you have these incredible rich you know, institutions, the Broad, the Los Angeles Philharmonic. So you have this amazing ecosystem and yet you have really an oversupply of artists. I mean, so many people competing for minor opportunities. The fact that L.A. inspired your work is really interesting just because of the really the discrepancy between some of the richest cultural institutions in the world and then this incredibly competitive art market where there's just hundreds and hundreds of dancers musicians producers filmmakers script writers all these people competing competing for a limited amount of work right and so that's sort of driving down the competition in the sense you can there's always some another artist to hire right and you don't need to pay them a whole lot because they're all looking for that big break that makes them famous so really interesting that that that sort of class discrepancy was so

[00:05:42.252] Makeda Easter:
yeah la is a strange place um i'm not i'm i grew up in houston um and i think the yeah the disparity between rich and poor um and like extremely extreme poverty is was really really jarring to me to see i mean you can even just look at the statistics around um the homeless or unhoused population there um because you see you know you see such wealth around you and then you also see like yeah extreme poverty it's it's really sad um i also i came in through a fellowship program. Um, and I was making not very much money, even though I was working at the newspaper full time. Uh, it was like a program where you get trained for two years and then you, you know, if you're good enough, you get promoted to staff. And, um, the salary was $40,000 and it, yeah, I quickly realized like, this is not enough to live anywhere near comfortably in LA, but I had a, uh, like a steady paycheck. So I was like when i was talking to my dancer friends i was like how are they do how are they doing this because they're not getting like a paycheck every two weeks i'm at least getting a paycheck it's not enough um but it's

[00:06:57.874] Mark Clague:
you're a winner in this situation and yet still it was impossible

[00:07:00.716] Makeda Easter:
right right yeah it's it's yeah it really opened my eyes um and journalism is different than the arts but there are a lot of similarities there in terms of you know you you do it because you're passionate about it and you put up with low pay because, you know, there's tons of people competing for not very many positions. Yeah. So, yeah, it was it was a really interesting experience being there.

[00:07:25.262] Mark Clague:
Yeah. The myth of the suffering artist that somehow suffering and low pay and marginal living circumstances are good for you as an artist. So you did a lot of interviews with artists to sort of talk to them. And in many ways, you sort of kept them anonymous to a certain extent. Right. So can you talk about sort of the interview process and maybe a a couple of the stories that particularly you know were

[00:07:50.170] Makeda Easter:
yeah um so when i so i launched the project or i kind of announced the project um through my site which is called the art rebellion last february and so i kind of put out this call for artists where i said i'm looking to speak to artists anonymously about their pay um this project is inspired by other projects like refinery 29's money diaries where people submit an anonymous, like, a week long diary entry about how they spend every single dollar that they have, or where their money goes. And so I put out this call for artists. And then I began reaching out to arts organizations across the country that had, you know, maybe a mission around like helping artists thrive around pay equity, that kind of thing. And I asked them to share it with their networks. And so yeah, so once I shared it on my platform, and then other organizations begin sharing this call for artists, I I heard back from artists who are interested in participating.

[00:08:48.511] Mark Clague:
Yeah, I mean, I can see that because in the arts, we're not very comfortable talking about money, right? I mean, on one hand, money is sort of seen as commercial, selling out, sort of dirty, you know, as opposed to the ideals of expression and individual creativity, right, that we have in the arts. So it runs against some of those narratives, but those narratives end up becoming a barrier to artists really getting, you know, the kind of pay they deserve. But Are there particular stories that you collected that were sort of shocking to you?

