How Feminism Made Me Quit Community Curating: Gender, Care, and Personal Values

Author: Weronika Tupaj

I was a fresh graduate - enthusiastic, passionate, and determined to change or at least improve my slice of the world. I worked tirelessly, pushed myself outside my comfort zone, and dealt with rejection after rejection after rejection to finally break into community art curating. But once I made it there, I only lasted two years. How did the dream I worked so hard for become a dead end I would work equally hard to escape?

My first contact with community curating was by accident. In my first year of university, I signed up for an extracurricular project - co-curating an exhibition for the city museum. What started as just a way to make friends turned into a mission. I was working with international students – a population often excluded from arts and heritage programming – to have their views and voices included in an exhibition at a major museum. As years went by, I had an increasing number of similar projects under my belt. Each came with excitement of inviting a different group of people into the world they had limited or no access to before.

My Master’s curatorial project, the largest and most complex one I had ever done, was, of course, also with the local community. It was incredibly exciting, but with excitement came fear and tiredness. I was inexperienced and unpaid. I didn’t know how to do many of the things I needed to do – from securing a public planning permit to calculating how much tea and crisps to buy for the workshops. I carried responsibility for a complex and evolving project with over 100 people participating in different ways and sometimes with different motivations. When our exhibition finally launched, I was exhausted but happy and proud like never before. I was ready to keep going and getting that successful project high over and over again.

After a long and painful post-graduation job hunt, I finally got my first paid internship at a learning department of a small arts organisation. When this one ran out, I moved on to community building and advocacy through art. Alongside and in between, there were freelance gigs, self-started projects, and teaching opportunities. My days went by planning events, buying art supplies, ordering pizzas, serving teas, installing exhibitions, hosting launches, reassuring participants their art wasn’t ugly, and always lending a listening ear whenever someone needed to offload a problem. Many people I worked with were in some way vulnerable or excluded from the mainstream art world. I had immigrants, refugees, and people experiencing ill health, discrimination, and deprivation. Holding safe, creative space for them felt so rewarding. I came home from events buzzing with satisfaction of once again helping someone access something they wouldn’t find elsewhere. Yet with time, the emotional high started wearing off. Instead, I was more and more tired.

In this role, I couldn’t be tired. I needed infectious enthusiasm to draw people in. I needed patience to stay kind as other commitments and personality clashes kept getting in the way. I needed focus and compassion to listen and show I care. But with dozens of similar stories heard over time, I cared less and less. What started as a mission and passion became a tedious job. Job I wasn’t always equipped to do – no one ever taught me how to react when people share complex problems, break down, or become hostile. I didn’t know how to deal with such extreme (but frequent) cases, but at the same time, I didn’t want it to be my responsibility. After all, I was an emerging curator, not a social worker or a therapist with rigorous training and access to a formalised support system.

While navigating these conversations was too difficult, other parts of the job were too easy. Setting up tables, sharpening pencils, and having small talk with participants felt the same on day 500 as it did on day 1. Intellectual fulfilment is important to me, and I was getting little of it from the tasks that made up most of my work. It’s only temporary, I was telling myself, I will soon have something more responsible and stimulating to do. But with no staff development budgets, human resources expertise, or clear progression paths all over the sector, it wasn’t clear how, when, and whether at all that would happen. I felt stuck in a never-ending cycle of what felt like doing life admin and running errands for strangers.

With lack of progression in tasks, came lack of progression in pay. Everything was part-time, fixed-term, zero-hour. I was working three regular jobs at the same time, plus freelance gigs that could fall through anytime and leave me with reduced income. To prepare for this eventuality, I spent significant portion of my personal time going to industry events, posting on social media, and trying to befriend people from the sector – all in hopes to create a network I can rely on when current contracts dry up. Despite these efforts backed by a very long CV from years of working multiple jobs, I often got rejected from more secure roles and advised to work for free to get more experience. Data shows such multi-jobbing and turning personal activities into network-building is the rule rather than exception in the arts, regardless of level of experience (1). I kept meeting more experienced practitioners who still worked customer service side jobs, flat shared, had no emergency savings, and financially relied on their parents or partners. And then, it hit me.

I always thought I was too smart for gender pay gap. I am educated, have no issues talking about money, and will stand up for myself when I think I’m not treated right. Yet I found myself in an underpaid, overworked sector that mostly employs women. And the things I did in the sector – running errands, organising food, listening, comforting, cleaning up literal and emotional messes – are what women are often expected to do at the expense of their personal development, leisure time, and financial independence. The tiredness and overwhelm I first experienced during my Master’s project seemed built into the sector. The same way they are built into women’s existence under patriarchy and late capitalism.

