Visual Arts Work: Seminar and Book Launch

Join us for an industry focused forum that highlights the key implications of the three-year Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project – Visual Arts Work. The project’s aim is to develop sustainable strategies for the Australian visual arts and craft sector. It included two sector wide surveys of both visual and craft artists and arts workers, together with extensive research and analysis has produced insights that are essential to the future of a sector that works for the benefit of all parties.

We will hear from project team members, industry partners the National Association of Visual Arts and Australian Museums and Galleries Association and artist Madeleine Thornton-Smith. The event will share key project findings regarding artists’ and arts workers’ careers, incomes and working lives along with policy recommendations and proposed actions to contribute to a fairer, more equitable and a sustainable visual arts and craft sector.

4-5.30pm Wednesday 2 April 2025
Level 7, Building 16 (Storey Hall) - RMIT University, 336/348 Swanston St, Melbourne VIC

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Visual Arts Work: Careers, Perspectives and Practices in an Australian Context, an edited volume that provides the most comprehensive picture to date of work in the visual arts ecosystem in Australia. The book launch will include short readings from contributors including Esther Anatolitis and Steven Rhall. 

In a context where artists’ incomes are consistently low and falling, commercial galleries are financially vulnerable, and public galleries face program funding challenges — this book explores barriers to the economic health of the sector, the challenge of improving artists’ and arts workers’ working conditions, and the realities of being a creative in the twenty-first century. The book combines an analysis of art world economic value chains alongside alternative and emergent cultural, social and political economies with new quantitative and qualitative insights from artists and arts workers. With interdisciplinary methodologies and industry engagement, it examines multiple and hybrid systems of value and includes the perspectives of visual artists, craft artists and arts workers with diverse lived experiences. Our research offers greater insight into the social, cultural, and political forces that underly the mediation of art to the public including an urgent emphasis on gender, cultural safety and care work including the concerns of First Nations artists, culturally and linguistic diverse artists, and artists with disability. Our approach unpacks the diversity and hybridity of art ‘work’ to include practices realised through digitisation, internationalisation, community engagement and intersectoral partnerships.

6-7.30pm Wednesday 2 April 2025
The Oxford Scholar, 427 Swanston St, Melbourne VIC

CAST Contemporary Art and Social Transformation is a research group based in the School of Art at RMIT University.

CAST produces art research that critically engages with environmental, social and public spheres with a particular interest in how artistic practices intersect with issues of equity, access and democracy. CAST is a hub for critical thinking, collaboration and the exchange of ideas, knowledge dissemination, practice-led artistic research and socially-engaged art practice. CAST engages on local and international levels by collaborating with practitioners, communities, industry, and government partners.