Creative Labor, Creative Conditions, and the Case for May Day

At 8:30 in the morning, I arrived at the ferry terminal in Lower Manhattan to catch the boat to Governors Island.

Governors Island sits in New York Harbor, a former military armory turned artist residency—a place that now provides studio space and resources for working artists. It was there at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Arts Center that May Day began. Artist Greg Corbino opened the day with his work Labor of Love: An Interactive Celebration of Our Hardworking Ecosystems, exploring his deep and studied love for oysters as a living system and as a teacher. The oyster's job is to filter the water that heads upstream into the rivers and to filter the water that moves downstream into the ocean.

The oyster, Corbino reminded us, cannot do its work without the right conditions. It cannot filter. It cannot sustain. It cannot make the water livable. Remove the conditions and the oyster cannot function. The ecosystem suffers. The water suffers. Everything that depends on the water suffers.

I steeped in that metaphor all day.

Because that is exactly what we are talking about when we talk about creative labor. Artists give us language for what we cannot say. They provide us with ways to reflect and understand our experiences. They make us laugh when grief is the only thing in the room. They hold memory when human frailty fails to. They help us imagine futures when the present feels impossible. They are the ones who make sense of the moment we are living in before the rest of us even have words for it. Most of the major resistance movements, including the civil rights movements of the 1960s, were fueled and propelled by artists and their labor. Yet we continue to ask them to do that work inside conditions that were never designed to sustain them.

On May Day we work to begin to resolve that contradiction.

From Governors Island, the day moved through the city in a procession that was deliberate and layered, through neighborhoods where artists have built entire ecosystems with their hands and their vision. To New York Theatre Workshop, where Patricia McGregor reminded us that creating the preconditions for artists to thrive is itself a labor of love, and where the community gathered and the Resistance Revival Chorus lifted their voices to remind us that what the world needs now is joy. What the world needs now is resistance. What the world needs now is love. To Lincoln Center, where a musical bus became a stage and people spoke their dreams out loud.

Twenty-five years ago, the city allowed La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, New York Theatre Workshop, and other giants of the Fourth Street Arts Block (FAB NYC) were able to buy the buildings they occupied from the city for one dollar with no official acknowledgment that those blocks mattered to the city government. But on May Day 2026, the mayor's office was there. That is not a small thing. That is what twenty-five years of creative labor looks like when it refuses to be ignored.

Yet I want to be honest about what that presence does and does not mean. Because what happens too often is this: There is a separation of activation from policy. The people who have access to real money and real power, the people who are right now in control of framing policy, do not often believe that artists should be at the table or part of the conversation. We live in a society that loves it when the artist shows up and entertains us or, in those moments we do not expect, leaves us in tears. We are often surprised to find ourselves emotionally undone at the hands of an artist who simply did the most basic thing an artist can do: translate humanity back to us.

Why are we so surprised? Because we like to forget. Forgetting allows us to treat artists as if they are perpetually becoming, always in need of care and nurturing and support. It is a convenient fiction. It keeps artists dependent and policy-makers comfortable.

I call that what it is.

In the 1960s and 1970s, artists took over what was considered blighted land in the East Village and turned it into what is now the Fourth Street Arts Block. They turned it into something invaluable. They served a community that had all but been forgotten by the city that claimed to represent it. What I learned at Fourth Street is that artists are always at the table, whether they have been invited or not.

The mayor's office being present on May Day is proof that the oyster is at work filtering by the gallons and sending back to the world that which is clean and ready.

The day closed at the Apollo Theater in Harlem where five artists shared their personal stories about love, survival, and how the spirit prevails through joy and pain. And on that stage, I was reminded of my own conviction that artists are not adornments to our civic life but the infrastructure for it.

The stories: The first time a grown man hears the words “I love you” come out of his father's mouth. An apology for my generation of children whose parents believed they were raising them inside the same paradigm in which they were raised—one that promised they could guarantee safety within their neighborhoods. Someone else's journey to get back to the grace of an omnipotent source of love. I could find a connection in every single story. And I was reminded, both as an oyster and as a fifty-four-year-old Black girl from Oakland, how deeply we are all connected through the human condition. That is the blessing of our existence.

I witnessed artists fearlessly share who they are with the world, so that the world may see itself. So that the world may be prepared to impact and make the changes necessary to make a greater, better world.

And then, after the Apollo, I walked with a newly announced Doris Duke Artist Award recipient to Times Square to see her image on the marquee. This is a practice that the Doris Duke Foundation has been doing since 2024. For twenty-four hours the new recipients are displayed behind the TKTS stairs in Times Square.

