Art Technician Emergency Fund
Auction organised by
Sarah Titheridge
Taz Lovejoy and
Martina Schmuecker
The Art Technician Emergency Fund initiative ran from March to June 2020. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, jobs for freelance art workers in museums, galleries and other institutions dissappeared literally over night. Extremely concerned for our own livelyhoods, looking at the situation initially with no state support in sight, we decided on the spot that we had to do something to help. We asked all artists, institutions and collectors we could think of to support us by donating art work for an online silent auction we had set up to collect funds for struggling art technician workers.
The auction of over 100 artist’s works, as well as a selection of posters dotaned by the 2020Solidarity Campaign, collected 27k during a 5 week run. We then handed over the money and the contacts of the art technicians who had responded to our call out to AN magazine, to distribute the funds equally between 53 applicants.
The initial number of respondents to our call out had been over 100 art technicians. By the time of distribution, finally some government support in the form of SEISS was available, which made it possibe for half of our applicants to opt out of receiving money from our fund. However, a lot of us art technicians working in multiple, different jobs and employment situations between contracted and self employed, and some of us were not elegible for any state support, and so still in a difficult situation.
ATEF was based on trust and honesty - we did not want to nor had the facility to check if people really needed our funds.
The fact that over half of the initial applicants to the fund decided they didn’t need the funding available by the time of distribution and dropped out, so the amount for each remaining recipient increased,shows an admirable degree of solidarity between people working.
Equally, artists donating work lowered their prices considerably for our auction, as we didn’t have contacts of higher value buyers- just any contacts we could pool between us, our own networks and friends.
︎︎︎Research and info (March 2020)
︎︎︎ List of auctioned works and artists
LINKS/PRESS
AN to distribute over 27k from the ART Technician Emergency Fund
2020Solidarity
Sarah Titheridge Interview Limited Perspective Podcast
