BeTheMuseum:  The Endowment Rooms grew from recognizing a pattern of scarcity in  myself, my friends, and the artists around me. I began to see how I  wasted so placed in the position of begging for survival: applying,  waiting, hoping, proving, and asking to be chosen. Over time, I realized  this pattern was not only in the arts. It appeared everywhere, from  schools to jobs to nonprofit structures.

I  began studying private foundations, endowments, and the financial  systems that often support nonprofit institutions. At the same time, I  started writing publicly here about these questions. Instagram became a  site for field notes and conversation, a place where artists could  respond with their own experiences of fear, scarcity, confusion,  exclusion, abundance, and the desire to take control of their lives  without having to do it alone. I began educating myself in financial  language, invited a small group of artists to learn with me, and am  turning the research into writing, images, songs, ceremony, and public  dialogue.