We Need to Talk About Power & Control in the Arts & Culture Sector

New frameworks to name structural harm and collective liberation

Every semester I sit across from the next generation of arts and culture workers. They are brilliant, committed, and full of hope.They are preparing to enter a sector they love, many of them have already given years of unpaid labor, underpaid service, and unrecognized expertise. And every semester I ask myself what do I owe them?

I owe them honesty. I owe them a real conversation about the current state of the sector. And, as a future ancestor, I owe them the framework to build something better than what they will inherit.

Although I still feel like a spring chicken compared to other leaders in this field, I have been in it long enough to recognize how I have been a part of and, at times, have perpetuated the very system I am naming here. I have loved this field for a long time and it has given me amazing opportunities, dope colleagues and friends, and spaces to grow, dream, and imagine new possibilities. At the same time, this field has also done things to me that I can describe as violent.

I have sat in rooms where my expertise was questioned before I opened my mouth. I have sat on panels where colleagues had their credibility challenged in real time, in front of audiences, by people who had never done the work those colleagues built their lives around. I have watched funding flow through networks that were never designed to include everyone. I have watched people build something from nothing, pour years into it, and then stand by as credit was stolen by someone who had more resources. I have been told my work was too political, too radical, too much, by institutions whose entire identity depended on our communities. I have watched artists and cultural workers give everything to this field and to not even receive a “thank you” in return. Too many of us have been celebrated and extracted from in the same breath.

For a long time, I did not have clean language for any of that, just the fact that people weren’t shit and didn’t care. I knew something was wrong but the field kept offering explanations that made it sound like a series of misunderstandings rather than a system doing exactly what it was built to do.

This is what brought me to creating a “new framework” (I use framework very loosely) for thinking about repair and accountability in the arts and culture sector. In this article, I’ll introduce the Arts & Culture Power and Control Wheel and the Arts & Culture Liberation Wheel. I’ll begin with the historical context behind the wheels before digging into the frameworks themselves.

The Original Power and Control Wheel

In the 1980s, advocates at the Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs in Duluth, Minnesota created the Power and Control Wheel. If you have never seen it, it names that abuse is not one thing. It is a pattern, a system of tactics that work together to keep someone trapped, through intimidation, isolation, economic control, emotional abuse, and the use of privilege to justify all of it. The wheel named these dynamics without asking the person experiencing harm to prove that the pattern was real.

First, domestic violence is real. It is devastating and too often fatal. I want to honor and acknowledge the work of the advocates and survivors who built that framework because it serves as the intellectual and moral foundation of this work. What I am doing here is building on top of that work, extending its logic into a different but related context. The wheel I am introducing for the arts and culture sector exists because someone in Duluth believed survivors enough to build a tool to help them name what was happening to them. That lineage is important. By adapting the Power and Control Wheel into new contexts my goal is to NOT minimize what it was originally built to address. The original wheel teaches us that harm is systemic, that patterns can be named, and that naming them is an act of power.

Freire wrote that naming the world is the first act of transformation. In the arts and culture sector, we have not yet done that first act honestly. We have named symptoms while protecting systems. What these frameworks ask us to do is name the system itself, unapologetically, because you cannot build something new on a foundation you have never honestly examined.

This framework also draws from abolitionist scholarship that helps us understand harm structurally rather than individually. Dr. Wilson Gilmore writes that racism is the state-sanctioned and extralegal production of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. That definition is useful because it is structural and names a function and its mechanism. When I look at the arts and culture sector through a liberatory and abolitionist lens, I see that same logic operating at every level in who gets funded, whose leadership gets legitimized, and whose safety gets protected. The patterns are the product of a system organized around white supremacy and class power, dressed in the language of creativity, mission, and community.

Abolition teaches us that we do not tear things down and leave rubble. We build new institutions in the place of the ones that caused harm. Thus, I have adapted the Power and Control Wheel into this new lens.

The Arts & Culture Power and Control Wheel

Power and Control in the Arts and Culture Sector is a system that concentrates decision-making, resources, visibility, and value in the hands of the few while extracting labor and limiting the power of the many.

The outer ring names the structural forces holding all of it in place: White Supremacy Culture, Patriarchy, Class Power (read: Capitalism), and Structural Dominance. This is the foundation of the current structure and inside that architecture, nine specific dynamics operate every single day across our field.

• Cultural gatekeeping is about who gets access to opportunities, platforms, audiences, and funding, and who gets locked out. It shows up in opaque processes, insider relationships, and systems built to privilege proximity to white dominant culture and Western ideas of excellence. We often call this institutional expertise. But for those excluded from those spaces, it is clear that gatekeeping is about maintaining power.

• Representation manipulation happens when diversity becomes performance instead of structural change. It is the appearance of inclusion without real voice, authority, or decision-making power. The sector often places different faces into the same systems while continuing to center white and colonial perspectives.

• Resource hoarding is the concentration of funding and influence within the same institutions and networks year after year. Community-based organizations are told to “build capacity” while established organizations continue receiving the majority of support. When funders become de facto decision-makers for community priorities, scarcity becomes a tool of control rather than an accident of the system.

• Exploitation of creative labor reveals the sector’s deep relationship to class inequity. Artists are expected to work for exposure while organizations profit from their labor and pay executive salaries in the hundreds of thousands. Living wages, healthcare, and sustainable working conditions are treated as optional, especially for artists of the global majority and artists with disabilities.

