W.A.G.E.

10 years ago today: An Open Letter to the New Museum On May 10, 2016, The New York Times reported on the New Museum's $80 million expansion plans for its Bowery location. Already armed with a calculation of what the New Museum would have paid out in artist fees had it been W.A.G.E. Certified in fiscal year 2014, an open letter was spontaneously penned and circulated on May 16. On March 21, 2026, after a 2-year closure to complete the expansion, the New Museum reopened with the inaugural exhibition, New Humans: Memories of the Future. As described in its press release, “The exhibition offers prototypes of beings that may be able to navigate an uncertain future and visualizes the spaces—both natural and architectural—in which new forms of life may be able to thrive.” Since existing forms of life still need to earn money in order to survive, it is our hope that the artists in New Humans were paid for their participation. But because the New Museum still isn’t W.A.G.E. Certified, we can only project what that would mean in material terms. Here is the 2026 math: If each of the 235 participating artists, 106 of whom are living and 129 are deceased, received a Minimum W.A.G.E. fee of $1,875, it would have cost $440,625. Deceased artists are included because institutions can and should pay fees to artists’ estates when working with them directly. @soft___network $440,625 is 0.5% of the cost of the museum’s $82 million building expansion. $440,625 is 1.2% of the museum’s operating expenses over the 2 years it was closed to the public to complete the expansion. $440,625 is just over half of the annual salary of the museum’s highest paid employee. Further reading: /newmuseum#top /newmuseum#dear-dad /2016/05/11/arts/design/new-museum-plans-expansion-after-raising43-million.html /2026/03/19/arts/design/new-museum-reopening-new-humans-phillips-gioni.html

Just in time for the collapse of the rules-based international order, introducing the Contract Generator, a new tool for drafting agreements between hiring parties and independent contractors working in the art industry. > Who is it for? Freelance art handlers, artist assistants, teaching artists and the galleries, nonprofit organizations, businesses, and agencies who contract their labor. > What is it for? Project-based casual labor has long been crucial to powering the production, exhibition, and circulation of art. For the many who constitute this under-recognized labor force, the temporary nature of gig work provides needed flexibility. But as non-employees there are few options when it comes to organizing for better pay and working conditions. Rarely sharing the same employer at the same time poses a real obstacle to bargaining collectively and as such, contracts are one of the only negotiating tools available to freelance workers. The Contract Generator was conceived to make the use of contracts straightforward, standard, and widespread. It produces PDFs for negotiation and signature from interactive, fillable forms. Developed through worker roundtables and drafted by a contract and employment lawyer, each agreement is a 'bespoke' legal document that addresses the specific economic and legal protections generally not available to independent contractors for each position. Because the agreements clarify and amplify workers’ status as independent contractors, they cannot be used by employers to contract employees. While instructional and easy to use, the generator does not simply draft agreements. Instead, the drafting process is designed to be an instrument of learning. To use it, join WAGENCY and become a subscribing member. $5 per month provides critical support for W.A.G.E.’s work. Think of it as monthly dues. /wagency/join-wagency#top /contracts#top

Join W.A.G.E. and AICA-USA online on Friday, August 1 from 1-2 pm EST on Zoom for Tools in Hands, a participatory introduction to WAGENCY. Not a formal trade union, umbrella group, or guild, WAGENCY is an organizing infrastructure designed to increase workers’ individual bargaining power and build collective leverage in the arts. W.A.G.E. core organizer Lise Soskolne will walk us through how to use its calculation tools, followed by a participatory discussion facilitated by Jasmine Amussen (President, AICA-USA) about the per word payment model for art writers and critics, and the challenges to accounting for the time investment required by this kind of highly skilled labor, particularly at the lower end of the pay scale. Link in bio to register ABOUT W.A.G.E. & WAGENCY W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) was founded in 2008 in New York City by a group of visual and performing artists and independent curators. Our mission is to establish sustainable economic relationships between artists and the institutions that contract our labor, and to introduce mechanisms for self-regulation into the art field that collectively bring about a more equitable distribution of its economy. Not a formal trade union, umbrella group, or guild, WAGENCY is an organizing infrastructure designed to increase workers’ individual bargaining power and build collective leverage in the arts. WAGENCY provides tools for calculating and negotiating equitable pay in occupations across the supply chain. With divisions for artists, artist assistants, art handlers, arts administrators, critics, curators, educators, interns, studio managers, and visitor service workers, its power lies in the commitment of its members to actively participate in changing the terms on which they engage their labor and to do so in solidarity with their peers.  @wageforwork

