Above: Quilt by Lina Revere.
The Trouble with Calling It Work
I hesitate when I call art “work.” The word lands uncomfortably, as though I am slotting something intimate into an economic structure that was never meant to hold it. I use it anyway, because artists are workers, because I want to insist that making is labour, because unpaid and underpaid creative work has been too easily dismissed as a luxury, an indulgence, a hobby. But still, I hesitate.
For women and marginalised artists, the tension between creative labour and actual labour—what gets counted, what gets compensated—is sharp. Historically, the work of the hands, of care, of craft has been rendered invisible. The radical textile artist Faith Ringgold spoke about this erasure, recognising early in her career that traditional quilting, a practice passed down through generations of Black women, was not even considered art by institutions. It was seen as domestic labour, not creative expression. The line between art and “women’s work” has always been policed.
Then there is the problem of love. Audre Lorde, in Sister Outsider, wrote that “we have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.” I think about this when I feel the pull to make, to write, to lose myself in the kind of work that is both labour and longing. But capitalism tells us that if we love something, we must monetise it. That if we have a calling, we should turn it into a career. That passion should be productive. It is difficult, sometimes, to make peace with this contradiction. How do we follow the “yes” without turning it into a job, without losing the pleasure of making to the grind of survival?
So I hesitate when I call art “work,” even as I insist on its value. I want to hold space for making that is not transactional, for creation that does not justify itself through profit or productivity. But I also want to acknowledge the labour of it. The hours, the exhaustion, the risk. Perhaps the word itself is not the problem, but rather the structures we place around it. Perhaps the real question is not whether art is work, but whether all work, especially the unseen, unpaid, and unrecognised, should be valued differently.
Revere – 2025.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984.