By Joanne Hinkel Illustrated by Grant Reynolds

       It's May, the month for graduating, and many of you will soon be leaving the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with either a Bachelor of Fine Arts or Master of Fine Arts degree in hand. Consider yourself lucky to be graduating into a relatively strong, though recently waning, economy. With a degree from a prestigious art school, you shouldn't have any problem finding a job, right? But do you really want the kind of jobs that inundate the classified pages? Don't you want to be making art? Isn't that why you opted to go to art school instead of a liberal arts college?
       Earning a living through art has long been a challenge in our culture, if not a near impossibility. Regardless of the state of the economy, the cliché of the "starving artist" still persists. A study commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts last fall supports this sentiment. According to it, unemployment rates for artists are twice that of other professional workers.
       While this statistic presents a daunting reality, it isn't as straightforwardly depressing as it may seem. After all, is "employment" really an appropriate term by which to judge a group of people who are often self-employed? More telling is the fact that artists moonlight at a rate 40 percent higher than other professional workers. As we know from our instructors - many of whom hold day jobs in the arts in addition to their part-time teaching jobs at SAIC - balancing multiple jobs is a reality. While the rest of Americans are multi-tasking, artists are multi-jobbing.
      "I'm going to have to get some kind of job to pay the bills," said Pam Bagdzinski, a graduating senior in the Painting and Drawing program. Bagdzinski looks to her immediate future with anticipation and anxiety. She wants to be a full-time painter but knows that's not a realistic plan. "I can't see my painting supporting me at this point," she says, "though I do know that I want to be a painter. That's what I want first and foremost. I'm kind of resolved to working a lot of odd jobs. I want to do something that will stay at work, though, and won't follow me home."
       Bagdzinski, a former editor of F News, points out that students graduating with degrees in fashion studies or visual communication are going out of school and into an industry, while painters, sculptors, and performance artists have fewer money-making opportunities. She likes to joke that she's going to be a lounge singer after graduation.
       Since graduating from SAIC three years ago with an MFA in Performance, Karen Sorensen has not found work in the arts job market. "I feel very proud of my degree," she said, "but the cost of my graduate experience has put me in a very difficult economic situation." Although financial constraints have forced her to take on non-arts related day jobs, Sorenson tries to make her schedule flexible enough to allow for creative pursuits. "I have tried different strategies [for] finding work. It is still absurd at times. [It's] like you have two jobs - a nine-to-five and the job of making art work."
        One of the biggest obstacles that moonlighting, or multi-jobbing, creates for artists is time management. Through communicating with other artists facing her predicament, Sorenson has come up with ways to combat this challenge. "In January, I spent two weeks at Centrum Arts, a residency for artists in Washington," she says. "It was a great learning opportunity. I came up with a lot of new tactics to make more time for creativity. I recently purchased a timer that I use when I make art. It is a way of taking time for myself and focusing. When the timer is on, I make ART!"
       While students at SAIC are developing their skills, perfecting techniques, acquiring a knowledge of art history, and learning how to articulate critical thoughts about art, shouldn't there also be an emphasis on how to make it in the real world? Though "real world" may seem like a ridiculous construction, graduates say that it is inarguably different out there.
        Leah Finch, an alum of the Fiber & Material Studies graduate program, says she didn't learn how to market herself at SAIC, but adds that she wasn't concerned with that kind of information anyway. "There was little to no talk about how to approach galleries, collectors, etc.," Finch said. "If there was, then I was not paying attention. But I do not think I was headed in that direction, so my advisors and professors may have not addressed those topics with me." The list of jobs that Finch currently maintains says something about the reality of moonlighting for artists: she works as an assistant in a River North gallery, as a part-time art teacher, as a studio assistant, and as a free-lance art critic. The fact that she has four jobs in the arts, though, suggests that Finch is a self-motivated individual who has figured out how to market herself. Most struggling artists don't manage to moonlight exclusively in the art world.
     "The school operates in a bubble concerning issues of economics," said Craig Harshaw, a graduate of the Performance Department. Harshaw wonders if SAIC isn't setting up students for a rude awakening once they graduate. "There wasn't enough talk about what kinds of things our generation of artists are facing," he says, referring to how no one discussed why some of the city's most alternative galleries, like the Name Gallery and the Randolph Street Gallery, were closing down just when he was being prepared to be a radical artist.
     What SAIC did provide Harshaw with, he says, was an introduction to an invaluable network of artists, curators, arts patrons, and others. From meeting other artists with whom to collaborate to using his degree's reputation to generate interest in Insight Arts, a community-based arts organization in Rogers Park he became involved with while still a student, Harshaw believes this network is the greatest professional asset he gained from SAIC.