-II-
+ +
From SCAD, I was awarded a BFA in fashion design and a minor in photography. I moved to Savannah, Georgia and began undergrad in 2001. Early one Tuesday morning, during the first week of our freshman year classes, the attacks of September 11 occurred. By the time I graduated late, in 2006, I had different thesis projects in fashion design, menswear, costume design, photography, and film production. I stayed in Savannah longer to finish the photo minor that I later took on, where my emphasis was in studio photography. Although all of this came at a high cost, the many things I had learned and accomplished, and all the people I connected with along the way in those years changed me forever.
One might assume that, from my East Asian presenting appearance and being adopted by a white family, that for most of my life I’ve had access to financial prosperity; that I had the encouragement, support, and guidance from a loving community. But the truth is that I come from a small, conservative, almost entirely white, rural town in New England. Within that town, I was raised in a restrictive and insular evangelical Lutheran church community. I was adopted through an adoption organization known as Holt, a conspicuously Christian organization which considered a couple’s commitment to conservative Christianity just as important as their ability to fulfill the mandated requirements.
My family is not wealthy, and neither of my parents attended four-year college. My mom has an associates degree in secretarial work and my dad went to trade school for engineering. Lacking experience and insight, they had no long term plan to pay for college by the time I graduated high school in 2001. Putting me through art school was financially crippling for my parents, who nearly lost the house at one point while I was in college. Struggling through those tenuous years while I was gone was traumatic for them.
Where I grew up, most families (including mine) are lower-middle working class, with occupations and lifestyles in construction, farming, machinery, or similar industries. While (like many) my family saw and encouraged my artistic and creative abilities that revealed themselves in my early childhood, I had no real way to gain knowledge of and access to the inner workings of the greater art world. Nobody in my family was ready for me to actually become an artist and stray from their much more sheltered, orderly existence. I’ve largely had to teach myself the complexities of a very different path without their guidance. The ways I am now very different from them add to the estrangement between us; it cost them nearly everything they had for the daughter they knew to never really come home again.
+ +
For decades since its founding, SCAD has had an uneven reputation as an institution depending on your field of study. For some practices (e.g. 3D animation, motion graphics) it was considered a top tier school, while for other programs (e.g. fashion design, photography) this place was seen as a trade school, at best. SCAD’s reputation has evolved considerably in subsequent years, and there are plenty of good reasons for students today to attend. But when I attended in the early 2000’s, it was considered the odd and incorrect choice for studying and building connections in fashion design and photography especially.
While this is no longer the case today, SCAD’s unusual lack of a requirement to submit an art portfolio to be accepted negatively differentiated them from the elite European and New York City academic institutions. Originally, I set out to be a fashion photographer, putting most of my energy on that work in school, even though many of my professors taught fine art, not commercial work. After graduating, the photographers and fashion companies interviewing me for internships openly recoiled seeing SCAD on my resume, openly expressing disgust in the educational experience I had worked so hard to achieve and had cost my family so dearly.
The culture inside and surrounding elite art institutions is woven inextricably into the fabric of the global art world, and into the history of modern art as we know it. By the time I got to NYC in 2008, I was 24 with zero industry experience, with a bachelor's degree from what most peers considered to be a second-rate college. I moved to New York City in 2008, at the height of the Great Recession: the economic crisis brought on by the collapse of the housing market that was the largest economic downturn since The Great Depression in the 1930’s.
Many fellow alumni were less than two years into their jobs by the time I was crashing on their Brooklyn couches to begin mine. Not even my grim cynicism prepared me for being at the mercy of what I now realize in hindsight were an abnormally harsh series of internships and gigs. During those years, I got severely beaten down just trying to survive hostile spaces as a poor kid trying to play a rich kid’s game, feeling isolated, stressed out and struggling; always feeling a day late and a dollar short. It was nearly impossible to lay a career foundation in 2008-2009, patching together the weirdest, most random jobs and gigs that were only sporadically available.
+ +
As I want you to feel prepared for the rest of what you’re about to read, it’s worth clarifying now that this piece about my personal history will, by its very nature, contain topics some might have a hard time taking in. This personal essay contains descriptions of hostile work environments, my lived experience with racism in the industry, detailed recollections of verbal abuse I’ve experienced and witnessed, and descriptions of my experience with financial hardship. So, this is your reminder to check in with yourself as you read this, and to please read on with care.
