April Bey could not afford to buy her own work, and that is where the whole thing started. “The originating idea was that I couldn’t afford to buy my own work,” said Bey, a contemporary artist and tenured professor at Glendale Community College who runs an independent studio in Los Angeles.
Her answer is called Equity in Collecting, and it is a price rather than a gesture. The studio issues a voucher covering 90 percent of a work’s retail price to collectors who qualify, so a piece with a $7,000 retail value goes to an equity collector for $700. Buyers may not resell for five years. Her own program page states that the established retail value of an artwork remains unchanged regardless of the price paid, and that eligibility runs on self-attestation with no documentation required.
Who qualifies is the point. The list covers Black, African and African diaspora collectors, women of colour, LGBTQIA2S+ and Indigenous collectors, single parents, people with disabilities, recipients of WIC, SNAP or CalFresh, public service employees including educators, and emerging artists and curators. Black women are among her largest collector groups already.
“A lot of my biggest supporters have just been watching for years, unable to support,” Bey said. Other artists are in the same position. “Arts workers in general and other artists. We want to buy each other’s art.”
She is blunt about the trade she has made. “High-spending collectors are great, galas are fun, art fairs are cute, but my community, which is mostly the equity collectors, is the prize,” she said. “My objective is to make sure my studio can still function without the art market.”
The longer argument is about what ownership does once it accumulates. “You could collect enough of my work that it’s being used as collateral to get a loan,” Bey said. “Why not have a good path to where that could happen more in our community?”
She will show equity works at Miami Art Basel and the Untitled art fairs this year, alongside Vielmetter Los Angeles and the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas. The program serves, in her words, “geriatric millennials, younger Gen Zs that are just trying to learn.”
“I’m willing to make the space myself for those of us who do value those things,” she said.
