Field Study

Field Study originated in the Artists’ Co-op Seminar at Hunter College in the fall of 2021 as a way to learn more about how our artist colleagues — Hunter MFA alumni and current MFA students — are dealing with challenges large and mundane in their lives as working artists. How do they protect their time and process while holding other jobs? How do they build community? How are they unlearning the biases of arts institutions? It’s rare for artists to come together to talk about these sorts of things, rarer still to be vulnerable with strangers. And yet, that’s what we asked of our participants as we gathered this information from them. We imagined the Hunter MFA community as a microcosm of the professional art field at-large.

Each session was organized by a Hunter MA or MFA student, who facilitated an hour-long, small group conversation between artists who have done graduate work at Hunter, past and present. The goal of our class — to learn and think about cooperative models for the arts — found its way into the project. Conversations took place in rounds: facilitators asked the group a question and then invited participants to respond, one at a time, without interruption. Speaking in rounds is one aspect of the sociocratic meeting structure that we studied in our seminar.

What follows are nine transcriptions of conversations between working artists. We promised participants that all identifying information would be redacted from the final texts to allow them to speak freely. We hope these texts can be a resource to those working in the arts within the Hunter community and outside of it.