Let’s pull back for a moment and consider just how different than today the overall state of the creative industry was back then, and all the people running it. The year 2008 specifically was the worst possible year in recent history to start a career in the arts in New York City (claiming second place is 2020). The biggest factors contributing to this was the magnitude of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession, how that changed the creative industry drastically in a couple short years, how different the overall culture and values prevalent in the industry were back then, the resources and support of underrepresented and marginalized artists available today were still many years away from existing when we started out.
It’s difficult to describe this anxious, unstable, inauspicious time to anyone who either was too young to recall, or anyone who’s started their career more recently. The level of economic chaos in 2008, and resulting financial austerity in the arts and media, has not been experienced at such levels by any subsequent working-age generation since then (as of this writing). The 2008 recession and economic downturn was like a tsunami that laid waste an entire unprepared city, destroying the lives of its citizens forever; while subsequent recessions have felt more like tropical storms that cause considerable damage, but there’s enough infrastructure and morale left in the aftermath for people to rebuild.
Funding and budgets dried up everywhere, nobody was paying artists of any kind, especially not new photographers fresh out of school. Even my friends who’d started their careers not long before I did were suddenly laid off before they could get much experience. Indeed, this happened across all job sectors; not just in the creative industry, and not just photography. Every door was closing and there was nowhere for anyone to go. People in all sectors were desperate for any work at the time, no matter how mediocre. We didn’t even get to fight over shooting entry level, base rate assignments; those projects just went away entirely.
Quite literally every day in 2008, the creative directors, editors, and their cohorts who might’ve given us early career chances on projects were losing their decision making jobs due to entire department shutdowns and company closures. There was this old trade rag called “Agency Spy” that would report on what creative directors and executives were leaving or changing agencies and related gossip; during 2008-09 those email newsletters read more like the obituaries you see after a widespread disaster, there was so much upheaval.
Traditionally, internships were structured as the way by which inexperienced workers provide unpaid labor, and put up with occasional minor indignities, in exchange for direct paths and promise to full time employment, professional credentials, and career mentorship. What enabled past generations to acquire relevant work experience eroded like the coastline in the tsunami of the Great Recession. With no money being distributed or spent in the industry, employers everywhere responded to the crisis by locking down financially and laying off most of or the entirety of their workforce. With few to no remaining staff, unpaid internships went from a somewhat protected apprenticeship structure to exploitative free labor from a new generation of inexperienced, early career workers entering the job market under unprecedented financial insecurity.
The many brands, publications, and agencies that shut down back in 2008 meant that the thousand-headed tangle of industry vendors that relied upon their business, and that historically provided a multitude of industry-relevant entry level jobs, either shut down, pivoted business models, or stopped hiring for several years. Entire companies went bankrupt, unable to pay vendors and freelancers. So risk averse were the few paying brands and remaining magazines, they often refused to book anyone but the biggest, most recognizable artists for paid commissions.
The digital and social media marketing age, brand new in 2008, forced even successful artists to make creative and financial compromises for clients demanding much more work (or as they started calling it, “content”), demanding artists agree to full buyouts for pennies on the dollar. Project budgets went from the tens and hundreds of thousands (even millions in some cases) to almost nothing, despite the enormous pressure on the surviving agencies to generate their clients business and revenue in a recession. They had to keep making ads and content for clients, but now with skeleton crews of the few creatives left after mass-layoffs of the Great Recession gutted entire departments. Clients and agencies lowering the value of commissioned work to wring as much profit out of it as possible had a stranglehold on the industry that lasted years; they realized they could still get work out of people for a fraction of the budget, and there was little incentive to change that even years later when financial recovery was well underway.
Photographers, studios, rental companies, and vendors with business drying up during the recession either downsized or relocated en masse, and some sold their equipment and quit the industry entirely. Not everyone could pivot to what were then the brand new demands for photography asset creation that now involved motion, video, and device integration. While this sometimes meant the mourned retirement of a respected industry legend, this later opened up opportunities for newer photographers with more nimble techniques and modern equipment who could accommodate and explore these new concepts.
Many of us who started working during the 2008 economic crisis will recall hearing the people at the top panicking that their coffers for special luxuries and extravagant material pleasures were gone, while ourselves and many others worked at the lowest ranks for the lowest rates and struggled every day for basic financial stability. The lurid, Hollywood Babylon-style debauchery was less coveted by the newer generation of artists and producers, who would much prefer to see themselves and their crews getting paid more, than to see clients blowing cash on frivolous amenities like champagne and caviar.