[00:09:19.365] Makeda Easter:
Yeah. I'm thinking of shocking. You know, something I saw that was really sad and that I've seen throughout a couple of the interviews that I've gotten is someone saying, you know, like I am one health emergency or one car breakdown or one like very unexpected event happening from just being in a really, really bad situation. There were a few artist who talked about not having health insurance and one artist who is a mural painter in Pennsylvania she chose to leave her full-time job to work independently to be a freelancer and one of the sacrifices that she made that she talked about was choosing not to have health care and that's just you know it's I won't say it's fully shocking but it's just sad to read that that someone who and it seems like just the way she described her work that she She is the known mural painter in this community and doing work with businesses and other like organizations, but is uninsured. That was, I think, pretty shocking and sad. The one or I guess one of like two or three artists who said they did feel comfortable, one of them was a professor at a university. And she said that her salary range from I think like 90,000 to 100,000. And but she still had six figures of debt from getting the credentials to become a professor. Yeah. align with everything that I've heard from friends and like people I've met in the community and people I've interviewed. Um, yeah, I think it, I think, you know, the shocking thing was just the, the, the kind of sacrifices people have to make, or I heard someone or someone else told me, I think they had, you know, a really big medical bill and they're just choosing not to pay it because they can't. And that's just like, you know, if my credit is ruined because of this, that's just, it has to be because I can't, I can't pay the dead off. So hearing a lot of those kind of stories is just really sad.

[00:11:49.024] Mark Clague:
Yeah, no, it's interesting how, I mean, this muralist who's, you know, making an important contribution to their community, they have to make that personal sacrifice to put themselves at risk in order to provide that service, right? And so if we really respect the arts in this way, if the arts are important to the community, if it's part of why people come to live in the community, what attracts business to that community, and yet we're really, you know, Profiting off the unpaid and uncompensated work of, you know, these artists who are really not even getting as much as maybe a fast food worker who's working, you know, full time, right? Because there's no benefit. So really, really fascinating. Are there other themes that sort of emerged from your work?

[00:12:33.048] Makeda Easter:
Yeah, one of the big themes, so one of the questions in the survey, and so the way I've like got, you know, the way the information was received is there's a survey where I'm asking very specific questions about food. How much money do you make per year or per month? Whatever is easier, easiest for you to calculate. What percentage of your income comes from your art practice directly? And if it doesn't all come from art, where are the other sources of income? What are your expenses? So you go through this questionnaire with about, I want to say like 15 questions. And then I do a follow-up phone call where I ask more details about the numbers that they provided. And something that I think I saw in most of the surveys and talked about with many of the artists was that their incomes art was a very small fraction of where their income came from. And it's like 7%, like 10%, 20%. It was rare that it was more than like, I won't even say like 30%. And the rest of the income was from other jobs that they had to do, basically to make money to live and eat so that they can do their art practice because the art practice was not providing anywhere near enough money to pay their rent or, you know, to do any of the things that we need to just live and life. Um, so that was a through line through a lot of the interviews. Um, a lot of people talked about just like, um, yeah, there's the frustration of how the arts are devalued and being asked to work for exposure and being expected to be okay with being asked to work for exposure. Um, and a few people kind of got at like how offensive it was to just always be expected to work for free. Um, and then, you I heard was that a lot of people don't even know where to begin when it comes to asking for money because it's something that's not talked about something that a lot of artists don't share so they're not even sure how really to price their own work in a way that where they you know feel like they're making enough money for the work that they put into the art and I think a lot of there's like a lot of trepidation of asking for what they need because they don't want to feel that they're asking for too much for someone to kind of like say oh you're asking me a thousand I think there's a lot of like people are like very nervous around just even asking for what they deserve. I read and heard that a lot from people.

[00:14:56.376] Mark Clague:
Yeah. I mean, going to an artist and expecting a discount like that shouldn't be what we're looking for. Right. We should be looking to support artists and to create help them create more art. But so it sounds like sort of artists sharing more about the money they're actually earning would be one of the recommendations you have.

