I am

I sold my car when I left Swarthmore. My schedule for the next couple years will likely incorporate lots of travel outside of Philadelphia, where I live, and I wanted to get rid of the ~$260/month car payment that I would have had until 2021. My younger brother is doing research abroad until October 2019, and I am using and looking after his car until then.

I began to brainstorm with a couple of my siblings about how we might be able to mortgage a multi-unit house together, and rent at least one of the units as income to help with the mortgage. Home ownership and management of rental income had been something I had thought about since winning a Pew Fellowship for $60,000 in 2012. I was very close to buying a triplex in the Kingsessing area of Philadelphia, maybe about a week off… and I pulled out because I did not have a clear plan for myself about how I could go through with it and still work toward a just housing system, and against being a pawn in the dislocation of homeowners in an area that continued to hang on by threads to resist the grasp of gentrification’s hungry jaws. This is the area of Philadelphia that I and my family have lived in since I was 14, but my plan didn’t feel rooted enough in community-mindedness to feel like I would really be doing much good with my purchasing decisions – even for myself. Now, this current brainstorming with my siblings feels more responsible, but I still have many questions. For myself, the notion of renting space to tenants feels like it would help me to contribute to my sustainability in a career that is constantly full of question marks, but I want to figure out if I can do this in a way that can contribute to more justice, love, and interdependence within my world.

My undergraduate degree (BA from Swarthmore College in English Literature and Black Studies) and graduate degree (MFA from Temple University in Dance) continue to cost me about $112,000 in student loan debt (current amount after several interest years). They are all federal loans that I pay on a federal Income-Based Repayment program. Most of the loans are from graduate school – each year, I think I took out the maximum amount to go toward living expenses. The second two of my three years were supported by graduate teaching assistantships. I first entered into a Master’s program that was not eligible for fellowship support from the University, and when I switched into the MFA program after a semester, there were no possibilities to apply for MFA fellowship support. I currently have no financial debt other than these school loans. At the time that I went, grad school felt like it was a good decision for me, but were I to make the choice again, I probably would not have decided to attend without fellowship support.

When I graduated from undergrad, I started living in the house that my family owned, but had just recently moved out of. Our oil radiator in the basement had imploded and sent up soot throughout the entire house (called a puffback, I think), and with three college mates who graduated with me, I moved back into my family’s house just as renovation process through homeowners’ insurance was beginning. While I did graduate school, my parents allowed me to live in the house while overseeing the long (multi-year) renovation process and managing the property. In exchange, I did not have to pay rent. When I graduated and did start to pay rent, it was slightly less than market rates I would have had to pay in my family’s West Philadelphia neighborhood.

While I took on almost all of my school payments and loans personally, my family was and continues to be a significant support system for me. In addition to being able to move back into my family home post-graduation, I never was in serious fear of being put out by my family for being queer, a luxury that other queer peers of mine had not had. Feeling surrounded by love through my family has consistently been a resource for me that has allowed me to have stability even in my less stable moments.

In my family, I have four younger siblings, and have always felt a significant sense of responsibility to be independent enough not to take resources away from them, and also to have enough money available to aid one of my siblings or cousins if they needed support in a given moment.

Almost all of the money to create my art has come from foundational support (grants, residencies, or commissions) and/or subsidy from my salary at Swarthmore College.  There was a period when I stopped applying for foundational support and chose to focus on smaller projects that I could personally subsidize through my income. More information about how folks have been paid on projects that I have produced can be found in the project pages under the budget link. Generally, the fee decisions in my work are made via conversations with the artists about the budget I am working with, what I propose as fees based on that, and what they can accept.  Until recently, I haven’t needed to consider paying myself through the work that I produce, since all of my financial needs (and many desires) were covered through my Swarthmore College part-time income. I have always also done projects under the direction of other artists, and I generally have been able to simply take these jobs based on whether I wanted to do them or not – regardless of pay rates. Rarely have I had to take gigs just for the money, but every once in a while I would if I had a specific personal project to fund (buying a new computer, paying for an upcoming trip, etc).

Upon leaving Swarthmore, I have had to think more about how I will pay myself through my project and teaching work.  Utilizing a model from Philadelphia’s Artists’ U organization, I have figured out some ideal hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly rates for myself.  The Artists’ U model encourages you to have a look at the previous year’s tax return, thinking about whether you made enough money for yourself to do the things you feel like you needed to and wanted to do (basic necessities, affording time off, emergency money, discretionary income you desire, etc).  Adding to (or subtracting from) that figure to find an amount of money per year that you would like to be bringing in, you have a base from which to establish figures. The Artists’ U model looks at a typical white collar full-time position that would demand 40 hours a week, probably for 50 weeks a year (2000 hours).  They encourage artists to work toward 3/4 of this amount of work (1500 hours per year), to allow ample time for the reflection and dreaming that artists (and, really, humans) need to do. You would then divide your ideal yearly income by 1500 for an hourly rate. From that hourly figure, you would multiply by 8 for a daily rate, 40 for a weekly rate, etc.  I did a version of this – taking the amount that I want to be making per year, and then dividing it by 40 – imagining that, out of 52 weeks per year, I would like to establish a rate to be able to work for 40 of these weeks, and also imagining that a lot of the work that I would do would be paid on a weekly rate. From there, I divided that by 36 hours to find my hourly rate, since I did not want to be working more than 36 hours per week.  I use these figures largely to have an image to use as reference. For me, it is important to consider the wages that I work toward in relationship to the communities I want to live in, the world that I want to help to realize, the capitalist systems that I want to eliminate.