Why You Need a Collective After Graduating Art School

Collectives are the continuation of art school’s best lesson: art is not only an individual pursuit, but a peer-to-peer network. Right after graduation, they are not just useful, but sometimes necessary.

“I’d never thought about my friends as forming a part of my education.” ponders Quest Taludkar, The White Pube’s fictional avatar in the British critic duo debut novel, Poor Artists. Taludkar is a successful market artist, yet she struggled to find meaning in her practice after graduating. Because it’s true—the real curriculum of art school isn’t the lecture slides or the studio visits; it’s the sideways comments, the half-baked critiques after a party, the tools you borrow, barely know how to use and never return. It’s an ecosystem of shared time and attention. Then graduation happens, and most of that disappears. How do you survive that abrupt structural shift?

Poor Artists by The White Pube. Image courtesy of The White Pube.

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Collectives might seem like little more than social clubs for artists putting on DIY shows, but for those just out of school, they can become lifelines. Here are four reasons to join (or form) a collective after graduation, through the experience of multiple art collectives that shaped the art world in the past years.

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Reason 1: Collectives can replace the lost infrastructure of art school

Graduation is as much a ceremony as a structural shift. The crits stop, the studios empty out, the sense that someone’s paying attention vanishes. Sometimes, all you’re left with is rent, silence, and the echo of your own deadlines.

Collectives exist to plug that gap. They aren’t just about friendship, even if friendship is often where they start. They’re about building the support systems that art school provides by default and the art world rarely offers in the early years of an artist’s career.

Collectives can emerge from a shared desire for collaborative practice, which became prevalent in the 2010s post-internet era. Take LuckyPDF: four friends from Camberwell who in 2008 started to turn their post-grad restlessness into DIY live-streamed TV, staging performances and mock talk shows that kept the critique energy alive. DIS began as four friends making a magazine in New York, a playful way to critique lifestyle branding that snowballed into exhibitions and the DIS.art platform.

DIS. © Sabine Reitmaier. Courtesy Biennale Foundation, Berlin.

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Other times, collectives emerge from a shared question. Forensic Architecture started at Goldsmiths as a research group led by Eyal Weizman, asking how architectural tools could document violence. Their critiques became investigations, their studio a lab. London-based bare minimum collective formed around four Cambridge undergrads questioning the working culture in the art world and beyond, which led them to collectively produce artworks countering the traditional narratives they were up against.

Each story proves the same point: what you lose after school—feedback, deadlines, a reason to keep going—can be rebuilt collectively. Crit nights morph into kitchen-table salons. Group chats become admin hotlines. What can start as either a joke or a survival strategy turns into a practice.

“The story of our coming together is quite predictable: we were a bunch of queers who met at university, kept each other alive, continued those friendships after we left, and needed an excuse, or framework, to make art together,” explains bare minimum during a Flash Art interview in 2022. “We all believe strongly in relation to each other, and so we created this collective to give us the permission to make. And when you make an Instagram, people start to take you seriously.”

If art school taught you how to make work, collectives teach you how to keep making it when the scaffolding is gone.

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Reason 2: Collectives can help navigate precarity together

Here’s the reality check: a 2023 survey by Industria collective, Artist Leaks, reported a median hourly rate of £2.60 for UK artists. Similar findings have been popping up across countries in the past years. And yet, for most of us, precarity feels personal. You didn’t apply to enough residencies. You didn’t pitch hard enough. You didn’t “network.” The hustle is internalized as a moral failing.

Collectives break that everlasting feeling of competition, not with slogans but with tools. W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) in New York created fee calculators and accreditation schemes so artists could compare what institutions pay, turning “taboo” money talk into leverage. In Belgium, State of the Arts runs regular assemblies where cultural workers sit together to swap stories and draft demands, creating a shared language around exploitation. In Australia, the Karrabing Film Collective, made up of Indigenous families, uses filmmaking not only as art but as a survival strategy—pooling resources to keep control of their narratives and land.