[00:15:13.936] Makeda Easter:
Yeah, I think artists sharing with each other what they're making or what someone's offering them. There's been some really cool projects here in Chicago. There's this dance company that also has like a second arm where they do, they have the Chicago Dance Pay Transparency Project where they began posting just the pay rates for all the companies in town. And this is including the bigger companies like Hubbard Street and then like very, very local companies. So just sharing a little bit about that. like what those rates are. And then, um, I think that's, that's a great thing. There's a really cool project called wage. Um, and they're, I think based in New York. And so they have this great website where like, if you're in a position to pay an artist, um, like let's say you work for a nonprofit or a corporation or a university, you can kind of look on this site and it's like a, like the scale where you can put in your company's budget. And then it lists for every single thing you can hire an artist for what a fair pay would would be based on the size of the organization. If you're, you know, like, let's say you, you contract artists for a department of the university, you can look at this wage scale to see what a fair rate would be for like someone designing an exhibition or someone coming in to speak on a panel. So I think like some things like this, like where we kind of standardize or where there is some standards of this is fair pay and making that more accessible or widely available not just to artists but everyone to know like oh I think you know I think people don't think about it um just about paying artists and I think if that can just be more common knowledge um I think that would help a lot of people because yeah I think you know think about like a plumber or like a doctor or a lawyer like their rates are their rates and you can say like no I'm not going to go with your service but that's their rate And I think people accept that more readily than an artist, like asking for something that seems unrealistic or even offering as a person paying the artist to say like, Hey, my budget is actually, you know, my budget is $5,000 versus like my budget is $250. Like, I think just, yeah, like one of the, um, this is, sorry if it's a little long-winded, but, um, one of the artists I talked to, he spoke a lot about like the mystification or like the mysticism around the arts in our society like it's this thing that just happens this thing like that disappears and it's like takes away from the people who are actually doing the labor to make the thing the the piece of music or like the mural that you see on on a wall or the film or like a local punk show like people don't understand like the amount of work and education and practice and sacrifice that goes into everything around us and so that That kind of has led to this like sense of devaluing of the arts in this country in particular.

[00:18:21.236] Mark Clague:
I think it's really confusing to understand the cost and the investment necessary to make art. I mean, on one hand, you can duct tape a banana to the wall and it can sell for $6 million. other hand, if you hire a musician and say you want someone to play keyboards or whatever, and you're hiring them for three hours, you're like, well, you know, minimum wage is... 15 bucks an hour. I'll be really generous. I'll pay him 20 bucks an hour. You can have $60 for paying, playing for my, you know, background music at my restaurant for three hours. Why, why is $60 not enough for an artist for three hours?

[00:18:58.415] Makeda Easter:
Yeah, that's a great question. Um, I think it's because a lot of artists, um, and a lot of them don't want to be in this position, but their businesses. And so they are like freelancers. They run everything on their own. That's $60. Technically, like once you start adding in these gigs, like they have to pay taxes on that money. So let's say 20 or 30% goes into taxes. Like you mentioned, there's the cost of classes, if you're keeping up your skill, you might be in vocal lessons, or like taking one off classes, there's time that you spent practicing that you're not paid for that $60, like quickly fizzles into almost nothing. I see that this a lot with journalism, like I occasionally do freelance pieces. And something that I've been thinking about over the past year, year and a half is, is this the offer of this job worth my time. So for example, if an editor for publication reaches out and says, Hey, we'd like to commission you to write a story, and our pay rate is $250. And so we, the story should be 1500 words, and it We're going to go through three rounds of editing. Once I begin doing the math, how long does it take me to research? How long does it take me to do the interviews? How long am I spending writing, going back and forth on edits? That $250 quickly fizzles because if I'm spending, let's say, 25 or 30 hours on the story, once you start dividing that out into what I'm getting paid, it becomes less than minimum wage. And then also a similar thing in the arts, a lot of times artists aren't even paid on time. Um, and that happens in journalism where you do, you do work, you do a story and then it's four months later when you get the paycheck. So yeah, the, you know, it's the pricing thing is hard. Um, but yeah. And, and going back to the music point, I recently spoke to, I did another interview with, um, Chicago, Chicago based musician, and they were saying they don't really even make money from it. They play in the band and they don't really even make money from their gigs because there's a band of maybe like four musicians, the bar offer them $250 for the band. Um, they begin splitting the money for each musician, but then they talked about their investment of like having to find practice space and like, it really ended up making almost nothing. So yeah, it's, um, the pricing thing is, is something I think a lot more people should be aware of.

