As an artist who also works across administrative and advisory roles, I’ve observed and participated in the normalized ways that “opportunity” (grants, residencies, commissions, open calls) invites artists into processes that transfer hours of unpaid labor onto those with the least margin. What artists are often led to believe they are working toward is access, visibility, legitimacy, and prestige. At the same time, institutions promise both artists and the public a richer cultural fabric, civic vitality, and a strengthened creative life.

Institutions have designed their funding processes around the assumption that delivering these promises requires sense-making labor. Grantmakers and opportunity-givers require artists to perform this work simply to be considered. Artists are asked to translate practices that are often perceptual, relational, temporal, affective, and nonlinear into institutional language, priorities, and justifications. In doing so, they are also asked to perform specialized, ethical, and relational labor involving judgment, care, and responsibility. They are asked to carry this not-insignificant labor without the structural support needed to absorb its costs.

I’m beginning a series of posts examining how these dynamics feel to live within and how they function structurally. I’m calling it Pouring Water into Boxes: Artistic labor and the limits of institutional form. It is intended as an examination of organizational, program, and project design choices and their consequences for artists, funders, administrators, and the many people working in between. My hope is to offer shared language for tensions many of us feel but struggle to name, and to invite more collective responsibility for how opportunity is structured.

As I write through the series, I’ll also entertain a fundamental shift of frame that I think is necessary for all of us. In terms of creating a vibrant and innovative society, no amount of better grantmaking can substitute for income security or healthcare. I want to look beyond our field, consider the larger context in which we are operating, and recognize the collective power we hold to make meaningful change.

I’ll share the first installment in the series next Tuesday, 1/27.
If you want to be in public dialogue, I’m also posting this on LinkedIn and FB, join me there via the social links here on my website, or use the Contact link to be in touch behind the curtain :-).

I am writing on the cusp of January 2026. January is named for Janus, the ancient Roman god who looks both to the past and the future at once—a fitting figure to preside over this moment as I articulate how my position is shifting within a landscape many of us have been navigating together for a long time. If you’re reading this, it’s likely because you are part of my wider community: people who understand both the intimacy and the strain of working inside arts and cultural systems in the United States, systems that routinely extract our gifts without adequately supporting our lives.

I have lived these systems in my body and my creative practice as a dance artist. I have also spent the last fifteen years doing what I now understand as bridge labor: helping embodied, lived artistic intelligence move through the forms, narratives, budgets, timelines, and justifications that prevailing funding structures require. That dual vantage point—maker and mediator—has deeply shaped how I see the field and what it asks of us.

As I approach a new year and a new stage of life—turning sixty in 2026 while also engaged in full-time caregiving for my mother—I am being pushed into a more honest reckoning with our situation. I am questioning what kinds of futures are foreclosed when I, and others, continue to help people endure systems that are fundamentally misaligned with the nature of artistic and cultural labor. I know in my body when the ask and the offer are wildly out of balance: when grantmaker rhetoric inflates responsibility without compensating labor, and when people are asked—most cruelly and most crucially—to perform belief in stories that harm them.

At the same time, it is clear that the arts operate within a field shaped by much larger systemic failures and economic imbalances that affect millions of people, not only artists. Over the longer term, I aim to articulate clearer public positions about the limits of current arts funding structures and the need for broader policy interventions, particularly Universal Basic Income and Universal Healthcare. I recognize that, in the current U.S. political climate, this is a swimming-upstream proposition. Still, I trust that others feel this tension too and are willing to imagine and explore more viable futures.

For me, 2026 will be a transition year. I am sunsetting structures that I can no longer sustain and piloting new practices that better honor what I want for others and for myself. As part of this shift, I am offering Clarity & Insight Sessions and Monthly Open Office Hours—both designed to support thoughtful orientation, discernment, and decision-making during uncertain times.

Looking backwards and forwards,

Asimina