Artist Contract (2017-) is an evolving conceptual artwork and legal contract that employs collective economic redistribution to challenge the gendered inequities that permeate the art market. The contract is based on Seth Siegelaub and Robert Projansky’s 1971 The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, which gave artists more power over the trajectories of their works. Artist Contract builds on this framework but mandates that every “owner” sell the artwork after ten years upon purchase. All accrued value must be reinvested in new work by an emerging female-identifying, trans, non-binary, or gender expansive artist. In opposition to “collecting,” the contract elicits stewardship, where the artwork continually changes hands every ten years and, in the process, supports artists who are often overlooked and underpaid.
Artist Contract may be bought and sold as an artwork in and of itself, or it may function as a contract in tandem with another artwork. Its presence must always be visible in a form mutually agreed upon by the Artist and Steward. In this way, the work points to the bureaucratic labor inherent in displaying an artwork often hidden from sight while enabling a collaborative relationship between the Artist and Steward, both creatively and politically.
Download the agreement, read it, modify it, use it, or pass it along.
Artist Contract may be bought and sold as an artwork in and of itself, or it may function as a contract in tandem with another artwork. Its presence must always be visible in a form mutually agreed upon by the Artist and Steward. In this way, the work points to the bureaucratic labor inherent in displaying an artwork often hidden from sight while enabling a collaborative relationship between the Artist and Steward, both creatively and politically.
Download the agreement, read it, modify it, use it, or pass it along.
“Agreement: Alex Strada in conversation with Lauren van Haaften-Schick,” 2019, Double Negative at ChaShaMa, curated by Darling Green, New York, New York
︎Listen to “a kind of step in a flawed system” from REDISTRIBUTION at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts.
︎Read “Alex Strada is Contractually Binding Her Collectors to Support Emerging Female Artists” in Artsy.