[00:21:34.346] Mark Clague:
Yeah. I'm really glad you brought up the gig work and journalism. Cause you recently did a panel at the Ross, um, business plus impact studio. And, uh, one of the things that struck me about that panel I mean other than the really powerful stories your colleagues and you were talking about but I mean in a way the entire sort of worker model is moving in this direction we used to think of the artist as sort of an exception to the rule right the gig worker and you know musicians have been doing gigs for four or five six hundred years maybe right but now we have uber drivers and and now it's really getting into work that we didn't think of as gig work you know like journalism or writing or maybe even getting into legal work and things that have been relatively, you know, highly compensated professions. But it's starting to be where people are just they're getting these one off gigs and they don't have a sustainable career. So in a way, the artists are on the front lines of a much bigger war over sort of capital and labor and how we value human individuality and creativity. Right. So if it gets to the point where we really see the individual artist as not being valuable, you know, not valuing that voice, that creativity, that personality, the things that make them special, we start to see everybody as just interchangeable. And, you know, I mean, so many issues of the way we treat immigration and racial difference and all sorts of things is about just a fundamental disrespect of humanness, right? So I think you're really touching on a fissure, a crack in our system that actually opens up really profound and big issues.

[00:23:13.711] Makeda Easter:
Yeah. I mean, my focus is on the arts, but I hope that people who interact with the work really think about the larger picture as you, as you mentioned. Yeah. I think I read an article somewhat recently about even nurses are doing some gig work, like in terms of doing freelance, like Botox parties and stuff. Like I I've seen some interesting, like I think like dental clinics that seem corporate in a weird way. Like, I don't know. I feel like this, like, this freelance everyone's their own business and has to like pick up multiple jobs to make ends meet that's the reality I feel like it's going to be for most or many of us regardless of what industry you're in and so some of the like solutions or things that I think about in terms of making artists lives better are really things that make everyone's lives better and it's like if we can improve the lives of just our society as a whole artists benefit from that And then their work benefits from that. And it just like like more like collectivism or like I'm just thinking about my focus is the arts, but it's really like applicable to so many like facets of people like working people and just like people in general.

[00:24:29.848] Mark Clague:
So you've just done this exhibit in partnership in part with with the Arts Initiative here at Michigan and the Roscoe business. And I'm just curious, you know, as a journalist, you're used to telling stories. through words and sort of through a narrative, you know, that has its sort of introduction and middle and end. How is doing an exhibit different? I mean, was that empowering? Was that scary? Did it make you think differently? Because, of course, in your exhibit, like when I was there, you can come into the middle, you can start at one end of the room, you can start at the other end of the room. You know, you don't control the viewer in the same way maybe you do with text. So I'm curious as an artist just how that was different for you.

