Workingclasscreativesdatabase

ALT Text on a dark blue background reads: A family of artists who were shy about using that word, making gifts for friends, sometimes selling them, and more than anything escaping into books and nature and creativity; those were the safety nets I was taught to use, the ways to cope when you can’t. Look: a grey heron! We were bird watching by the river and landscapes leaning against every wall and early lessons in what I would now call feminism. Women like titans, men in painted jeans.

ALT Text on a dark blue background reads: First, the surprisingly widespread belief that artists by definition are not working class; this one sticks like wood chip. At its heart is the conviction that art as a cultural practice is inherently middle and upper class, and therefore an artist either already is middle or upper class or becomes so via the cultural capital they accrue through their artistic practice. We so often hear art and literature discussed as inherently privileged activities that we have grown used to focusing mostly on privileged artists – a self-confirming circle of logic that erases working class artists and reinforces the idea that ‘real’ art belongs to and is created primarily by class-privileged people.

ALT Text on a dark blue background reads: They show me how broad we are, how intricate and powerful and luminous we are when we are both the speaker and the spoken about. Too big for our boots, ideas above our station, we are bold and brash and unapologetic and intellectual and creative and messy and perfect and here: multiple, and refusing to know our place ... Other working class people call me home, and they show me what I knew and forgot, what I come back to to warm myself against, to draw from and to cherish: our artistic histories, our creative inheritance. Our art.