Book Launch - Visual Arts Work: Careers, Perspectives and Practices in an Australian Context
Editors Grace McQuilten, Chloë Powell, Marnie Badham, Kate MacNeill and Jenny Lye. With contributions from Esther Anatolitis, Penelope Benton, Channon Goodwin, Sarah Gorey, Genevieve Grieves, Jenny Hickinbotham, Joe Hirschberg, Eugenia Lim, Bev Munro, Rafaela Pandolfini, Steven Rhall, Katie Russell, Madeleine Thornton-Smith and Catherine Truman.

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Visual Arts Work: Careers, Perspectives and Practices in an Australian Context, an edited volume that provides the most comprehensive picture to date of work in the visual arts ecosystem in Australia. The book launch will include short readings from contributors including Esther Anatolitis and Steven Rhall.

In a context where artists’ incomes are consistently low and falling, commercial galleries are financially vulnerable, and public galleries face program funding challenges — this book explores barriers to the economic health of the sector, the challenge of improving artists’ and arts workers’ working conditions, and the realities of being a creative in the twenty-first century. The book combines an analysis of art world economic value chains alongside alternative and emergent cultural, social and political economies with new quantitative and qualitative insights from artists and arts workers. With interdisciplinary methodologies and industry engagement, it examines multiple and hybrid systems of value and includes the perspectives of visual artists, craft artists and arts workers with diverse lived experiences. Our research offers greater insight into the social, cultural, and political forces that underly the mediation of art to the public including an urgent emphasis on gender, cultural safety and care work including the concerns of First Nations artists, culturally and linguistic diverse artists, and artists with disability. Our approach unpacks the diversity and hybridity of art ‘work’ to include practices realised through digitisation, internationalisation, community engagement and intersectoral partnerships.