Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida: The ZERO interview

Contributed by Adam Simon / This year’s Upstate Art Weekend (July 19 – 21) included a most unusual venue. The Zero Art Fair exhibited the work of over seventy artists in a barn in Elizaville, New York, owned by Manon Slome. All the work was available to take home and none of it was for sale once the fair began. Surprisingly, or not, many of the artists that were included normally sell their work for prices that would have been out of the question for most browsers at UAW. Yet here those browsers were taking art home for free. The Zero Art Fair was scheduled to last for three days but by the end of the second day almost nothing was left. The following is a Two Coats of Paint interview with Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida, the two people primarily responsible for the Zero Art Fair.

Adam Simon: So, when I visited ZAF at the end of the first day, you both seemed excited but visibly exhausted. Was the fair more taxing than you had anticipated?

Jennifer Dalton: Hi Adam! 

Overall, we did not know at all what to expect, but I think we both expected it to be exhausting, and it was. It had taken a lot of work to make it happen, physically, emotionally and technically/logistically. But it was also exhilarating, because all the visitors were so happy, and the response was so enthusiastic. We had a lot of friends and family working the fair with us who helped immensely.

William Powhida: While we talked through what the different scenarios for the fair might look like, it was hard to imagine it would go so smoothly, despite a few glitches, and so quickly.  What I learned, and have to thank Jen for this, is that you have to plan for the best-case scenario. In our case, that meant making sure we had as many people on the ground as possible. Both of our partners, Wellington Fan and Kristen Jensen, came up to the fair to help install and work the floor.  Having them alongside Edward Winkleman and Murat Orozobekov, two experienced art dealers who also founded and ran the Moving Image fair made working with other volunteers easy for us.  I don’t think the fair would have been successful without having nearly 10 people available to help visitors sign contracts and pack the works.  Ultimately, we relied on a lot of volunteer help from our advisory board members and people who offered their time and energy back in the spring.  

AS: Yeah, the sense of a community effort was palpable. On the day I went Maureen Sullivan was giving away art books outside, but you had to win a badminton game first! Bill, could you describe the premise behind Zero and give us the origin story?

WP: I can tell the first parts of the origin story, and Jen can pick it up since she brought the fair back from the proverbial drawing board where the idea had been sitting for over two years.  The basic premise of Zero Art Fair is that it uses a novel contract to release works from artists’ inventories to the public at no initial cost. The contract grants artists certain rights during the five-year vesting period and a 50% cut if the work is sold after ownership transfers to the new collector.  So, Zero Art Fair is a way artists can give away work for free, without giving up on its value. The short version of my part began back in 2018 or so when my LA gallery, Charlie James, began returning some work that had been in inventory for several years. Receiving multiple boxes at my small, basement studio got me thinking about ways to release some of the work, so I reached out to Amy Whitaker about developing an art storage contract in the summer of 2019.  She sent me back a first draft of the contract in July that was more of an agreement between the artist and a friend, which became the basis of my Store-to-Own contract.  

That fall, Jen and I met with a group of artists we had collaborated with previously called FIPCA (which doesn’t stand for anything) and started talking about the idea of a free art fair, and I brought up the storage art contract as a possible method for releasing works.  The group included Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Peter Rostovsky, Lynn Sullivan, Susan Hamburger, and Guy Richards Smit.  I’m not sure if everyone participated in the initial conversations, but Peter began making some early logo designs and we started developing a pitch deck that didn’t get very far.  Unfortunately, we didn’t quite sustain our initial interest in the fair, and I quietly released my Store-to-Own project as a Google Site that fall.  Artnet reported on it in February of 2020 and I received hundreds of requests over a weekend that I definitely could not fulfill myself.  I think that level of interest showed me that the fair was an important idea, and maybe collectively we could meet the demand I experienced after the article came out.

So, the beginnings of Zero Art Fair started both with an idea I had for a contract that Amy Whitaker and Alfred Steiner created, and some very fun and creative meetings with FIPCA that created the broad outlines of the idea for the fair model.  The version of Zero Art Fair that Jen and I launched took another two years to develop and Jen can really pick up the story from a meeting with Manon Slome in the summer of 2022. 

JD: In summer 2022 I visited the Hudson Valley home of curator and No Longer Empty co-founder Manon Slome to deliver a work she had purchased from my “Mistakes Were Made” exhibition at Mother in Law’s in Germantown. I knew Manon from previously participating in No Longer Empty exhibitions. She showed me the fantastic barn on her property and invited me to propose ideas for an art project or happening to take place there. I quickly realized that it could be the perfect spot to launch Zero Art Fair. Bill and I approached our earlier collaborators to see if they were interested in pursuing it together with us; none of them felt like it was a great time for them to be a part of it on the organizing side, so the two of us decided to go ahead and try to make it happen. Since it would involve fundraising as well as organization to bring the fair into being, we decided it would take us over a year to develop the idea and raise enough money to do it and decided to aim for summer 2024. 

AS: I looked again at the contract that I entered into when my painting, ‘Clouds’ was obtained, for no money, at the fair. Like most people I don’t have an easy time reading legal documents, but I think the gist is that the ‘friend’ who now has ‘Clouds’ is essentially storing it for five years after which they assume ownership. During the five year period I have the right to sell or take back the work. After that, I will still be entitled to 10% of any resale. Is that a fair summary?

WP: You’re close, but you’re leaving out one of the main features of the contract.  After the five-year vesting period ends, if the new collector ever sells the work for the first time you would be entitled to 50% of that sale price.  It’s an important distinction to make between that right and the continuing 10% resale royalty.  In effect, you retain a 50% stake in the potential value of your painting ‘Clouds.’  I think it’s also important to note that during the 5 year vesting period and beyond that we added certain moral rights based on French copyright law for artists, as well as formalized certain expectations like being able to borrow back works for exhibition. 

The contract also grants your collector rights, including a first right of refusal on ‘Clouds’ at a discounted price based on how many years they have held the painting during the five year period, if you were to find a buyer.  Essentially this means that the owner is also building some equity while they store the work.  I totally understand that reading legal documents is not easy, but I really enjoy the process of translating informal expectations in the art world into law and learning how law is intended to work.  I was told early on never to sign anything in the art world, but after two decades working in the field, I respectfully disagree with that handshake mentality. I think artists can benefit from being active and engaged participants in shaping the laws that govern our field.  Given that we don’t have a Federal law granting artists resale royalties like the European Union, I think our contract is another effort towards making that a reality. While I’d prefer collectors honor the agreement, I also expect there will be legal challenges if a great deal of money is involved in the sale of work covered by the contract.  

AS: This might be a good time to introduce the Fine Art Adoption Network, which I initiated and launched with the nonprofit, Art in General, (no longer active) back in 2006. FAAN was a website where artists posted works they were willing to gift outright to individuals or institutions. Potential adopters emailed them through the site, stating why they loved the work, who they were and where the work would reside. The artists then chose who got the work. The adopters were only responsible to pay for transfer costs. Unlike the Zero Art Fair, the artists received no additional compensation in the way of percentages of future sales. They were addressing the issues of overproduction and storage and were getting to choose who owned their work.

By the way, I greatly appreciate your mentioning FAAN in interviews around the fair. As I understand it, Zero marries the basic idea behind FAAN to something that has been kicking around since the 1970s, generally known as the Artists Contract. The Contract has been used by a small number of very successful artists to ensure that they get a percentage of resale profits from works sold but it has not been implementable for the majority of artists. One thing that I find brilliant about Zero is that you created an event that facilitated something that has been considered controversial for a very long time, resale rights for artists. The controversy was rendered moot by making it operable. Kind of a fait accompli. I assume that it succeeded partly because the audience was not made up of people speculating on art, and not overly concerned with reselling the work.  

JD: I think you’re right that our audience included a lot of so-called normal people; that was our vision, although we couldn’t really control who came. But also, part of the reason that the resale royalty was not a tough ‘sell’ was because we were not selling! I’ve heard from commercial art dealers that collectors can be very hostile to the concept, but I think it’s a different thing when someone’s getting the work for free. 

As you know and must be obvious, we are big fans of what you achieved with FAAN. For better or for worse (some of both) it was not practical for Zero to give artists the opportunity to ‘vet’ their new collectors. The artists pre-signed their half of the contracts ahead of the fair, and the event was ‘first come, first served’ in terms of who got the works. The hope is that these collectors become new friends, supporters and (though I hate this word- for lack of a better way to put it-) stakeholders in the work. We already see some signs of that happening, with reports from participating artists of connections and studio visits with these new collectors.

AS: Forging relationships between artists and the people that adopted their work was a big part of FAAN as well, and even if that didn’t happen the adoption always began with a meaningful correspondence. The differences between Zero and FAAN suggests that there could be diverse versions of art gifting, and other projects around art distribution. A few years ago, I joined with ten or so friends and we collectively bought a painting from a mutual friend who was having a show. We pass the work around in three-month shifts. What you guys did generated a lot of energy that could spawn other projects. I’m also aware of how it relates to other collaborative projects of yours. I loved #Class, the month-long think tank you both created at Ed Winkleman’s gallery a number of years ago. By the way, it sounds likely that the next iteration will happen next summer at the Flag Art Foundation. If you do reprise the Zero Art Fair in Manhattan, do you think that the first come first served policy might need adjusting? I could see how that venue might require different logistics.

JD: Yes, one of the reasons ‘first come, first served’ worked in Elizaville was because the location of the venue provided a limiting factor for attendance. If we were to do it somewhere more accessible–and of course, our project is about accessibility to art on a variety of different axes–we’ve discussed how we might implement a reverse income priority, where people who report being in the lowest income bracket would get first access to the artwork.

WP: We have been discussing and debating how we can create income and wealth sensitive, progressive access to the work.  We don’t want to stigmatize or single out lower income visitors, so we are thinking about proportions of people we can admit to a future version of Zero Art Fair that will prioritize people who need help living with art.  We’ve been thinking about at least three tiers through our initial fundraising efforts and bringing them to the fair itself.  Jen and I had a meeting last week while dropping off some fundraising prints and work from the fair, and she observed that coming up with these kinds of ideas that work differently from consumer culture are some of the most exciting parts of collaborating.  We don’t always agree on the how, and it makes us think more deeply and through our own ideas about how the fair (and art) might work. 

I also think it’s important to point out that the Zero Art Fair isn’t just about freeing up physical and mental space for artists. It’s also about making friends with art and providing people a way to get some art in their homes and see themselves as collectors. I have encountered some artists who only ask how they will benefit from the fair, and I think they may be missing an important side of what the fair offers different audiences or audiences who don’t have the economic, social, or cultural capital to collect. I think Jen and I both liked Mark Tribe’s response about how it felt to participate when he said that receiving the notification about the work being taken at the fair felt special in a kind of ‘karmic economy’. One of the reasons the fair can work in the future is that it doesn’t ask too much from individual artists, just a few works at time, but collectively, we can offer hundreds of works to visitors to the fair. If an artist wants to free up more space, they are welcome to submit more works.

My hope is that this generosity will be recognized as part of the arguments for greater public funding for artists by showing other ways it might be released into society without the high barrier of contemporary art prices for the ruling class. 

AS: Brilliant! And this might sound patently anti-capitalist but is just stating the obvious: that there are millions of people that would love to own original art if cost were not an impediment.

JEN: Yes totally! And we hope that striking some blows against art’s perceived elitism will pay larger cultural dividends. But/and at the same time artists deserve to be paid for the work that they do. Our discussions about possibly doing this again also involve trying to fundraise enough that the artists could receive an honorarium or exhibition fee. And us not working for free as well. Bill and I each worked over 300 hours on the fair over 6 months and were not able to fundraise enough to pay ourselves for our work on the fair. Amid all the generosity the reality is we present this within a capitalist system so money must come from somewhere to produce it, and everyone must sustain themselves somehow in the meantime. 

AS: Understood, completely. I don’t see this as a philanthropic project of selfless giving either on the part of you the organizers or the participating artists. It’s more an instance of well-directed self-interest, without which we’d have a lot more highway deaths. In this case, self-interest can mean not assuming the marketplace as the only option for getting work out. And I think it’s important that you have a community that you could draw on for support. I see this community as composed of artists, collectors and you, the facilitators. The artists and the collectors together enact a transaction that is mutually supportive, and the facilitators are creating a meta artwork. I suppose that could be a question. Do you see the Zero Art Fair as a collaborative artwork?

WP: I think of Zero Art Fair as an extension of my collaborations with Jen and our friends in FIPCA, but I don’t think of it as an artwork.  I think of it more practically, as a functional system and structure that must work, which runs counter to traditional ideas around divisions between art and craft, for example.  That said, it comes out of our ideas related to institutional critique, but in this case, it doesn’t stop with identifying and analyzing problems related to Capitalism and inequality but moves into something a little more liberatory. That’s one of the things that I admired about FAAN and our early conversations with W.A.G.E. at #Class.  Building Zero Art Fair felt like working on an art project, in so much as we did it for free, but it requires us to think outside of the symbolic power of art and move into structural things like law, policy, and economics.  I don’t know if ZAF needs the contextual frame of Art, but I do think it has a strong conceptual basis building on previous efforts like Seth Seigelaub’s Artist Rights and Transfer Agreement and projects like FAAN that have tried to introduce productive disruptions to the status quo, which does not benefit most artists or audiences for art.  

JD: I sign on to everything Bill just said, and I don’t think of Zero Art Fair as a work of art. However, and I will just speak for myself here because my feelings might differ from Bill’s: I feel my work on creating this sprung from many of the same obsessions and creative impulses that drive my own artwork. Both Bill and I have made work in the vein of institutional critique, and for me it feels very positive and hopeful to actually make something that addresses some of the issues we’ve both critiqued. 

About the Author: Adam Simon is a New York artist and writer. His solo painting show is up at OSMOS Address, 50 East First Street, NYC, through November 9, 2024.