It’s common knowledge that many big-name artists had day jobs before they came to prominence: Jeff Koons was a Wall Street commodity broker, Mark Rothko was a schoolteacher, Barbara Kruger was a graphic designer, and Cindy Sherman was a receptionist in an art room in New York. Space.
But this is not just a historical phenomenon. Some artists find second passions that turn into businesses, and even fairly successful artists today sometimes have a second non-art job to make ends meet (not to mention the legions of artists who teach in art schools) .
This may increasingly be the case, given high inflation and a possible economic downturn. A recent Bankrate survey found that nearly two in five Americans have a side job, and one in three say they need money to pay bills. It’s also a global phenomenon: A recent global survey of 10,000 workers by a marketing data and analytics firm Kantar shows that 30% of the working population has a second job due to economic concerns.
In this case, the other occupations of artists, both historical and current, are the subject of the exhibition.Day jobsat the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas. The show “proves that even some of the world’s most successful artists have relied on other jobs to make ends meet – and that those day jobs can sometimes prove essential to their core practice, rather than distracting them. of their primary vocation”. wrote Sarah Cascone of Artnet News.
And art serves as a kind of secondary activity in its own right: famous personalities like jim carrey For Miley Cyrus, Bob Dylan For Seth Rogen tried their hand as artists, making works ranging from political cartoons to assemblage sculpture, from painting to pottery.
Here are 6 artists who have a completely different job than what they do in the studio.
Katherine Bernhardt: Berber rug merchant
Courtesy of Katherine Bernhardt.
Katherine Bernhardt is not only a painter who depicts pop culture subjects like the Pink Panther, Bart Simpson and Pokemon Trading Cards-Sometimes sensational auction estimates while she’s there. Several years ago, she also went into business with her sister and her husband as Flying Magic Carpets of the Berber Kingdom of Morocco, after visiting the North African country more than a decade ago. .
“[The rugs] are inspiring,” she told Artnet News. “The use of symbols in the rugs is related to my work, and the color combinations are amazing, and the fact that they’re all made by women is awesome.”
Lateral bustle even penetrated the main stage at times: Bernhardt showed the carpets next to his paintings.
Christopher Chiappa: Designer/Installer
Christopher Chiappa’s work in an assortment of mediums has been exhibited at venues including the SCAD Museum at Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams. It earned him coverage in the pages of the New York Times And art forum. (For the record, I bought one of the life-size sculptures of fried eggs that earned him a mention in the Time.)
Chiappa is also a design-centric entrepreneur, running New York boutique Full Wolf.
A Full Wolf installation in progress. Courtesy of Chris Chiappa.
After starting work in Jeff Koons’ studio, Chiappa did some contracting work on the side, building a storage space for painter Donald Baechler, then met contractor Murray Moss and ended up building the Moss stores. “None of this would have been possible without him,” say Moss and Franklin Getchell in their book Please don’t touch. Today, Full Wolf helps furniture and design company Herman Miller with their showrooms and is the East Coast installer for Vitsœ shelving.
“It’s an artist-centric model,” Chiappa told Artnet News. Artists such as Joseph Buckley, Benny Merris and Luis Salas Porras were paid. “You are supposed to have the flexibility to do a residency at Skowhegan or get ready for a show.
Cary Leibowitz (aka Candyass): Auction House Manager
Cary Leibowitz. Photo courtesy of Phillips.
Cary Leibowitz’s incredible sense of humor can be seen in such exhibition titles as “I need to grow up and be taken seriously, said the clown at the urinal”, “Prequel Nyquil” and “Phyllis Diller If You Do, Phyllis Diller If You Don’t.” He has shown his equally witty paintings, installations and sculptures all over the world, from the Guggenheim Museum in New York to the Art Institute of Chicago to the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Things (presumably) get a little more serious as he gets dressed and heads into his day job as global co-head of publishing at Phillips auction house, where he’s worked since 2008.
“When I met people, they were like, ‘Oh, are you still doing art? “”, did he declare. Artnet News in 2018. “It was a bit awkward. But the more comfortable I became with my daily work, the more confident I became in my artistic creation. Because I have this respectable, well-paid career, I don’t need my artistic creation to sustain me. It gives me the freedom to continue making art the way I want to.
Nicole Mazza: tango dancer
Nicole Mazza, The Beso2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Nicole Mazza’s fabric artwork can be seductive or sinister, and that’s fair judging by the two currently featured on its homepage: one shows an orgy at the edge of a swimming pool, the other a woman dressed only in red pumps who is about to plunge a large pair of scissors into the back of another woman. Mazza, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has caught the eye of publications like Vice.
Mazza started dancing tango at 18, and in 2014 when she visited Buenos Aires, where the dance was born, she fell in love. She is a professional dancer to this day.
“As a dancer, especially the tango, an improvised dance with a partner, there is a lot at stake in terms of what we want to express as dancers, what we can express due to the limitations of our bodies. and what we actually convey to students and viewers when we do a show,” Mazza told Artnet News. “Tango is another art form that is similar to the visual arts because the ‘product’ is subjective. Some people like what you do and some people don’t. You must be tough-skinned and confident in your art, in your dancing.
Virginia L. Montgomery: Graphic Facilitator
Virginia L. Montgomery, 2022, O Luna (video) and egg stone (sculpture), on view at Contemporary Austin.
One of the artists featured on Blanton’s “Day Jobs” show, Virginia L. Montgomery works in media such as video, performance, sound design and sculpture, and creates works that bring together mysticism, science and his experience as a neurodivergent person. Since earning an MFA at Yale, she has shown her work around the world at venues such as the Tate Modern in London, the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, and the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Denmark.
When she’s not creating artwork, she’s a graphic facilitator, which she describes as a unique profession in which she maps the development of ideas at events such as TED talks and talks. Its clients include IBM, Google, Pfizer and teen vogue.
Virginia L. Montgomery at work as a graphic facilitator at the Future of Design Conference in New York in 2017.
“In both of my careers, I create connections between ideas through symbols,” she told Artnet News. “I am an artist who thinks in symbols. In my fine art, I choreograph symbols, gestures, textures and sounds to facilitate the healing of dream worlds filled with moons, moths and lush colors.
But there is a big difference between the two professions, she points out: “Unlike the abbreviated readability of illustrations that I use as Graphic Facilitator, my works invoke surreal and multifaceted associations.”
Ragen MossAvocado
Installation view, “Ragen Moss: What is deprivation?” », Bridget Donahue, New York. Images courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York. Photographer: Dario Lasagni.
Also featured in the Blanton exhibit, Los Angeles-based sculptor Ragen Moss was a star of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, with cocoon-like sculptures in which, according to curators, “the artist explores creative ideas of space and meaning by placing an independent, fully formed sculpture inside another.A recent show at New York’s Bridget Donahue, “What Is a Deprivation?” continued some of the same formal concerns while including lit torches, literally warming the gallery.
“Being an artist and a lawyer just took on meaning for me, and I saw them as intertwined rather than compartmentalised,” Moss said. Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles in 2019. “I’m into both as well, at the level of genuine interest. It’s rarely occurred to me that being both is odd, although externally I’m aware that having an MFA and a JD isn’t the most obvious and it creates a complex weekly rhythm – I’ve taken conference calls while mixing cement, which isn’t ideal.
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