culture/Math is an artist service organization that develops tools to support the deep and rich cultural community in Chicago. We aim to act as a utility for artists by maintaining an infrastructure of tools and resources that provide support and advocacy for Chicago’s visual artists.
culture/Math maintains a core belief that artists’ basic needs must be met in order to keep a healthy creative community in Chicago. Artists require financial stability and access to healthcare and childcare, as well as have repository to digitally archive and research public projects. Through The Visualist, an establishment of a Visual Artist Credit Union and research into group healthcare, culture/Math intends to create a more stable platform for artists to thrive in the City of Chicago.
Please feel free to contact us at visualistchicago@gmail.com
From this report, culture/Math has created goals for how artists in our organization will be compensated for their administrative labor. As an artist service organization that is run by artists, we have set a floor for paying staff in our organization that is currently $25 per hour. As we grow, we will work to use the calculations we created in the From Living to Thriving report to increase our wages to $35.69 per hour to accommodate an artist along with one dependent, as well as to institute wrap-around services. This will be a long process of growth, but we believe that an organization's budget should match its values from the very beginning.
Currently, culture/Math maintains only one part-time, 10-hour-per-week staff member along with a founding board that volunteers an additional 20-30 hours a week to work on projects like From Living to Thriving, as well as to maintain The Visualist.
We arrived at $35.69 per hour by aggregating our data from the Family Budget Calculator, Self-Sufficiency Standard, Living Wage Calculator, and the Teaching Artist Pay Rate Calculator with a family structure that accounts for one individual mid-career artist and one dependent.
From Living to Thriving
From Living to Thriving is a policy report developed by culture/Math and Threewalls to define how Living Wage frameworks can be constructed and to outline how Threewalls currently implements them in their programs. This report contains nearly three years of qualitative and quantitative research defining the needs of artists and the structures by which more equitable support can be created. As our organizations continue evolving, so will our approach to compensation for artists and the care-centered practices that align with our mission's approaches. This research further highlights changes that can benefit not only artists and the communities in which we work but also other organizations and the larger apparatus of the art world as a whole.
The report pushes against the patronage model to consider a more holistic approach to artist support. A direct and comprehensive analysis of pay equity for artists through human-centered, intersectional policy development has been needed since the general and ongoing push toward the professionalization of the arts, which has been occurring since the 1960s. In this time, nothing has become quite so apparent as the simple fact that artists also need to be compensated fairly for all of their labor. Within From Living to Thriving, we have developed guidelines for a payment policy that helps provide goals for growth based on community outreach and extensive research. It is our belief that from this growth, more good will also grow.
The numbers as we have calculated them
The Family Budget Calculator: 1 Child and 1 adult 76,296
Self-Sufficiency Standard:f 1 adult and 1 infant: $63,367
Living Wage Calculator: 1 adult and 1 Child: $78,208
Teaching Artist Pay Rate Calculator: 1 individual and 1 dependent (working at the emerging level), $79,106
Annual Salary of $74,244 (rounded to the nearest dollar)
Hourly: $35.69 per hour ( the annual salary divided by 2080 hours, the annual number of hours for a 40 hour work week)
culture/Math is an artist-run 501C3.
The Visualist is a 2016 recipient of the Propeller Grant, culture/Math is the recipient of a 2020 CityArts Grant and is partially supported by the Builders Initiative and the Illinois Arts Council Agency.