Artists are at the heart of our communities’ cultural vibrancy. Their ability to tackle the biggest challenges facing our nation and world today is top of mind for me as I write this message. Together we face a new year, with its myriad accompanying challenges and opportunities.

Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) will complete our programming work at the close of 2024. Born in the midst of the pandemic, CRNY was always intended to be a short-term initiative to materially support artists and kickstart a new economic conversation. We’re proud of all that we’ve been able to accomplish over the past few years, particularly advancing the discussion of why and how artists should be more firmly integrated into our economy and communities. Personally, I hope we’ve also been a powerful force in uplifting artists as changemakers because we need them now more than ever. 

I’m gratified that one of our recent releases at CRNY tells the story of exactly what happens when we trust the skills and expertise of artists working as community builders side by side with their neighbors. CRNY’s Artist Employment Program (AEP), which employed 300 New York artists at community based organizations throughout the state, was built on the understanding that artists have a unique combination of creative, design, and communication skills. Combined with their powers for observation, future imagining, and empathy, artists are natural community leaders.

During our two-year program, artists received a $65,000 annual salary with benefits. Their community-based organization, municipality, or tribal government employers were able to enjoy and experiment with having an artist or artists on their staff. While some artists were employed directly by their organization, others were employed directly by a cultural worker cooperative, Tribeworks. The results of this program, recently published in a report by The Urban Institute, demonstrate the impact of the AEP, revealing many benefits to both the artists and the organizations, including:

• Overall, both artists and partner organizations viewed AEP positively. This finding holds true for both employment models — whether artists were directly employed by their partner organization or via Tribeworks.
• For artists, AEP involvement led to increased personal well-being and financial stability and helped them develop new artistic practices and technical skills.
• Organizations reported that the AEP increased their capacity, influenced their community relationships, and impacted their organization’s culture and practice. The AEP expanded the scope of the work and engagement these organizations could do in their communities, showing those with less experience working with artists the value of incorporating art into their approach.
• The AEP’s flexible model provided benefits and challenges. Since artists and organizations set the terms of their relationships, some partnerships had greater clarity than others in coming to agreement on roles and working approaches. Building in supports, as CRNY did, to help work through issues in such an open-ended program is important.
• Providing employer-sponsored health insurance to all participants highlighted the importance of benefits. However, the range of benefits offered to artists illustrated the inequalities of the existing health care system in the US. While having access to medical insurance was literally life-saving for some artists, for others, health care coverage did not meet their needs.  

It’s our hope that community-based organizations and policymakers will be inspired to build on this labor model, implementing similar programs and perfecting areas to make them successful for all those involved.

As we wrap up our programmatic work and hope to spark change, other notable developments include:

• This month, CRNY released a new video series highlighting artists and organization leaders participating in our Artist Employment Program. From a photographer helping Deaf refugees find their voice in Rochester to a theater director producing a play examining alternative approaches to safety in NYC public schools, these artists created moving work that fuels the fight for social change. This series follows another suite of videos CRNY released earlier this year profiling the lives and craft of five artists throughout the state. 
• CRNY launched a comprehensive repository of all 108 AEP collaborations between 300 artists and 126 organizations. Explore the breathtaking breadth and depth of the work that took place over the course of the program through a combination of photos, videos, quantitative data, and narrative storytelling. Sort by region, community served, or simply scroll through collaborations to get started. 
• In partnership with eleven stakeholders from the AEP initiative, CRNY created an Artist and Cultural Workers Bill of Rights. This collaborative effort aims to address the systemic inequities and labor concerns facing artists and cultural workers, emphasizing fair compensation, safe working conditions, and transparent decision-making. We hope artists and cultural workers in New York State and beyond use this as a starting place for legislative campaigns and adapt it to their local needs.
• BK Reader, a local Brooklyn news outlet, published a feature on CRNY’s Artist Employment Program. The article spotlights two of our AEP artists, Tracey Dixon at Opus Dance Theatre and Crystal Clarity at Mayday Space. Their contributions to the organizations they were paired with proved so invaluable that these organizations decided to keep them on staff on their own dime — even after the AEP ended. Highlighting the skills artists possess to make their communities a better place was the purpose of the AEP, and we’re so excited Tracey and Crystal have the opportunity to continue their great work.
  
• CRNY shared a new blog series spotlighting how AEP artists are tackling important social issues. Artists Víctor María Chamán and Mary Courtney are using their craft to support immigrants. Artists Sphynxx and Nadeem Ahmed are changing narratives around the LGBTQ+ community. Artist Sarah C. Rutherford used art to foster community healing after domestic violence. Artists Ryan Haddad, Ife Olujobi, and Julian Goldhagan used theater as a tool to advance pay equity and accessibility. Eight artists worked with Friends of Ganondagan to elevate the way that knowledge is shared within Haudenosaunee communities, and even more artists worked with non-arts organizations to apply their creative thinking and skills across sectors. 
• We reflected on the lessons learned from our GI program. Maurie Cuffie-Peterson shared our approach to the end of cash payments. Our goal was to align the principles of guaranteed income with a solidarity framework with a series of transition support offerings. Andrew Simonet shared what he learned from working with GI artists over the past year. He reflects on the power of bringing artists together across a diverse range of practices and respecting their expertise to spend money how they see fit.

As the fight for permanent economic and labor policies to uplift artists continues, CRNY is honored to cement its legacy in the labor and economic justice movements. While CRNY is closing, the vision we share will carry on. We still have several things in the hopper that we’re excited to share over the next few weeks, including a new campaign for artists’ rights and new research on our GI program, so this isn’t our final goodbye. But as 2024 comes to a close, we want to extend our hearty thanks and holiday wishes to the entire CRNY community for helping us reimagine what is possible. New York isn’t New York without artists, and you’ve helped us illuminate this for the world to see. 

Tenant Power: one of 12 poster designs for a series of Risograph posters celebrating the history of activism in NY Chinatown. Photo by Tomie Arai.