These aren’t utopias. They’re practical infrastructures: assemblies, calculators, mutual film production. “The currency of precarity is solitude,” once said a participant at a workshop at Flanders Art Institute about money in the art world. Collectives do not offer an escape from precarity, but the knowledge that you’re not carrying it alone.

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Reason 3: Collectives can allow you to experiment beyond market logics

One of the first shocks after graduation is realizing how quickly the pressure to make it out there can narrow your field of vision. Suddenly the question isn’t “What do you want to make?” but “What will get you the show, the residency, the sale?”. The risk is that experimentation gets trimmed down to fit what you think are institutional expectations.

Collectives help crack that frame open. They build parallel spaces where you can test things without worrying about commercial legibility. Think of Cooking Sections, who turned dinners into performances and eventually into multi-year projects about ecology and colonial food systems. Their work didn’t look like “art” at first—and that was the point. Or again Forensic Architecture, which began as a studio seminar and became a collective turning architectural analysis into evidence for human rights cases. Their exhibitions often function less as artworks than as investigative archives, but the art world had to adjust.

Salmon: A Red Herring, site-specific installation by Cooking Sections. © Tate. Image credit: Lucy Dawkins.

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Of course, collectives are not always about pushing the boundaries of art. At a smaller scale, they can look like self-organized shows in apartments, improvised screenings, or risograph zines circulating through collectives. Poor Artists makes the same point: most of what sustains artistic life happens outside galleries, in the messy circulation of PDFs, Tumblr posts, or informal reading groups.

The freedom of the collective is that failure doesn’t cost as much. A show that falls apart is still a night with your peers. A project that doesn’t sell is still research shared. By pooling time and attention, collectives loosen the grip of market logic. They give you permission to treat art less as product and more as experiment—which, ironically, is where you might get noticed by institutions.

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Reason 4: Collectives can enable admin survival (and more)

You graduate knowing how to do art but rarely how to file taxes, draft a contract, or ask for a fee without apologizing. Admin tasks represent a major part of an artist’s time in the early years, unless the unlikely scenario where you’re already running a four-assistant studio.

There’s a growing ecosystem of DIY tools made by and for artists. W.A.G.E. built a fee calculator and accreditation system so artists could actually see what institutions should be paying. In Belgium, Engagement Arts runs support systems specifically addressing sexual violence in the sector, offering clear protocols where institutions looked the other way.

Even smaller gestures matter. The White Pube started a “Successful Funding Application Library” for artists to share, alleviating the confusion that can come with the very specific language and strategies of grant applications.

These tools aren’t necessarily glamorous, but they’re the glue. The point is not just access to information, but redistribution of knowledge. The art world is not always conducive to solidarity amongst artists, amidst competitive pressure, uneven access to means of production, and the persistent myth of artists being above material contingencies. But each time you contribute to making life a tiny bit easier for fellow artists around you, it also strengthens a community your practice will benefit from.

Institutional budget visualisation by W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy).

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The communing is the art (it can be messy, finite, and still necessary)

Collectives start in many ways. Sometimes the answer is right in front of you: the classmates you already pulled all-nighters with. Sometimes it’s a collective studio down the block, rent cut six ways. Sometimes it’s a scrappy warehouse show where strangers suddenly feel like peers.

Sometimes the starting point is less obvious. But often how to start matters less than the act of starting. Begin with a group chat, a kitchen-table crit, a shared Google Drive. Call it a collective, or don’t—the label is secondary to the practice. As Quest Taludkar reminds us at the end of Poor Artists, the network isn’t a by-product of your practice; it is a core part of it. “The communing is the art.”

None of this is perfect. Collectives can be messy, frustrating, and they often have a natural expiration date. But that’s part of the deal: like an unofficial, self-organized, post-doc, they give shape and urgency to the energy you have right after graduation.

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