Not long after I graduated from UT Austin at 19, I moved to New York City. I took out my first credit card to split the cost of new furniture with my roommates, and felt hopeful that I was investing in my adult life — in my future success. But our living situation soon fell apart. As a young artist, there was a lot on my plate, and almost all of it was financial.
I spent hours on the phone with the city’s Human Resources Administration in an attempt to garner some assistance for my living situation. I’d wait on hold only to be dropped from the queue, never getting the help I sought. It was impossible to speak to anyone at all. After five straight days of this, I broke. I’d gone through years of therapy to recover from past experiences, and this brought everything back. The experience pushed me to check myself into the psychiatric hospital for a bit. Sitting there physically alone in the apartment, I thought, “I might as well try and see if I can live through this…and talk to a social worker.”
Thankfully, two friends had previously sent me information about Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY), a local pilot program that provides working artists with a $1,000 monthly guaranteed income. The idea of guaranteed income for 18 months felt unreal, and there had to be a catch.
At the time I checked myself into the hospital, I had been in the process of sending in pre-acceptance information to CRNY. Those emails hadn’t resulted in a “yes,” so I didn’t hold my breath. I wasn’t feeling the guarantee. The day I was discharged, I saw the notice that I had been selected as a participant.
Beyond the clear day-to-day financial assistance and feeling of a safety net, CRNY’s program helped me move into a new apartment. It spared me from eviction, which often comes before homelessness. Having other opportunities, like CRNY afforded me, made me more confident in applying for those jobs, making those gallery calls, having transportation to my interviews, and other forms of artistic freedom.
Although the guaranteed income was categorized as a gift, for me it worked like a “grant” which has so many connotations for a young artist. Everyone always talks about grant writing and it all feels so inaccessible or based on chance rather than merit. Being able to tie in those past feelings with acceptance was another form of freedom. Pairing a guaranteed income framework with what a grant means to fine artists is almost like a cure to impostor syndrome. It helped me understand that I deserved that grant for simply being an artist — and an artist in need, at that. Usually being in need contributes to the hardships, and being in a situation in which the opposite is true is validating to your identity as an artist.
Young artists like myself need validation, whether we would like to admit it or not. I was constantly the youngest person in my undergraduate studio classes, and I hadn’t been making professional visual work for long, as I’d practiced music composition my entire life. My undergraduate work was my first introduction to what all of my classmates had been studying for far longer. I prepped a portfolio in three months, while these people had been preparing for years. Moving to New York and chasing the dream of being an artist was a crazy leap of faith, and CRNY assured me that I was making the right choices, despite my financial circumstances.
With GI, the ups and downs of a gig economy were curbed because I knew at some point in the month I wouldn't be as broke as I was during a slow week. I asked myself, “Am I bad with money?” With GI, I realized the answer was “no.” The issue was just that I previously didn’t have enough money to manage. The resourcefulness that comes from having absolutely nothing helps you manage once you actually have funds to work with.
Money can and does rule my emotions as much as I don't want to admit it: I’m not going to have a good day if my account is in the negative. Having guaranteed income that I knew for a fact was coming each month made that feeling almost disappear. The bigger challenges I faced weren’t completely overcome, as money isn’t the answer to every problem. However, that monthly guarantee did create both concrete and abstract value to walk away with once the pilot program ended after the 18 months it was funded to run for. The Mellon and Ford Foundations put resources toward the program to help artists weather the pandemic, which I believe the program absolutely did. The unfortunate reality is that economic precarity for artists, especially those of us at the beginning of our careers, is a constant in a country without robust funding for the arts.
While CRNY may be over, I hope that similar programs continue, and not just for artists. We need GI programs at the national level that would ensure that everyone, everywhere, has a humane level of basic support. Young people, the arts community, and society at large would be so much better for it.
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