I often think about how lucky I have been, in comparison to so many other women, to move abroad on my own, study, pursue my dream career, and earn my own salary. Every day, I am grateful for the opportunity to opt out of the traditional mother, caregiver, and homemaker roles. It frightened me to realise I was effectively doing these roles at work. Women’s rights and gender equality are and have always been very important to me. When I noticed so many things about my career went against these values, I felt like I was taking the privileges (rights?) handed over to me by previous generations of feminists and throwing them out of the window.

Fig.1 Cleaning in preparation for a community art project in Garnethill Park. Glasgow, July 2022. Photograph by Kiki Zheng.

There is little data on working conditions in community art, but what can be pulled from surveys on the whole arts sector paints a bleak picture of gender-based gaps in pay, progression, and security. In most creative industries, it is mostly men who perform creative roles, while women often remain confined to facilitatory and administrative positions (2). Stereotypically feminine traits associated with these jobs (and with community art practice) – being nurturing, ‘nice’, consensus-oriented and focused on fostering others’ creativity rather than one’s own - are often turned against women to deny them progression to senior leadership roles (3). This inequality is reflected in gender pay gap across the sector (4) and in the fact that women are far more likely to work unpaid internships (5). It is no surprise, then, that community and participatory art work mostly performed by women often is perceived as less valuable and pays lower than other segments of the arts (6). In addition to low pay, practitioners often carry the emotional load of responsibility for vulnerable participants – sometimes also in their personal time (7). The research on other art areas found women were significantly more likely to lose their creative jobs in times of uncertainty (8). In an undervalued, feminised niche of the sector well known for precarious working conditions and workers’ exploitation, this means a lifetime of exhaustion and destitution. A life I don’t want for myself and deserve better than.

On my last day at the community centre, someone approached me looking for advice. Their question wasn’t within the remit of my role, but wanting to help, I came up with some ideas. When it turned out they already tried my suggestions and I couldn’t think of anything else, they told me to f… off. That tragicomic situation was a poignant end to my career in the community art sector.

My new job is a full-time, permanent role at a funding body. One of my tasks is to ensure our grantees comply with governance, reporting, and fair work requirements. This authoritative role suits and fulfils me much more than any of the caring, nurturing roles I had before. I sometimes miss the hustle and bustle of community centres, the buzz of going home after a successful event, the satisfaction of helping the most vulnerable people. But where I am now, I don’t have to accept exploitation and compromise on my values.

All views in this text are author’s own.

Footnotes

(1) Bridget Conor, Rosalind Gill, Stephanie Taylor, ‘Gender and creative labour’, The Sociological Review, volume 63 issue 1, pp. 1-22 (8).

(2) Sarah Baker, David Hesmondhalgh, ‘Sex, Gender and Work Segregation in the Cultural Industries’, The Sociological Review, vol. 63 issue 1 (2015).

(3) Ibid.

(4) Scottish Trade Unions Congress, Freelance and Forgotten: A Report on Worker Exploitation in Scotland’s Creative Industries (2025), pp. 27-29.

(5) Orian Brook, Dave O’Brien, Mark Taylor, ‘“There’s no way that you get paid to do the arts”: unpaid labour across the cultural and creative life course’, Sociological Research Online, volume 25 issue 4, pp. 571-588 (579).

(6) Freelance and Forgotten…

(7) Eleonora Belfiore, ‘Who cares? At what price? The hidden costs of socially engaged arts labour and the moral failure of cultural policy’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, volume 25 issue 1 (2021).

(8) Bridget Conor, Rosalind Gill, Stephanie Taylor, ‘Gender and creative labour’, The Sociological Review, volume 63 issue 1, pp. 1-22 (6).

Bibliography

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Belfiore, E. 2021. ‘Who cares? At what price? The hidden costs of socially engaged arts labour and the moral failure of cultural policy’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 25 (1). Available from: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367549420982863#core-bibr14-1367549420982863-1 (accessed on 3 November 2025).

Brook, O., O’Brien, D., Taylor, M., ‘“There’s no way that you get paid to do the arts”: unpaid labour across the cultural and creative life course’, Sociological Research Online, 25 (4), (571-588).

Conor, B., Gill, R.,Taylor, S. (2015). Gender and creative labour. The Sociological Review, 63 (1), (1-22).

Folbre, N. 2014. Who Cares? A Feminist Critique of the Care Economy. New York (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung).

Frölich R. 2004, ‘Feminine and feminist values in communication professions’, in de Bruin M. and Ross K. (eds), Gender and Newsroom Cultures: Identities at Work, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press (64-77).

Scottish Trade Unions Congress. 2025. Freelance and Forgotten: A Report on Worker Exploitation in Scotland’s Creative Industries. Available from: freelance-and-forgotten-a-report-on-worker-exploitation-in-scotlands-creative-industries.pdf (accessed on 3 November 2025).