The harmful effects of the wildly unchecked privilege and excess of “the good old days” that our Boomer bosses reminisced about, and the misogyny and the power of white men it upheld for too long, were increasingly clear to us. Photo and video shoots never quite returned to the pre-crash level, now that every budget was heavily audited and trimmed down by the cost consultants that all agencies and brands brought in to save themselves money. With funds pulled away from traditional marketing (and increasingly redirected to shareholders and CEOs) major commissions and photo shoots happened far less frequently.
+ +
A candid discussion of the blatant racism, prejudice, and ableism that was still very much normal in the creative industry when I began working should be its own topic for another day. It’s impossible to ignore racism especially as the factor of why all of us who weren’t white rarely got trained up for employment or serious opportunities the way white interns regularly were. In the few instances where there was a BIPOC or another non-white intern, we noticed how we were frequently shoved to the background like “the help,” given manual labor tasks and getting shouted at all day, while white interns were given more dynamic projects, got invited to sit in on company meetings, attend industry events with supervisors, and were allowed to share their opinions.
However, it’s also very clear as to why I didn’t fit in. I am a walking, talking logical fallacy: a nerdy tomboy from a shabby New England backwater, who also just so happens to present as the ethnicity universally associated with subservience and meekness. Of course I always got sidelined by more straightforward and outwardly commanding personalities. Of course nobody ever quite knows what to do with me. Of course I tend to attract people seeking to exploit, not cultivate, their employees.
As an adopted Asian person with a Western name, American voice, and is inextricably American in culture, my professional life is a never-ending series of awkward moments when people, who I’ve connected with via email or on the phone, meet me in person and realize that they were actually dealing with an Asian. The ways my presenting ethnic appearance differs drastically from my actual personality and identity frequently wins me a lot of hostility from controlling, decisive creative powerhouse types who have absolutely no patience for the unexpected and off-putting surprise of my race.
While the creative industry is viewed as a generally liberal space, there is a not insignificant number of people at all levels who have a tendency to fundamentally misunderstand BIPOC, nonwhite, LGBTQ+, and people with disabilities’ right to be treated equally. They wrongly interpret that as an expectation that now, they have to guess what kind of “special treatment” we want from them at any given time. Unable to see past themselves and their biases, some people just don’t know how to act normally around people who are different from them, and they’re mad about it. They bristle at the necessary corrective measures (e.g. establishing protected characteristics, making accommodations, creating accessible spaces) as inconveniences inherently unequal to them. I know that I am hardly alone in experiencing hostility and isolation because I defy the self-centered, prejudiced expectations of so many.
It was a shock to my own values early in my career to see how many successful, talented, impressive people wielded their power and influence to be an extraordinarily difficult person, spending inordinate energy being unpredictably cruel in order to rule over the people in their orbit. I was so frequently the only non-white person in any given space, an anomaly in a sea of all-white colleagues. I stood out as different and therefore, surely they reasoned, the weak link who isn’t measuring up and slowing everything down. It was the easiest thing in the world for the powerful to exert their dominance over a situation by picking on and bullying me.
At networking events and similar gatherings, I’ve been stuck handling questions about my race or my adoption before I can even try connecting as a professional and talk about work; while everyone else connects by sharing ideas and information and building work relationships over commonalities. Adoption being so poorly understood by society at large makes it hard to form genuine connections with people who are preoccupied with picking apart how different my family and I are. Despite people’s (often invasive) curiosity about my being adopted, most conclude that it’s something “weird” they just learned before moving on to connect with people they have more in common with and don’t make them feel uncomfortable. For these reasons, I learned to be very selective with whom I bring up my identity as an adopted person.
However, this also means that all kinds of people just see me as “Asian,” silently assigning me familiar pejorative stereotypes and scriptwriting their biased assumptions, writing me off as “just like all The Other Ones.” I frequently experience this double dose of othering everywhere I go as an Asian-presenting adopted person, but it has been acutely detrimental in professional settings. This is all despite the grace I show when confronted with people’s lack of sensitivity and understanding.
I wish I could say I never saw white bosses hiring Asians not because they care about diversity, but to use them as an excuse to not hire any other kind of person, while still getting to say they hired a “minority.” It didn’t take long to notice that many successful Asians in the creative industry during those years were either in positions defined by silence or invisibility in service to white peers, or were themselves complicit in upholding white supremacist or misogynistic power structures.
