Dear Sixty: An Arts Confessional

Dear Sixty: An Arts Confessional is an advice column that asks artists, curators, organizers, and administrators to share their personal and professional experiences around value, mindfulness, communication, and labor in the arts. This is an outlet for your stories about care, compensation, neglect, expectations, roadblocks, and ways in which you feel you have been misinformed, wronged, taken for granted, or misused while working in the arts.

But this is also a space to share success stories. There are plenty of people taking thoughtful approaches to making work happen with limited resources and in ways that feel equitable and mutually beneficial. We want to celebrate those stories as well.

All of us at Sixty believe that in order to address questions of value and communication between artists, organizers, institutions, and communities we must call out the problematic actions and success stories from a range of perspectives and reflect on real-life situations. Those stories can then be used as points of departure into conversations that will hopefully help us learn from our mistakes and incorporate better strategies into our work.

So, hold no punches and tell us all about it. Be as honest and open as you feel comfortable being. Tell us your story. Then, one of Sixty’s writers will task themselves with responding anonymously with thoughts they might have on the situation or reach out into our knowledgable network to get input.

Your experience and our response will be published monthly on sixtyinchesfromcenter.org and more frequently as more submissions roll in. And feel free to name names if you choose, but please know that no names (individuals, organizations, or institutions) will ever be made public and all names will be removed when the stories are published–except with the success stories if you choose to have them included.

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