Risk and Resilience: Models for Personal Finance and the Arts

The arts sector has long been a precarious workforce, cobbling together short contracts and part-time gigs, and practitioners face the considerable challenge of balancing time for artistic practice and meeting financial needs. Natasha Mytnowych surveys the obstacles facing artists and creative workers in Canada, uncovering the specifics of what an individual artist or arts worker must do outside of paid hours to keep their lives, their creative practice, and in turn, the sector, afloat, especially as it becomes harder and harder to secure paid artistic work. Mytnowych advocates for new perspectives on arts labour, in particular the importance of de-stigmatizing work outside of one’s primary artistic practice; she recommends recognizes additional work as a legitimate and necessary financial supplement to the pursuit of risky, non-commercial creative projects. Mytnowych also notes that, as the rest of the workforce is becoming more similar to the creative sector, there are opportunities to create resources and practices to help entrepreneurs, contract workers, and others juggling multiple types of employment.