The Art World's Unpaid Tab

Field notes from asking arts organisations to actually pay people (yep, weird)

Still Waters Charmaine Watkiss, 2023. Showing at Hard Graft at the Wellcome Collection. Ph. Steven Pocock

In the first month of 2025, I experienced what genuine accessibility in the arts can look like. There have been conversations with programmers who understand that inclusive hiring is about fundamentally reimagining how they assess and value the skills of independent and marginalised workers whose contributions are vital to the sector. But I’ve had the weirdest interactions with gallery people about budgets already this year. They invite me to hold conversations for their projects – but these aren't casual chats. They're professional recordings they want to use and distribute and they make requests for me to do this without payment.

I am working with a small literary festival team at the moment, who helped me devise a practical access rider for a project that I’m working on with them as a co-curator. Here is how our first conversation went when I expressed that I had access needs: If you can’t travel on the day Lou or attend the event, no problem, we can work around you! The idea that I may not attend an event that I am curating would be unfathomable to most programmers. So bold! Unprofessional! My usual anxieties around being physically or cognitively functional on any given day, were diminished by their proactive attempts to accommodate me as I present to them as an independent, disabled worker. In doing so, they were saying that they valued my work, my 25 years sector experience and contribution to their project. Individuals like these encourage expansive conversations around access, treating them as starting points for dialogue, not bureaucratic burdens.

Bouba Touré May 1st demonstration in solidarity to the Sans-Papiers in hunger strike at the Halle Pajol before the occupation of the Saint Bernard Church, Paris,1996. Photograph Courtesy of the Bouba Touré Archive showing at Hard Graft at the Wellcome Collection.

Here’s a note to the press people reading this—hello! Please consider this important distinction about your requests for free press: