About this project

For more information, visit www.theworkoffice.com

We opened The Work Office (TWO) in the summer of 2009 and are working to re-open and hire more artists this coming year. Your donation will cover an artist's weekly wage of $23.50. Our goal of $1175.00 will pay the weekly wages of 50 artists.

The Work Office (TWO) is a multidisciplinary art project disguised as an employment agency. Informed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the Great Depression in the 1930s, TWO is a gesture to "make work" for visual and performing artists, writers, and others by giving them simple, idea-based assignments to explore, document, or improve daily life in New York. From a temporary central office, TWO's administrators—Katarina Jerinic and Naomi Miller—interview, register, and hire employees; assign, collect, and exhibit work; and distribute Depression-era wages to employees during weekly Payday Parties.

Prospective employees submit an application online through the project’s website and, once hired, choose an assignment such as documenting a need for repairs, making a regional travel guide for their block or neighborhood, reinterpreting a newspaper photograph, or giving a concert for a houseplant. Employees have a week to turn in their assignment, for which they will be paid $23.50, the weekly wage for an artist in the Federal One Project (the arts division of the WPA).

Payday Parties are held at the end of each work week. At these events, employees collect their wages and the public is invited to view the week’s works and learn about the project. The Payday Parties are inspired by the socializing that occurred between artists as they waited in line to collect their wages at their local WPA office. They also provide a forum for TWO artists and the general public to interact.

TWO is based on the idea of “making work” (WPA terminology) for artists to “make work” (artist terminology). With the current economic recession in mind, TWO revisits the approach the 1930s federal government took to alleviate the effects of the Depression on daily life. Artists were employed to make art—alongside infrastructure and other projects to rebuild the country—and were seen as a valuable labor force. TWO is a wry contemporary realization of this model.

Project location: , NY

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Katarina Jerinic and Naomi Miller

New York, NY

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Katarina Jerinic and Naomi Miller have been collaborating over the past year to create The Work Office. They met in 2004 at an art administration/photography job. Both are currently employed as arts administrators. They opened The Work Office (TWO) in the summer of 2009 for three weeks, and look forward to opening it again soon.

Katarina Jerinic’s mixed media, photography and ephemeral participant-based installations center on invented explorations of urban space. She was a participant in the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace program and has completed residencies at MacDowell Colony and the Experimental Television Center. She has an MFA from School of Visual Arts in Photography and Related Media (2002) and a BA from American University in American History (1995). Her work has been recently included in exhibitions at Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; the Brooklyn Arts Council Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; the Fox Art Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ; the Center for Book Arts, New York, NY; the DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival, Brooklyn, NY and Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Naomi Miller is a photography-based artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is concerned with both interior monologues and communal conversations. She received her BA in English and studio art at Clark University, Worcester, MA in 1996 and a MFA in photography at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. Recent group exhibitions include the Royal Nonesuch Gallery, Oakland; Steve Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco; Printed Matter, New York; Creative Arts Workshop, New Haven ; WORKS/San Jose; and Five Points Arthouse, San Francisco. She is a regular contributor of text and images to the Satellite publication (a project of artist Jon Rubin). The current incarnation of projects built around her car can be found at http://thelastdaysoftheironmaiden.blogspot.com/