About Us
Contemporary Art League is a trade cooperative building unity, solidarity, and equity among art workers in Los Angeles County.
Contemporary Art League (CAL) is one response to the public health and economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. The uprisings against anti-Black racism in the summer of 2020; the deepening climate emergency; and the increased political divisiveness across all levels of government contributed to the call for a mutual aid organization capable of adequately identifying and directly addressing the needs of our community of art workers in Los Angeles County. CAL confronts longstanding systemic problems in our field that have been exacerbated by the confluence of these historic economic, public health, social, environmental, and civic conditions.
Since the fall of 2020, we have been engaging in ongoing listening sessions with individual and group stakeholders in the community of art workers in Los Angeles County. These conversations helped us identify four areas of concern: access to healthcare, access to child care, access to capital, and systemic inequity. CAL is an ambitious, long term effort to address these areas of concern by establishing a member- and worker-owned cooperative that provides community services, professional support, and advocacy opportunities. We envision enacting our collective work and offering our cooperative services at a brick and mortar community center and online.
Our goal is to unify the labor force of art workers within the contemporary art world in Los Angeles County. As a cooperative trade organization, our business model and legal structure are designed to encourage solidarity at the professional, economic, and civic levels and to work toward equity across the field by increasing transparency, improving access to professional tools and relationships, and redistributing wealth. These are essential steps to ensure art workers can continue our important work as culture makers and culture stewards.
CAL was co-founded by Corrina Peipon and Debra Scacco in June of 2020. Corrina Peipon is an artist, curator, writer, and educator based in Los Angeles. She founded Continuous Project in 2018 as a platform for guiding art workers through their careers, teaching art students, and advocating for the empowerment of art workers. Debra is an artist and creative strategist based in Los Angeles. She is the co-founder of Air Projects, an itinerant research program supporting artists whose work focuses on the climate emergency; and is an organizing member of Artists Commit.
These are early days for CAL. We are continuing to reach out to art workers across Los Angeles County to listen to needs and learn more about how to serve our diverse overlapping and intersecting communities. As we develop business, governance, and membership models, we also have active working groups that meet regularly to develop services and programs that we can offer as we grow.