ACA Corner with Rashad T. Bailey

In this column, ACA staff members reflect on what we are reading, what we are thinking about, how we address the balance between our work lives and our creative lives (and the points at which those intersect). We asked Rashad T. Bailey, ACA’s Director of Development + Partnerships, to share what he’s been thinking about.

Subject: On the field we inherit, and the field we build 

From: Rashad T. Bailey, Director of Development + Partnerships, Artist Communities Alliance

Dear ACA community,

When I look at the creative economy of 2026, I see something structurally familiar. Artists are tenants. Tenants of platforms that can demonetize them overnight. Tenants of institutions whose programmatic priorities can shift mid-grant. Tenants of their own intellectual property in an attention economy that has outsourced both ownership and authorship to systems they didn't design. The platforms are new. The structure isn't.

This is the field ACA exists inside. It's also a field we are, together, in a rare position to interrupt.

For thirty-five years, the Artist Communities Alliance has stood for a particular proposition: that artists need protected time and space to make work that doesn't yet have a market. That proposition is still right. What an artist needs to do with that time, though, has shifted. The artists arriving at our 1,500 member programs today are not only making the work — they're publishing it, distributing it, defending it, and maintaining the legal and infrastructural conditions for it to exist at all.

What does a residency owe an artist in 2026?

Time and space, still. Connection to peers. Access to the tools — legal, technical, financial — that turn finished projects into sustained practice. A field that thinks of itself as infrastructure.

This isn't a pivot away from what residencies have always done. It's a deepening of it. Residencies have always functioned as a counter-architecture — places where artists could make work the surrounding economy didn't yet know how to value, and didn't yet know how to take.

We are in another such moment.

What we are building, with this team and with you, is a development practice equal to it. That means deeper partnerships with funders who want to support the field rather than direct it. Donor relationships rooted in trust rather than restriction. And the public case — to policymakers, to press, to the broader culture — that what happens inside an artist's residency is national infrastructure.

There is real work ahead, and a real chance to do it well. I'm glad to be in it with you.

Warmly, Rashad T. Bailey, 

References:

The work of Guerrilla Girls has been very inspiring

Ways of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist

We’d love to hear from you. Send your questions or reflections to ebasada@artistcommunities.org for a chance to be featured in an upcoming issue of our newsletter, Waypoints.