Artists as Cultural Workers

Angie Kim has served as President and CEO for the Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI), a California-based knowledge and financial services incubator for individual artists, since 2015. She also heads CCI’s national, pooled fund program, AmbitioUS, which invests in alternative economic paradigms of and federated infrastructure by those most dispossessed—primarily African American and Native American communities—who are seeking financial self-determination in order to preserve and support their cultural identity and artistic expressions on their own terms.

Angie has 20 years of experience in the arts and in philanthropy, having worked in various roles as a grantmaker, evaluator, and in communications at the Getty and Flintridge foundations, and as director of programs at Southern California Grantmakers. In addition, while successfully pursuing her doctorate on the topic of U.S. private philanthropy, she worked as a consultant helping arts and social justice foundations in connecting strategic program design with evaluation outcomes. She has been a lecturer on philanthropy at Claremont Graduate University and University of Southern California, and has served as an advisor of numerous arts initiatives. She served on the boards of California Humanities, Leveraging Investments in Creativity, and as vice-chair of Grantmakers in the Arts. Currently, she is a council member of American Alliance Association of Museums Center for the Future of Museums.

Kim received her B.A. in art history and English literature from Linfield College, M.A. in art history from University of Southern California, and Ph.D. in public policy from Walden University.

Not that long ago, art students were expected to spend their time in higher education focused narrowly on honing their artistic vision, voice, and practice. This presented an amazing opportunity to spend hours in pursuit of artistic excellence. However, in retrospect, specialization had downsides for both the student-artist and for society. Artists are not just their artistic product. They are a whole person and not just the means to an end. They may be children of foreign-born immigrants or descended from those on the Mayflower, come from metropolitan or agricultural communities, transgender or cis female, seek to earn money to afford comfort or eschew consumerism in order to save the planet. In other words, artistic identity is but one of many political, cultural, religious, socio-economic, gender, and educational identities that defines who artists are and what they stand for. Today, these varied identities matter a great deal, particularly as society looks to artists to shape debates, offer social solutions, and provide the kinds of connective tissue that foster shared perspectives and visions.

We are at a significant moment of cultural conflict in the United States. This is part of a long-running culture war, and we are all working during, what may likely be, one of its more defining moments. (Other pivotal moments in this country include colonization, westward expansion to the Pacific Ocean, the slave trade, the Trail of Tears and genocide of Indigenous people, the Civil War, and, in more recent memory, the public defunding of art sparked by an exhibition in the 1980s of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography that featured BDSM imagery.) The culture war is a conflict between traditionalists—those who embrace Western European monocultural identity and an ideology of Manifest Destiny wherein humans and nature are meant to be dominated—against progressives—those who embrace difference and diversity as comprising the American cultural identity, who believe in stewardship and not extraction, and who believe in shared prosperity. The former is recognizable in winner-take-all capitalist practices and celebrates American individualism. The latter is recognizable in efforts to take care of others through expansion of social safety nets and protections to those who are vulnerable, including the planet, and are motivated by the obligations of interdependence.

This culture war manifests in nearly everything these days—gun rights, vaccinations, abortion, federalism, religiosity versus secularism, privacy policies, labor protections, debt-financed capitalism, immigration policy, the role of government versus the private marketplace, and people’s response to the ethno-nationalism of the Trump Administration. The inability of elected officials from both political parties to work together has less to do with any particular issue and more to do with conflicting worldviews, which makes everything personal. No one wants to compromise on who they are and what they stand for. The stakes are high: The culture war is about who gets to call themselves an American. 

Artists have a significant part to play in determining the outcomes of this ideological battle. To add value to this conflict, artists are asked to both produce meaningful art as well as to be socially and culturally relevant. It’s no longer good enough to claim that one’s work is devoid of social issues. For one, this stance is reflective of Western European hegemony that held fine art to be intrinsically meaningful, so no answer is still an ideological position. For another, the person who makes the art is important. The artist matters—who they are, how they identify, what motivates them, and what they struggle with.

Rather than shut out the world during academic training, artists and future arts workers need this time to become informed. This culture war moment also means that artists have greater freedom to be expressive about issues that matter to them and not be silenced by educational or market conventions that ignore the maker in favor of the object. Take the time to understand the forces that shape your identity–your family’s beliefs, your religious convictions, your socio-economic class, if you have faced discrimination, if you live with financial anxiety, if your decision-making is shaped by your sexual orientation, and so forth—so that you, as an artist, teacher, culture bearer, or arts worker, can be intelligently and authentically impactful.

Some examples of using artistic practice and exerting cultural influence include speaking up about the plight of freelance workers, many of whom are artists, who face unpredictable incomes and few safety net protections; working with others who may share insurmountable levels of student loan debt by collectively bargaining for better lending practices; becoming a movement leader for shaping a less discriminatory digital economy; or starting a community bank to build a sense of cultural connectivity at a local level (all these are real examples led by artists and arts workers, www.ambitio-us.org). Artists have so much to offer during these chaotic times—creating moving and meaningful art and also shaping cultural identity that defines how, for what, and with whom we identify and work in common cause. Disruptive and destabilizing change moments are when we need artists to be socially relevant and culturally productive more than ever.