Arts administrators labor to bring arts, artists, and audiences together. They develop policies and implement them as practice as they navigate, follow, and disrupt professional norms. This research is grounded in concerns for arts administrator well-being, weary of paying a passion tax, committed to creative ideologies. While worker well-being has become more central to occupational discourse with COVID-19 and social justice movements, more research is needed to understand how well-being is understood and addressed in arts administration. Additionally, as a creative field we know little about how practitioners use creativity in their work, and how it is supported. I argue that attention to bodies, minds, and generally accepted, broad benefits of creativity can improve the practices, policies, pedagogies, and profession of arts administration.
The two main research questions of this inquiry seek new knowledge about the embodied experiences of arts administrators and the role of creativity in their lives. It also asks what queer theory might teach us about arts administration and the political stakes of connecting corporeal and systemic bodies in nonprofit arts administration. To begin answering these questions I employ an arts-based inquiry, utilizing creative approaches to study design (arts-based, queer, emergent), data collection (walking, making art, embodied), analysis (narrative, artful, discourse), and presentation of findings (visual, auditory, literary). A queer theoretical framework performs a queer study of bodies in a heteronormative field and researcher reflexivity as well as applying queer theory to rethink power, norms, failure, and joy in the field.
This inquiry involves 23 participant collaborators who identify as full-time, nonprofit arts administrators working in the United States. They responded to snowball sampling recruitment strategies for an online call for art/ifacts or iterative interviews soliciting interest in being reflexive and creative. They generally reflect the field’s professional demographics: white, heterosexual, able-bodied, well-educated cis women. They hold nested identities that scale privilege and power and direct their ambitions.
The embodied experiences of arts administrators are liminal spaces between fraying edges and en/folding curves. They fail, un/learn, and try again. Being creative is a personal aesthetic, hobby, and embodied approach to the job’s purpose, which can be hindered with social norms. Being creative promotes scaled agency, which is possible, limited, and surreptitious. Findings suggest that by turning attention to embodiment and creativity we might develop new curriculum, professional development, and strategic norms in arts administration to directly connect practices with creativity and policies with agency, improving corporeal and institutional well-being.
This research demonstrates that arts-based inquiries and queer theory open new insights about people, policies, practices, and the profession of arts administration. These frameworks allow us to ask questions in new ways to bring forth lived experiences and possibilities. Creative methods and human-centered theory are valuable ways to reimagine research in arts administration, shift power dynamics, and promote ethical research practices.