Whatever little hope I might’ve had for connecting with Asian colleagues and perhaps finding some form of community for the first time in my life was quickly replaced by anxiety over not knowing who to trust. The few chances I had to connect with other Asians were often met with their puzzled indifference once they realized we have nothing in common other than our physical appearance. During that time, there was really no accountability or incentive for the powerful to create inclusive or safe spaces.
Important and difficult to abbreviate, this topic does deserve its own piece another day. But including the extent of my lived experience here would get this piece about my personal history off track way too fast. But in everything you read here, please understand that multiple things are true: I’ve made plenty of mistakes, I haven’t always been great at every job I’ve had, and like many I’ve always struggled to survive and gain skills in an overwhelmingly white system that not only wasn’t built for me, but was built to keep us out no matter how hard we worked.
+ +
We should talk about what it was like to experience unpaid creative internships before the 2014 Conde Nast intern walk-out. For decades and even into 2008, these were the only entry positions available in many fields, but especially the arts and media. Emerging artists were unlikely to be considered eligible for full time employment or to start their own art practice unless they did at least one applicable internship first. This enables enormous hegemony in the arts for the privileged and wealthy, historically denying opportunities and career paths for many talented but marginalized people. I was about age 14, in 1998, when I learned what an internship was; having learned that Monica Lewinsky was a college student working at a summer internship she moved to Washington DC for.
The most notoriously difficult to survive internships in the creative industry were commonly associated with the most powerful, wealthy, and famous artists and companies. At these “ivory tower” internship positions, the general expectation is that to even be treated atrociously in these rarefied spaces is worth being able to say “I worked for So-and-So;” a currency which can indeed retain its value indefinitely in one’s career and social life. They even made a movie about this that a lot of you might recognize: The Devil Wears Prada.
While not every internship in every field was defined by abuse and chaos, most of the fashion, art, and media internships during this time were unhinged parodies of themselves. As I discussed earlier, all companies now relied heavily upon exploiting unpaid, untrained interns to do the work of the paid staff they laid off in response to the 2008 crisis. Especially in photography, we had zero expectation of being treated well, we expected to bear the brunt of high-stress environments, and be abused by maladjusted maniacs with no intention of teaching us anything useful for our careers. Even prior to the 2008 economic crisis, internships offering any amount of pay, or even a stipend for lunch or subway fare, were rare to nonexistent. It didn’t take long for most of us to accept that this industry isn’t here to make the world a better place or even make us successful artists, but for specific groups of people to extract maximum profit.
My very first internship was with a fashion photographer, who one day decided that I was to take lunch her building hallway from then on, because “I shouldn’t have to look at you eating.” While on set for the only shoot she did during our tenure, her photo assistant asked me to help him set up the backdrop. When she saw me setting up an autopole, she marched over (in full view of her client) and chided him, “No! She’s not a real assistant! Do not let her touch the equipment or come near my set!" She swatted me away when the stylist asked me to hold something for her because she momentarily needed both hands to work with the model, “Julie is not a stylist and I don’t want her touching the wardrobe!” When lunch arrived, she made a gesture for me to go sit in the hallway, but as I walked toward the door her client insisted, “Actually, I prefer that we all eat together as a team.” This, of course, only made the photographer seethe. She terminated my internship the following week, which was a relief; as every moment of working for this nasty, insecure, poorly behaved little brute was just awful.
The invasive work culture created in the fallout of the 2008 economic crisis, especially with the integration of smartphones into our everyday lives, loomed large for years. Industry managers gleefully erased the boundaries of work and personal time, it was quickly normal to not simply be on call for emergencies, but to be available online at all times.
I’d already graduated and with no classes to attend I could commit to working full time. I was age 24 when most interns were 18-21, and supervisors assigned me the workload and expectations of an employee, offering rushed, bare-minimum guidance before completely abandoning me tackle their overwhelming amount of tasks. Being closer in age to their full time employees, supervisors expected that I (unlike the younger interns) could handle things on my own. But because I lacked the work experience their employees had, and as someone who has undiagnosed ADHD, the stress of these environments where I was constantly under intense pressure to perform, without being able to ask for help (while also masking my ADHD), took a heavy toll on my mental health.
Back then it was expected that unpaid interns cover expenses with their money and await reimbursement. The fashion companies I did office-work based internships for did not take well to my inability to cover expenses like the other interns and salaried employees could. When explaining that I was in no position to pay for something because I just didn’t have the money and I could not wait for reimbursement. “Why are your personal financial limitations preventing you from doing what’s asked of you as an intern?” “Our last foreign intern who looked like you refused to be reimbursed to make things easier for us; why can’t you do the same?”
