Day Jobs examines the overlooked, powerful impact of day jobs on the visual arts.Success for artists is often measured by their ability to quit a day job and focus full time on their practice. Yet these jobs can often 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 book is comprised of thirty-nine chapters, one for each included artist, with images of their work, commissioned essays, and interviews. Included are creative pioneers such as Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Tishan Hsu, Howardena Pindell, and Julia Scher, who offer firsthand 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.
By examining the impact of day jobs on artists, Day Jobs seeks to demystify artistic production and overturn the romanticized concept of the artist sequestered in their studio, waiting forinspiration to strike. Conceived as a corrective to traditional art historical narratives, this book encourages us to more openly acknowledge the precarious and generative ways that economic and creative pursuits are intertwined.
Day Jobs was on display at The Blanton Museum of Art from February 19-July 23, 2023. It then travelled to the Cantor Arts Center from March 6-July 21, 2024.
Veronica Roberts is the John and Jill Freidenrich Director of the Cantor Arts Center. Before coming to Stanford, she was the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin since 2013. In addition to curating exhibitions and producing scholarly publications at the Blanton, Roberts oversaw the reinstallation of the museums’s modern and contemporary collection, focusing on bolstering works by women and artists of color and helping to create dedicated spaces for video art and new works by contemporary artists. She also worked closely with Ellsworth Kelly to help realize the artist’s only building, Austin. She earned her MA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her BA in art history from Williams College in Massachusetts.
