We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jenie Gao. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jenie below.
Jenie, thank you so much for joining us and offering your lessons and wisdom for our readers. One of the things we most admire about you is your generosity and so we’d love if you could talk to us about where you think your generosity comes from.
My generosity comes from the belief that there is enough to go around for everyone.
Growing up in a low-income immigrant family, I know the catch-22 of the pressures to succeed coupled with the guilt of being someone who “got out” of worse circumstances. Then as you “climb,” the comparisons that people draw among peers can become a hot bed for lateral violence that is detrimental to all of us. The only success you can get from scorekeeping among peers is the kind that serves the exploitative structures that so many claim to be against. The more people fight each other over who got which pittance of a grant, pay raise, etc. the less time they pay attention to larger redistribution needs for justice.
But if we prioritize work methods to help one another win, we can collectively gain access to more resources for our communities rather than competing for the same scraps at the bottom. I work in the arts, which is an industry that depends on artists not knowing their worth or how to negotiate their rights. Talk to your peers. Talk to your mentors. Talk to your community. Talk about money, contracts, intellectual property, ethics, best practices, negotiating, and more. Teach one another and learn together. Most importantly, learn to celebrate each other. It’s harder to exploit people—or inadvertently exploit others—if we all get smarter, braver, and kinder collectively. Individually, we beg. Collectively, we bargain.
This concept also goes beyond money. We all have benefited from mentorship, knowledge sharing, emotional support, and forms of support that are largely invisible to us. Many of us from racialized, marginalized backgrounds have also been on the brink of quitting something important to us, and we know what a difference the right support (or lack thereof) can make in those definitive life moments. The generosity I put forth in the world is the both the kind I have benefited from and the kind that I wish I had experienced even earlier in my life. I am lucky to be surrounded today with people who want me to shine, and I want others to shine, too.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I have been running an anti-gentrification arts business for nearly 10 years! I quit my last full-time corporate job in fall of 2014 and gave myself two years to figure out how to make being a full-time artist sustainable. It’s wild to be hitting this decade milestone.
The best part? Early on, I set the intention to build an arts business that’s generative and good for the community, which departs from the exploitative practices that are the norm for the arts industry.
Today, my business primarily focuses on public art, printmaking, social practice, and storytelling. I also consult for arts organizations and the public sector on ethics and equity. I have had many opportunities to further my own work, hire other artists and arts workers, and consult on paid opportunities and resource distribution for artists and the community-at-large.
I’m very excited about my newest body of work, called The Negotiation Tables. These are installation-based works in which I take hand-carved woodblocks and prints and transform them into tables and sites of negotiation. In each installation, I explore what it means to build an ethical practice in the arts. I also connect personal storytelling from my Taiwanese and Chinese roots with larger cultural histories and sociopolitical events. My hope for this work is that it will be exhibited and acquired by public institutions and collections, so that it can stay accessible to a public audience, and that these institutions are ready to evolve their protocols to better align with the values of this work. Fine arts institutions have long been exclusionary spaces. I would like to see genuine accountability and transformative action from institutions to right past and current wrongs.
I am also excited about some of the larger public and cultural planning projects that I have grown into as a consultant for nonprofits and governmental entities. I have done a lot of work at the intersection of art, community, and cultural planning. To do work that aligns the symbolic components of the arts with genuine systemic change that’s good for artists and marginalized community members—this is where I want to be.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Qualities: There’s a saying I like, “smart enough to know the risks, brave enough to do it anyway,” and I try to live by that. Community advocacy is integral to my work, and this often puts me at odds with institutional structures and those who wish to maintain the status quo. Being outspoken is risky—I have lost opportunities because of my public stances on issues like affordable housing, fair labor practices, and racial and gender equity. But I believe it is more important in the long-term to cultivate community trust, and trust comes from what we are willing to risk and stand for together.
Skills: A healthy relationship with grief, which is always a work-in-progress but so important. The political realities of the world and our personal sorrows can be heavy to carry, and if untended to they can fester inside of us and become a poison. Everyone carries grief. How do you care for your grief as the basis for learning to be in community with others?
Area of knowledge / awareness: That if the current system isn’t designed for you, you need to find another way. While this can be anxiety-inducing, I have never regretted finding alternative ways of doing things if the existing paths and systems are not serviceable to me. I am delighted with the life and career I have built as a result.
My advice? Make time for people and things that bring you joy. Be passionate about the causes you care about, and equally passionate about your well-being. Find a good therapist and work on yourself—this is self-care and community care, too.
Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?
As an artist, I would love to partner with cultural and public institutions like libraries, universities, art centers, and museums that are interested in building fairer practices in the arts. Part of this work is diversifying who gets exhibited and collected, and I want my work in avenues by which the public can engage with what I create. This work is also about updating the policies that institutions run by. A lot of organizations will invite racially and gender diverse artists to work with them only to end up hurting them. I want to work with people at these institutions who are ready to do deeper, more genuine equity work.
I do art commissions and acquisitions with private entities as well. Again, it’s about how we structure these projects so that my time and identity are honored and the community feels reflected and invited into the spaces we create via the arts.
As a consultant, I would also love to get into more cultural resource planning for arts nonprofits, municipalities, and state-level governance. I have a lot of specialized knowledge in this space as someone who has worked both at the grassroots in community and behind the scenes on policy, systems, and best practices.
Finally, because I get asked, yes, I have limited slots each year for consulting individual artists on things like pricing, business infrastructure, and art ethics. If an institution can hire me on to teach a workshop to a group, that’s also great. I get solicited for advice often and I wish I could answer everyone. But I have many talks and articles online and try to be of service in the ways that I can.
Folks can reach me through my website on ways to work together.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jenie.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeniegao/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jeniesart
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenie/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeniegao
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@jeniegao
- Other: Online Shop: https://jenie.studio/
Image Credits
Khim Hipol, Clare Yow, Krista Hoefle