I didn’t have my own computer in college and relied on SCAD’s computer labs to get my assignments done. I still couldn’t afford a computer after graduation and my college boyfriend loaned me his old laptop (a cantankerous Dell several years old at the time that weighed 20 lbs) to move to New York with. Across the industry, everyone from interns and executives alike all had the latest Apple MacBook laptops, and most internships required that students bring their own laptop. I struggled for a couple months with the Dell that ran on Windows, which was an issue working with files my colleagues created on Apple software. After I was rather suddenly (and maybe rightfully) dismissed from one internship for “misrepresenting my ability to provide a working laptop,” ultimately my boyfriend’s parents generously decided to buy me a MacBook.
I didn’t get very far when seeking photo assistant work. Back then especially, almost all photographers overwhelmingly preferred to work with men because they’re seen as stronger, more capable, and less of a liability. On one occasion I received a reply to my introduction email from a photographer’s studio manager: they had work coming up and if I could meet with her and the photographer to see if I’m a good fit, she’d put me on hold for the shoot. I was thrilled! Upon arriving I was greeted by the studio manager (a woman), but when the photographer (a man) saw me, he told me to step outside to the hallway while he shouted at her loud enough for me to hear, “You think that fucking Chinese girl can work my set? You are a fucking idiot! Get me a real assistant and get her the fuck out of my studio!”
During those years, as a young, petite Asian woman, there were very few photo shoots I managed to get hired on as a green assistant or PA, but I was almost always short changed to working as the receptionist. “You know what we really need right now? A nice gal like you to answer the phone while our crew guys get this done. Could you be a sweetheart and do that?” Being taken off set to answer the phone left enormous gaps in my working knowledge and ability to build connections in my professional network. Being kept away from set hobbled my ability to connect with people outside of serving them coffee. Not being allowed to handle any equipment closed off valuable learning and exposure to the latest camera technology and mastering advanced lighting techniques.
Digital techs and lighting assistants were paid in day rates that increased as they worked up the ranks of experience. I knew people (almost always white guys) who would put up with the 2008 base assistant rate of $200 a day in, say, January, and after getting enough experience on enough shoots, he’d be making $500 a day by July. It took them all a few years, but many of them were able to acquire the professional experience and financial stability to start their own photography careers. Being sidelined so immediately kneecapped my earning power. At the front desk, I was paid hourly at minimum wage (usually $8/hr, sometimes $10 or even $12), which never increased with experience, leaving me with few desirable skills other than the ability to use a telephone. If a guy could earn $200/day and get booked 5 days of the week, he’d earn $1,000. If I was scheduled for 5 days at the front desk at $12/hour, I’d get $480, and for gigs that paid $8/hour I’d walk away with even less. These reception gigs were not especially reliable because many places realized putting an unpaid intern at the front desk was even more cost effective for them than paying me.
Having more in common with the Scouts or a military troop than any office environment, there is a hierarchical, rank-and-file obedience deeply ingrained and strictly enforced at every level of production work. Speaking up in opposition to the photographer or clients, asserting oneself unasked, acting above one’s station, or refusing orders from the photographer are things that only the true 1% can get away with and still expect to keep getting hired (i.e. the artsy nepo-babies of celebrities, famous artists, and the ultra-wealthy). This keeps plenty of people in line and the system moving, while enabling a lot of terrible behavior and a damaging work culture that runs rampant in all kinds of overanxious production environments.
+ +
For many reasons, the commercial or fashion photographer paths became less and less realistic for me as the years passed. The industry was still very different back then, still resistant to change, aggressively gate-kept, with a narrow definition of what a “real” photographer was: preferably male, white, straight and cis, able-bodied and good looking, from a wealthy or famous background, with uninterrupted success. Anyone who didn’t fit that mold had to work much, much harder for diminished returns and an attenuated professional career.
In 2009, against all odds, I was offered a full time junior position after my favorable performance as an intern at an artist management company. I’d achieved a coveted job offer that followed an internship. This was indeed incredibly rare at the height of the economic crisis, I was considered extremely lucky. After earning at or barely above minimum wage as a receptionist, a salaried job where I might actually learn something didn’t seem so bad. This job paid $30,000 a year and offered health insurance (no other benefits). LOL.
After I accepted the job, I was rather candidly informed that they liked me the least out of the group of interns that season, but I was offered the job because I was the one who had no future as a real photographer. Unlike me, the other interns were talented photographers, they all had creative potential outside of doing low-level NPC admin work.
