From Stella to Grevsky: Employment Contracts in Artistic Production

Are studio assistants employees, contractors, or collaborators? What responsibilities do artists have toward the people who execute their work? Using the archives of artist Frank Stella and the contemporary primary documents of artist William Powhida, this paper contrasts Stella's practice of paying artists as employees with benefits and Powhida's use of contracts performatively to, in Powhida’s words, treat artists as “mercenary contractors making ‘art product.’” Stella is unusual in that his early success—e.g., his inclusion in MoMA's 16 Americans at age 24—allowed him to scale up and gave him the means to be generous. Stella paid his assistants health insurance, and went on to hire many skilled artisans, artists and others alike. For Powhida’s exhibition, After the Contemporary, the artist commissioned artists to make objects for a dystopian installation about the trajectory of art markets. These contracts, intentionally draconian and anti-artist as part of the work, claim a corporatized set of rights for the fictional Grevsky Gallery of Powhida's own creation. This paper draws on Stella's detailed archival records including checking account statements, social-security-tax filings for employees, health insurance forms, and pay stubs. The Powhida comparison focuses on the primary documents, namely the contracts used. The paper contributes to the use of archives and art historical documents to understand the "economic provenance" in which artworks are made, while offering insight into the paradoxical politics of a traditional studio practice and an anonymized participatory art project that takes as its subject the monolithic capitalism of contemporary art markets.