STANFORD, CA.- The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is presentingt Day Jobs, the first major exhibition to examine the overlooked impact of day jobs on the visual arts. On view from today to July 21, 2024, Day Jobs is curated by Veronica Roberts, the John and Jill Freidenrich Director of the Cantor, who originated the exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas in Austin, where she was the curator of modern and contemporary art. Now featuring a larger selection of works by standout California artists such as Margaret Kilgallen, Jay Lynn Gomez, Ahree Lee, Narsiso Martinez, and Sandy Rodriguez, the exhibition has significantly expanded to comprise more than 90 works by 36 established and emerging artists based in the United States. The accompanying publication has commissioned essays and interviews from 24 pioneering artists such as Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Tishan Hsu, Howardena Pindell, and Julia Scher, who offer first-hand accounts of how their day jobs—as a frame shop technician, hair stylist, word processor, museum employee, and security systems installer, respectively—altered their artistic trajectories in surprisingly profound ways.

"Day Jobs upends familiar narratives and myths around artists, challenging romanticized notions about how ideas are formed and what success looks like,” said Roberts. “My hope is that this exhibition will help dispel the misguided myth of the solitary artist genius and make clear that much of what has determined the course of art history in the late 20th and 21st centuries are unanticipated—often accidental—discoveries brought about as much by pragmatic experiences as by dramatic epiphanies. I also hope it encourages us to more openly acknowledge the precarious and generative ways that economic and creative pursuits are intertwined."

The vast majority of artists based in the United States take on day jobs due to the high cost of living and modest government support for the arts in this country. Success is often measured by their ability to quit a day job and focus full time on creating art. Yet these day job positions, even if unrelated to an artist’s practice, are not always impediments to their careers. This exhibition reveals how day jobs can, in fact, spur creative growth by providing artists with new materials and methods, hands-on knowledge of a specific industry that becomes an area of artistic investigation, or a predictable paycheck and structure that enable unpredictable ideas.

The exhibition is organized loosely in seven sections that reflect the diverse industries represented by the artists: “Art World,” “Service Industry," “Media and Advertising,” “Fashion and Design,” “Caregivers,” and “Finance, Technology, and Law.” Since artist day jobs are not commonly shared, recommendations were solicited from nearly a hundred curators, artists, and other colleagues in the field. Artists were selected based not only on the strength of their art, but also the extent to which their day job tangibly changed their practice. While the process for selecting artists occurred as part of the customary work of curatorial practice—informal studio visits and conversations, visiting residency programs, and encountering work in gallery and museum exhibitions as well as art fairs—notably, a third of the artists in the show were recommended by colleagues and unfamiliar to Roberts when she began assembling the exhibition checklist roughly five years ago.

Some of the most commonly-held day jobs—teaching art and working as an assistant to another artist—are threaded through participating artists’ careers but are deliberately not represented in the exhibition because their extensive and particular histories could be exhibitions unto themselves, and because the nature of those roles is so adjacent to being an artist. “Day Jobs ultimately seeks to demystify artistic production,” according to Roberts. “The show is part of a larger ongoing interest on my part to take contemporary art out of its rarefied realm and into everyday life. The exhibition also supports the Cantor’s mission to serve as a vital site that connects art to a wider public.”

Cantor Arts Center
Day Jobs
March 6th – July 21st, 2024