[00:25:14.049] Makeda Easter:
Yeah, it was all the things you mentioned, empowering, scary, like all of the things. I think, you know, the idea to even kind of share this work in an installation format was really begun when I began when I was at the University of Michigan using on these two fellowships, really like that time to just step away and think about my work and myself and my values. And I think I really connected to the sense of like I do journalism and then I do dance like they're two very different parts of who I am and during the fellowship I was thinking more deeply about like how do I put these two things together because it feels always feels like something like when I'm doing a story just a regular website newspaper magazine story like it's not fully me like it's something I can do but it doesn't like fully express like all the the different facets that I have and so um think about more ways to share my work creatively or to combine like all my different interests um that's kind of like the installation is a manifestation of that um i've always loved telling stories creatively and i've always always been thinking especially now is like i've learned more about you know the sad shifts and how people consume information people really don't read full stories um when you know when i was working at the la times you literally can see metrics of how many sales people spend on a webpage and it's not, it's not many seconds. Um, it not, they don't spend very long and yeah, a lot of people don't, they don't read like that. So I've been thinking also a lot about like, how do I get this work in front of everyone? Like as many types of people as possible. And I thought like installation was one manifestation of that. And so, yeah, it was, it was really empowering to share my work and this non-traditional way. It still was a bit traditional because we were literally taking excerpts of interviews and putting them as quotes on the wall. But yeah, you're right. You can start from the back of the room. You can start from the front of the room. You may not even know that you're in an installation. You may just be in the room and look up and then see something, which I think is really great. What I hope is that, especially for students who, I noticed that there were students who were just hanging out there to study. And I hope that they sat down and they looked up and they wondered what is this and maybe you know they read this quote or they saw there's like a panel where we just pull out different numbers they looked at a number and they wondered like what is this $400 what does that mean and they read the whole thing or they read like something else or they saw a photo and just wondered like what is this so I think that's like really cool because with like traditional journalism you're reaching people who are into journalism and yeah that's like a declining group of people unfortunately but with something like an installation and an a space as unexpected as ross's impact studio um i think the work can reach just new audiences that i wouldn't have been able to reach in traditional formats so it felt yeah it was it was really

[00:28:28.652] Mark Clague:
i think it's very powerful that your exhibit is at a business school you know it's an important message about about the that art is a business and that that business people should know about the art so thank you for that well maybe to wrap up say you just happened to open a drawer in your grandmother's house and found her magic wand where she could change anything in the universe and you could change, say, three things about our art world. What would you do?

[00:28:58.306] Makeda Easter:
That's a great question. Um, I mean, I would take a very radical approach, I would maybe, you know, make housing free for everyone, like everyone has free access to housing. And I think housing is like the biggest barrier when you look at, especially like an artist's expenses, rent, or mortgage, most people are renting. That's the thing that's like, the toughest, like part of, you know, spending money. So I and I think you know when people have housing and they feel safe where they live they're more free that opens up their mind to make better work um so housing I would say health care as well um give everyone health care and that includes the millions and millions of artists that we have in this world um a lot of artists don't have health care or have like had health issues that have impacted their art I think especially with you know like dance is the closest to me because I dance actively and like I know dancers and stuff it's like a body based art and even with like musicians just I mean they're using their bodies like everyone needs a healthy body so I would say housing health care and then I don't know I guess I would say like the like art institutions I don't know how I could you know really like describe this wish but I feel like with a lot of institutions It's exclusionary. And that's been the ethos for like, you know, maybe even like a century or more for some of these like very storied institutions. And it excludes like artists excludes communities who don't have access to the art. And I would just find a way to like, blow or like break down all those barriers so that these institutions that have all these resources are like funding community based art. They're putting up programs that really invite communities, people into these spaces. that have never felt they had access to them um so yeah i don't know how i would exactly like what i would wish for per se but it would be like a dramatic like reimagining of the art institutions and also funding um in this country

[00:31:13.243] Mark Clague:
no that's so powerful that really art is for everybody um not only consuming and experiencing it but making it so that's a great vision one thing i would definitely do with my magic so important to have these kind of robust conversations. So thank you so much for your work. Thank you for being part of the Arts Initiative and our arts conversation here on at the University of Michigan. And really good luck with all your future projects. I hope this continues.

[00:31:44.805] Makeda Easter:
Yeah, thank you so much, Mark. This was I'm honored that you included me on your show. And this was such a great conversation.

[00:31:50.712] Mark Clague:
The honor is mine.

[00:31:53.577] Makeda Easter:
Thank you.

[00:31:54.690] Mark Clague:
Thank you. please visit our website at arts.umich.edu thanks for listening