Join us online this Sunday, April 13th from 3 - 4:30pm EST for a WAGENCY workshop introducing contracts for freelance art and cultural workers. *WAGENCY membership + registration are required, see details below.* Joined by labor and employment lawyer John Willems, we’ll walk through the legal framework of W.A.G.E.’s forthcoming contracts for artist assistants, art handlers, and teaching artists — with agreements for independent curators, critics, and others to follow. In advance of making these tools available this summer, the workshop will include a feedback session and participatory discussion about how contracts can be initiated by workers. Read more about WAGENCY contracts here. * This event is for WAGENCY members only. Membership is free and open to all: /wagency/join-wagency#top ** Registration is required. Sign up here to receive a Zoom link: https://forms.gle/atNZmgP4d4rXjPMX9

Join us this Wednesday for A STAMP COSTS 5 HOURS, a discussion on cultural production and compensation featuring presentations from Willie Kearse (ABCA), Lise Soskolne (W.A.G.E.), Aileen Brown (Freelance Solidarity Project), Sara Kielly (incarcerated Journalist), with a presentation from Emily Nonko (Empowerment Ave) and Tyler Morse (ABCA) of data collected from a joint survey of incarcerated artists and writers regarding their experiences with cultural production and compensation. Essex Flowers Gallery | 19 Monroe St Wednesday Dec 4 - 6:30pm *masks required* RSVP at link in bio [//free] Essex Flowers Gallery is wheelchair accessible but does not have an accessible bathroom — one can be found at Luna Pizza (6 min from EFG). Image: postage stamp-trim flyer with above info, featuring a center weeping clock tower image from Manani Olivares’ artwork, “This Ticking Clock…”, one of the works featured in The Sky’s Fury Mirrors Mine; Art and the Archive of Indeterminate Release, on view at Essex Flowers Gallery through Dec 15th.

Join us online Sunday, November 3rd from 3 - 4:30 pm EST for Tools in Hands, a participatory introduction to WAGENCY. *Registration link in bio! Not a formal trade union, umbrella group, or guild, WAGENCY is an organizing infrastructure designed to increase workers’ individual bargaining power and build collective leverage in the arts. What tools? WAGENCY contains two calculators that connect publicly accessible government data with worker-driven standards. 1) The Fee Request Generator calculates artist fees according to the operating expenses of nonprofits as reported on their annual Form 990 tax filings. 2) The Skills Calculator determines the fair market value of skills used by workers across the industry, drawing on the federal Standard Occupational Classification system and regional salary data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. We’ll live-demo both and facilitate a discussion about the Skills Calculator’s classification system and how it distinguishes between industrial, fine art and craft-based processes. Whose hands? Since launching in 2018, WAGENCY has evolved from an artist certification program into an organizing infrastructure with divisions for artists, artist assistants, art handlers, arts administrators, critics, curators, educators, interns, studio managers, and visitor service workers. We’ll talk about the forthcoming launch of fillable contracts and our plans to build WAGENCY into a model that is participatory, representative, self-sustaining, and self-organized. Free and open to the public but you must register to attend. Zoom captions will be available. Please email [email protected] with any accessibility questions.

Introducing the Skills Calculator, a new tool for calculating the fair market value of skills used by workers across the art industry. Who is it for? Workers looking for regional prevailing wage and salary rates by skill or occupation, as well as unpaid interns who want to know how much their free labor is worth. What is it for? Art and cultural workers are often hired ad-hoc without a contract to work on projects for which there is little precedent in terms of execution or outcomes. Artist assistants, art handlers, studio managers and others are commonly expected to perform a wide range of tasks that are not valued equally. Many involve skills acquired not through academic or technical training but through years of underpaid supply chain labor, informal apprenticing, or sustaining a studio practice – itself unpaid and debt-producing. Despite being critical links in the supply chain, many occupations in the art field have been poorly defined, if defined at all. In fact, most are not listed in the federal Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system. The result is a lack of industry standards for much of the labor which is integral not only to the production and circulation of contemporary art but also to building its financial value. W.A.G.E.’s Skills Calculator is intended to close that gap by enabling workers to define their skills with precision and price them according to prevailing wages. It merges an art field skills categorization system made by W.A.G.E. with occupational data from the SOC system. Searchable by skill type, the database matches each skill to regional wage and salary rates drawn from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Users can calculate an average rate of compensation for a group of selected skills, thereby answering the eternal burning question: how much should I charge? Accessible through WAGENCY for subscribing members. Join and subscribe for $5 per month and get a free vintage 2018 Womanifesto poster! /skills-list#top /wagency/join-wagency#top