This artist who was just awarded one of the most prestigious awards for artists in the country was, along with the other five recipients, on the screens in one of the most surveilled, most commercially driven spaces in the world. She stood there and looked up at herself and facetimed her mom. That moment is beautiful and necessary in its humanity as well.

Times Square is emblematic of commerce and commercial viability, of who and what our culture decides has value. For one day, artists got to occupy that space in recognition of their impact and their contributions. Not because they had sold the most units or generated the most revenue, but because, like the oyster, their labor sustains something essential in us that no market can fully account for.

May Day was the beginning.

From May Day to Labor Day, Creative Labor, Creative Conditions moves across the country—Hawai’i, the Bay Area, Boston, Newport, New Orleans, Minneapolis. City by city, artist by artist, asking one consistent question everywhere we go: What does it take for creative people to truly thrive? Not survive, thrive. Materially, creatively, sustainably, joyfully.

I have spent my life in rooms where artists are asked to do what is both necessary and impossible. They are asked to hold complexity without flinching while translating grief into meaning. Their job is to imagine a future when the present feels unbearable. Repeatedly, I have watched artists step into moments of rupture—social, political, cultural—and offer language, form, and vision when other systems have failed. What I have seen just as consistently is how rarely the conditions surrounding that labor are designed to sustain the people doing it. We celebrate the work while neglecting the worker. We depend on artists to help us make sense of the world while offering them instability, precarity, and silence in return. We celebrate the “starving artist” while benefitting from their labor.

Creative Labor, Creative Conditions names this contradiction and insists that we address it directly.

Throughout my leadership at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, my vision was to recenter the purpose of the institution itself. To reimagine the theatre not as a site that primarily serves patrons and donors, but as an intentional platform designed to serve artists and support them in doing their work. I believed, and still believe, that when artists are centered, when they are given the conditions, trust, and autonomy to fully inhabit their craft, the world benefits. The regional theatre model has long behaved as if the space of the theatre exists for the audience and institution rather than as a shared civic commons rooted in artistic labor. Shifting that orientation proved difficult because it challenged deeply held assumptions about who the theatre is for and whose needs come first. Yet the audience's deepest benefit comes from encountering work shaped by artists who are not extracted from but fully supported. When artists are centered, culture moves and the world is reminded of how expansive our empathy is, how connected our humanity is, and how simple it all is. Not simple as in easy. Simple as in elemental. I am not saying the world should only be joyful. That is not the goal. The goal is that the world be willing to see both joy and pain as a necessary part of how we evolve, how we create the conditions for greater acceptance and deeper understanding. That we are reminded that at the center of every moment of our humanity is love and joy.

That conviction was further shaped through my work with One Nation/One Project and the Arts for EveryBody initiative. Working alongside artists embedded in their local contexts made one truth unmistakably clear: Civic engagement through the arts is only as strong as the conditions surrounding the artists themselves. Artists cannot sustain public-facing, community-centered work if they are operating without stability, care, or institutional support.

Federico García Lorca wrote about duende as a force that rises from the soles of the feet; a dark, embodied power born of struggle, risk, and truth. That spirit feels especially urgent now. As cultural institutions are overtly politicized, as censorship moves from metaphor to policy, we are reminded that art holds real civic and political power. And our power is significant enough to be contested, controlled, and co-opted. The attempt to hijack culture is itself proof of its power. In moments like this, artists are not peripheral to democracy, but central to its defense.

As Creative Labor, Creative Conditions moves across the country, it carries New York with it—its artists, its labor, its example—as proof of what becomes possible when we invest in creative people and mean it. What happens in these neighborhoods, on these stages, in these communities is the national story.

Creative Labor, Creative Conditions asks what it would mean to build partnerships that are not extractive, to design processes that are humane, and to approach collaboration as a shared responsibility rather than a transaction. It understands that sustainability is not simply a question of funding levels, but of power, trust, and alignment that the funding can offer. And it refuses to separate values from action and instead connects values to action to policy. By the end of this journey, we will be ready for the next city, the next year, the next generation of artists who deserve conditions worthy of their labor.

Centering artists as thought leaders and changemakers who transform culture is not an abstract aspiration. It is a throughline that has shaped my leadership, my writing, and my civic engagement. When artists are given the conditions to thrive, they offer us more than art. They offer us clarity, courage, and a deeper understanding of who we are and who we might yet become.

The Doris Duke Foundation’s May Day through Labor Day activation is not symbolic. It is fundamental and essential. And it is only the beginning.

The artist as the metaphorical oyster needs the right conditions to make the world clean and ready. So do we all.