There was a lot of pressure on me to take and keep that job in 2009, as the Great Recession raged on and jobs were still scarce. My college boyfriend was struggling to find work as a graphic designer after he’d funded our move to the city, and after he and his parents had been so generous with me, I was actually glad to have an opportunity to finally step up and support us this time. However, our subsequent breakup not long after I started this job added to the urgency to hold on to whatever income I had, especially with no other job prospects of my own.
So I was treated like a half-wit beast of burden, not like a junior colleague in training. There was no commitment or plan to train me into a capable and experienced agent or producer. My bosses and the two Asian-American colleagues I actually did have at this job all treated me with a form of harshness that I did not know what to do with. While I made plenty of irritating mistakes as a newbie, this was simply a very difficult place to work.
My bosses and coworkers treating me so harshly for as long as they did in front of so many clients and industry peers (who knew and respected my bosses but didn’t know me at all) made me somewhat radioactive. Anyone who saw them singling me out and treating me this way, while being nice to everyone else, might’ve led many to assume that I incurred their wrath because I failed to meet their expectations; that I just didn’t have what it takes, I wouldn’t last very long, and therefore I wasn’t someone worth getting to know.
I wish I wasn’t so ashamed to admit that I’ve never been able to make much money in this industry, and I still don’t to this day. Being chronically underpaid, under-trained, and repeatedly overworked in toxic workplaces left me too broke, too exhausted, and with no free time to put towards my skills or goals as a photographer.
However, this meant I missed out on everything that started to grow during the ensuing years of financial recovery and renewed community building in the visual arts. Having not meaningfully made work since I’d graduated, I was not qualified to participate in these new initiatives created to support previously marginalized artists; that is, if I hadn’t aged out of many opportunities by then entirely. By now, we’re somewhere around 2012-13, and I was 29-30 years old.
For a long time it seemed like the only thing I could do, for the industry that I loved but didn’t love me back, was to give up and keep my head down. Ultimately, the years of nonstop, severe bullying and deliberate isolation in more than one workplace ended up breaking my spirit. My mental health deteriorated rapidly during those years, the constant harsh treatment brought out the worst in me and I turned into a completely different person, someone I didn’t like. It’s taken me years to recover from those experiences.
+ +
It’s hard to say exactly when industry values and culture started to shift from the expectation of abuse as a rite of passage, insolent behavior and vicious outbursts, prejudice and misogyny at every level, the greed and hoarding of wealth; to normalizing a more diverse and inclusive culture based on community building, sharing resources, financial fairness, emotional maturity, and self-regulation.
Having lived through it, I personally think it started when Millennial-age professionals, who started working in and around the maelstrom of 2008, slowly became senior enough to advocate for creating something closer to the kind of workplaces that we wish we had when we were starting out. Gen Z might cringe at their Millennial colleagues and managers, but many of them are far less likely to experience the horrendous treatment we received from our Boomer-age bosses because we vowed this cycle of abusive work culture would end with us and not be repeated on our watch.
It’s true that we don’t always get everything right; there’s quite a lot we all can be better at, this is work worth doing. But today, we have the tools, spaces, and community and get support that simply did not exist for us in 2008, when inexperienced and marginalized artists faced so many financial and cultural limitations that today are thankfully hard to imagine since the years of financial recovery and creative evolution in the industry. Back then it really was everyone for themselves; we had so little to help each other out with.
Today, all kinds of people and organizations now enthusiastically seek out interns outside of art schools, offering unprecedented job opportunities to those with different life backgrounds entirely. Interns today have more agency to speak up about mistreatment, are designated mandatory breaks, aren’t expected to pay for things, and are discouraged from taking work home with them. At last, a broader spectrum of BIPOC artists more frequently inhabit influential positions in the industry, with a direct path and promise to future opportunities.
Today, many internships are paid positions; or if not, will at least provide a subway and meal stipend so it’s not costing them money to be there. Internships are expected to be structured around teaching and learning, not exploitation. Internships today exist to grant newcomers access to the guidance of experienced, well-intentioned creatives who create a space to succeed. That few today would recognize or even tolerate such hostile, abusive environments shows that real change is possible if you don’t give up, that the worst things that have happened to you don’t have to define you forever, and that we did not suffer those years entirely in vain.
-II-
+ +
That was a heavy one. Thank you for holding space for that.
Please know that the accompanying Part 3 that follows this is not nearly as depressing.
Ever onward; stay tuned in, mi amor.