RafaelFajardo
April 2012
Dolores Huerta turns 82 today and is awarded one of the nation’s highest honors
(Photos courtesy Dolores Huerta Foundation)Dolores Huerta, the civil rights, workers and women’s advocate who co-founded the United Farm Workers of America in 1962, was named one of 13 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Friday. The Medal of Freedom is the nation’s highest civilian honor, presented to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the the United States. The awards will be presented at the White House in late spring.
There’s always this sense that art is just play,” says Peter Plagens, a New York painter and art critic. “Art is what children do and what retired people do. Your mom puts your work up on the refrigerator. Or the way Dwight Eisenhower said, ‘Now that I’ve fought my battles, I can put my easel up outside.’
The musicians, actors and other artists we hear about tend to be fabulously successful. But the daily reality for the vast majority of the working artists in this country has little to do with Angelina Jolie or her perfectly toned right leg. “Artists in the Workforce,” a National Endowment for the Arts report released in 2008, before the Great Recession sliced and diced this class, showed the reality of the creative life. While most of the artists surveyed had college degrees, they earned — with a median income, in 2003-’05, of $34,800 — less than the average professional. Dancers made, on average, a mere $15,000. (More than a quarter of the artists in the 11 fields surveyed live in New York and California, two of the nation’s most expensive states, where that money runs out fast. The report has not been updated since 2008.)
Creativity is a form of expertise,” something a nation that keeps insisting on its status as a democracy has never been entirely comfortable with.
haters to the left; hippies to the right
photograph by Mags Phelan :: via dark_phaedra
From Artists in the Workforce (Research Report #48), courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts (via NEA News Room: Artists in the Workforce Graphics)
Creativity is a form of expertise,” something a nation that keeps insisting on its status as a democracy has never been entirely comfortable with.
There’s always this sense that art is just play,” says Peter Plagens, a New York painter and art critic. “Art is what children do and what retired people do. Your mom puts your work up on the refrigerator. Or the way Dwight Eisenhower said, ‘Now that I’ve fought my battles, I can put my easel up outside.’
The musicians, actors and other artists we hear about tend to be fabulously successful. But the daily reality for the vast majority of the working artists in this country has little to do with Angelina Jolie or her perfectly toned right leg. “Artists in the Workforce,” a National Endowment for the Arts report released in 2008, before the Great Recession sliced and diced this class, showed the reality of the creative life. While most of the artists surveyed had college degrees, they earned — with a median income, in 2003-’05, of $34,800 — less than the average professional. Dancers made, on average, a mere $15,000. (More than a quarter of the artists in the 11 fields surveyed live in New York and California, two of the nation’s most expensive states, where that money runs out fast. The report has not been updated since 2008.)
