Visual artist on a monthly salary: a guide to employing an artist offers practical advice on how an artist can be hired to carry out artistic activities and explains what it means when an artist works under an employment contract. This guide is primarily aimed at visual arts institutions, such as museums, municipalities, foundations and galleries.
The aim of this guide is to encourage organisations that hold visual art exhibitions as well as communities, municipalities and other bodies to try out a new role as an employer. The Artists' Association of Finland would like to urge organisations to engage in employment experiments by offering practical, tried and tested advice.
The Artists' Association of Finland did a pilot project of this model in the exhibition Nuoret 2023, as eleven young artists were either hired or commissioned by the Association to produce a new work on a designated production budget.
This guide contains tips for drafting an employment contract from Artists’ Association of Finland lawyer Viivi Kuosa. Vappu Renko and Sakarias Sokka, researchers from Cupore, the Center for Cultural Policy Research, explore visual artists’ various sources of income in the past, present and future in this publication. Artists who took part in the Nuoret (Young Artists) 2023 exhibition also share their experiences of the pilot project.
Artists’ salaries have also been debated especially actively within the Arts Promotion Centre Finland. It has been discussed whether our grant system should be replaced with a salary for artists, which would mean more security and a better pension accrual. The Parliamentary Finance Committee has also called for an experiment on the artists’ salary model. A similar debate took place even before the current grant system was introduced in the last century.
The guide is available as a PDF in Finnish, Swedish and English.