It is with profound sadness that we acknowledge the passing of our beloved colleague and friend, Marina Vishmidt (1976 – 2024). Marina served on W.A.G.E.’s board of directors from 2013 to 2016 but her involvement began years before, growing through the sharing of ideas on long threads of correspondence between New York and London. Pictured here with Richard Birkett at the 2014 Certification Summit at Cage in New York, Marina also participated in the 2015 WAGENCY Summit at May Day Rooms and the 2017 Artist’s Contract Summit at the ICA, both in London. Her singular and rigorous politics, indivisible from her mischievous wit, were crucial to the formation of our core programs. The great surplus of thought that was Marina’s contribution to W.A.G.E. will be felt for many years to come. 🖤 Images: 1. Marina and Richard Birkett at the 2014 Certification Summit. Cage, NY. Photo by Park McArthur. 2. Handmade WAGENCY member card for Marina, 2015. 3. Pages 1-4 of 7 from “Working Artists in the Greater Economy” by Marina Vishmidt. Labor Journal, 2011.

Seventeen million, eight hundred and ninety-eight thousand, eight hundred and forty-two dollars paid out to artists through W.A.G.E. Certification since 2014. Real-time artist fee counter now *live* and updating daily at wageforwork.com #wealthtransfer #resourceredistribution #measurableoutcome

STRIKE GERMANY. For artists and cultural workers contracted by German institutions. ✊ /

WAGENCY Reboot & wageforwork.com 4.0 is LIVE! WAGENCY was conceived in 2015 as a certification program for individual artists, designed to operate in parallel with W.A.G.E.’s certification program for institutions. Where W.A.G.E. certifies nonprofits that publicly commit to paying artist fees meeting W.A.G.E. standards, WAGENCY certified artists when they successfully negotiated W.A.G.E. fees or withheld labor from institutions that pay below them. In this way, WAGENCY enabled artists to engage in direct strike action using W.A.G.E. as a conduit. As we learned from how WAGENCY was and wasn’t being used by artists since its introduction in 2018, rebuilding the platform was an opportunity for reconfiguration. While it remains a tool for individual self-organization grounded in collective mobilization, WAGENCY is no longer a certification program. Instead of being certified or uncertified, WAGENTS now have one status — members — and two ways to participate. BEING A WAGENT. Members can display their digital badge and unique WAGENT number to increase individual leverage in negotiations. They can also collectivize their leverage. Because there is power in numbers, and in the art world, in names, all WAGENTS are now publicly listed. Joining WAGENCY is free. USING WAGENCY. WAGENCY is still a platform for negotiating equitable compensation. Members can use it to request W.A.G.E. fees and, whenever necessary, to withhold labor. Fee Requests are still sent from W.A.G.E. to contracting institutions as customized PDFs but negotiations now take place via email with W.A.G.E. in CC to increase bargaining power and provide support if needed. Using WAGENCY is still USD $5 per month. Read more about WAGENCY 2.0 on wageforwork.com 4.0. It’s LIVE! /#top

More guideline changes coming soon with wageforwork.com 4.0 MAXIMUM W.A.G.E. CAP RAISED TO $60K W.A.G.E. Certification was conceived in 2014 as a 3-tiered model with Floor, Minimum and Maximum thresholds. The floor was put in place to stop the race to the bottom while the ceiling, or Maximum W.A.G.E., ensures that no one unfairly profits from the redistribution of resources, including artists. For that reason, the Maximum W.A.G.E. for a Solo Exhibition was set at the average salary of a large institution's full-time employees – estimated at $30k. Because an actual average salary calculation made in 2023 revealed that the average salary of full-time employees was in fact $60k – twice the 2014 estimation – the Solo Exhibition cap will be raised to $60k along with increases to all fee categories. As a result, the Maximum W.A.G.E. threshold will apply to institutions with total annual operating expenses of $30 million or higher, up from $15 million. IN PRACTICE this means that if, for example, the Whitney Museum were W.A.G.E. Certified and contracted Jeff Koons to have another retrospective, with its operating expenses of over $100 million the museum would pay him no more than a $60k fee, not including other forms of content he might provide. …………………………………….. NEW LIVING W.A.G.E. TIER W.A.G.E. Certification will soon include Living W.A.G.E., a new 4th tier for institutions with operating expenses between $5 million - $30 million. For now, certified institutions falling within this range will still only be required to pay Minimum W.A.G.E. fees, but a continued scale-up until the cap is strongly encouraged. Should institutions offer Minimum fees, artists can request more using WAGENCY. IN PRACTICE this means that if, for example, MoMA PS1 were W.A.G.E. Certified and contracted Jeff Koons to present a retrospective for a $10k Minimum W.A.G.E. fee, with its annual operating expenses of around $10 million the artist could send the institution a Fee Request for a $20k Living W.A.G.E. fee (*or higher*), not including other forms of content he might provide. Read the full announcement: link in bio