overdraft. Opening Reception is happening on May 29 Final Fridays Gallery Crawl. Come witness the exhibition, explore the new studio location, and celebrate the invisible work that made it happen from 5:30-9 PM.
overdraft. // 650 Smithfield St.
Radiant Hall Studios // 308 Seventh Ave.
People say it all the time: that’s just the cost of doing business, usually delivered with a shrug and a dollar sign attached. A vendor contract (why is catering a small fortune?). Inflated rent. Licensing fees. The kinds of expenses that live in a spreadsheet and eventually get written off at tax time.
For more than a year, Radiant Hall has been working toward expanding into a fourth studio location in downtown Pittsburgh: securing funding, building partnerships, and reimagining a vacant space so it would support artists and creative community in the heart of the city. In the last two months, we added two staff members, signed a five-year lease, gutted and renovated an entire floor of the Heffren-Tillotsen building on 7th Ave (seemingly untouched since the 1990s), and transformed it into viable studio and gallery space. We rented the studios, installed and opened a group exhibition down the block, and hosted a Studio 54-themed launch party to mark the occasion.
Amazing. Incredible. Applause.
But what if I told you that in the two weeks leading up to opening, I worked somewhere in the ballpark of 120 hours?
I’m not a doctor or an astrophysicist. I’m not even what some might deem “essential.” I’m a multidisciplinary artist, the creative producer behind gooxjy co., and Radiant Hall’s Communication and Events Manager, and for most of April, my days dissolved into meetings, interpersonal management, fabrication projects, donor outreach, power naps, supply runs, unboxings, and budget reviews. Sleep became more of a concept than a biological function.
Yet, when the doors to Studio R|4| opened for the first time and the pink curtains were drawn, the public experienced disco balls, live performances, artist demos, champagne pours, caviar towers, and carefully curated magic. The artists stepped into beautiful studios full of possibility and exposure. But very few people think of asking who climbed the 20-foot ladders, who cleaned up dog accidents after missing the window to get home, who hiked across bridges to avoid the ghastly parking situation, or who let out a primal scream until their ears rang?
That was us. A team of six held together by a group chat, caffeine, and the stubborn belief that this mattered. (It did. It does). We were burnt out anyway.
And somewhere between the exhaustion and the celebration– and there was plenty of both– I know we all found ourselves asking the same question: what are the invisible costs of doing this kind of work, and is it too expensive?
This is just one of several open questions explored in overdraft., the parallel exhibition I curated while also planning our launch, on view in the former Huntington Bank site across from Radiant Hall Downtown.
During our site visit with the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership I immediately thought of a robbery, a heist. It brought to mind the film Set It Off (1996), where four friends plan a bank robbery as an act of desperation and retribution and ask: “What’s the fucking procedure when you got a gun at your head?”
It’s not a gentle question. But for artists and arts workers navigating late-stage capitalism, arts funding cuts and institutional red tape, the algorithmic attention economy, and the relentless pressure to produce and monetize, it is not far from how the stakes actually land in a life.
overdraft. is an immersive, installation-based visual exploration of systems of value: what is exchanged, what is extracted, and what remains. Reframed through the lens of creative labor, the space itself carries the history of financial transaction as a backdrop to the art itself.
There is a particular nostalgia embedded in spaces like this, especially for those who came of age in the late 90s and early 2000s– a memory of a world that moved more slowly, before the digital era compressed time and collapsed the distance between creation and consumption. The atmosphere of the space is liminal and haunting, suspended between familiarity and unease, and in it the exhibition asks questions of fair exchange, the commodification of passion and talent, what a culture owes its artists.
It also considers what the artist gives in order to create, and what it costs to sustain a creative life. When rent, debt, burnout, unstable income, and unreliable healthcare are the guns at your head, can you even create at all? overdraft offers a space between nostalgia and disruption to wrestle with these questions.
Producing the launch of |R|4 while simultaneously curating this exhibition about the invisible costs of creative labor took nearly everything I had. Critiquing systems of unequal exchange while navigating every one of them in real time felt both ironic and painfully appropriate.
Life wasn’t just imitating art; it was funding it.
Still, I cannot believe we pulled this off, and I can believe it completely, because I know exactly what I sacrificed and spent. I am tired. But I am also surging, inspired, and hopeful.
And maybe that is both the cost and reward of doing this kind of business.
For now.
To the administrators, production teams, creative directors, grant writers, and invisible architects: the shadow people who build the rooms, hang the lights, construct the treatments, climb the ladders, answer the emails, solve the crises, raise the money, and step back so others can stand in the light, thank you. I see you. The credit does not always find us. But the work does, and with it, meaning.
Photo credit to Vondre Clark.