• Narrative control and story theft operates through the appropriation of culture, stories, artistry, and community knowledge without consent, credit, or compensation. It controls which stories are told, how they are framed, and who benefits from them. Suppressing counter-narratives that identify systemic harm is also a form of cultural control.

• Isolation and network control prevents collective power before it can fully form. Artists and cultural workers are excluded from the spaces where real decisions are made while scarcity pushes people into competition over limited resources. Fragmentation protects existing hierarchies.

• Cultural dehumanization and erasure is the slow violence of institutional illegitimacy. It minimizes the work of people of the global majority, frames marginalized art as “niche” rather than universal, and erases languages, histories, and cultural practices. Even lived experience itself is often treated as insufficient evidence within dominant institutions.

• Psychological and emotional abuse is one of the sector’s most normalized forms of harm. It includes bullying, intimidation, retaliation, gaslighting, and burnout by design. Harm becomes normalized while silence is enforced, especially against those who challenge systems of power.

• Physical and sexual abuse must be named directly. Powerful gatekeepers have used access, opportunity, and institutional protection to enable predatory behavior. Survivors, particularly women, artists of the global majority, and early-career workers, are often silenced while institutions prioritize reputation over accountability. Any framework that refuses to name this dynamic ultimately protects the systems enabling it.

These nine dynamics reinforce each other, creating a system where exhaustion replaces resistance, harm feels personal rather than structural, and people spend more energy surviving the field than transforming it.

The Arts & Culture Liberation Wheel: Now Here Is What We Build

When creating work like these wheels, it’s important to offer pathways forward alongside critique. That’s what led me to create the Liberation Wheel. It names not only what we are trying to build structurally, but also the consciousness, relationships, and practices required to build it.

The center of the Liberation Wheel is Collective Power and Liberation, defined by shared decision-making, community-rooted freedom, interdependence, and the belief that we thrive together. The outer ring names where we are going: Collective Liberation, Racial Justice, Liberation from Patriarchy, and Economic Freedom.

In the Power and Control Wheel, Patriarchy was intentionally named in the outer ring because patriarchy functions as a structural force that shapes power, labor, leadership, safety, and value within the arts and culture sector and society more broadly. Patriarchy impacts everyone (even if they don’t realize it) and it reinforces systems of domination that often privilege hierarchy, control, extraction, and gendered violence.

I want to be explicit that I intentionally did not place “Matriarchy” in the outer ring of the Liberation Wheel as the supposed opposite of patriarchy. Part of that decision comes from how the concept of matriarchy has often been co-opted within white feminist frameworks as simply “women ruling over men” or as a gendered reversal of domination. But true liberation is not the inversion of oppressive power structures. Reversing domination is not the same thing as dismantling domination.

My understanding of leadership, care, and collective responsibility comes from growing up in an Afro-Matriarchal household and family structure. In my experience, Afro-Matriarchy is about relationality, accountability, care, survival, and collective responsibility. The women in my family held immense wisdom, leadership, and grounding power but the men were not absent nor positioned as enemies. There was a co-existing structure where people understood their roles, responsibilities, and relationships to one another outside of rigid Western patriarchal norms.

It was about responsibility to one another as opposed to having power over one another. This distinction matters deeply when we talk about liberation work.

The Liberation Wheel is not advocating for a new dominant class nor is it about not arguing for replacing one hierarchy with another. It is asking us to imagine systems rooted in interdependence, collective care, accountability, and shared power as opposed to its opposites. That is why the language of “Collective Liberation” and “Liberation from Patriarchy” felt more aligned for me than replacing patriarchy with matriarchy in a binary sense. The future I am imagining (and I hope you all imagine as well) is one where domination itself is no longer the organizing principle.

For every dynamic of control, there is a practice of liberation.

• Shared accountability is the answer to cultural gatekeeping. It means transparent decision-making, community-informed accountability, and repair over punishment. Power holders answer to the people most impacted by their decisions.

• Safety without surveillance is the answer to representation manipulation. It means trust-based environments where artists and communities are free from over-policing, suppression, and tokenization, and can show up fully without fear.

• Power-sharing is the answer to resource hoarding. Community governance, shared leadership, and the non-negotiable commitment that those most impacted lead the work.

• Equitable resource flow is the answer to exploitation of creative labor. Living wages and healthcare are treated as baseline, not negotiation. It means direct funding to artists and grassroots organizations, participatory grantmaking, and wealth redistribution, not just access.

• Truth and repair is the answer to narrative control and story theft. It requires naming harm, organizational accountability, restorative and transformative justice, and the documentation of truth over institutional revisionism. We cannot repair what we refuse to name.

• Connected ecosystems is the answer to isolation and network control. It means collaboration across organizations, resource sharing, trust-based networks, and collective strategy that rejects manufactured scarcity and competition for crumbs.

• Investment in collective future(s) is the answer to cultural dehumanization and erasure. Youth leadership pipelines, culturally grounded education, intergenerational learning, and the protection of joy, creativity, and identity are foundational to building a different future.

• Healing-centered workplaces and collective care is the answer to psychological and emotional abuse. It means building organizations that do not normalize harm or extraction. Rest, accountability, worker protection, and collective care become structural practices, not individual responsibilities.

• Safety, consent, and survivor justice is the answer to physical and sexual abuse. It centers survivor voice, community-based accountability, and governance structures that actively prevent harm rather than protect institutions or abusers.

What This Means Right Now For the Sector

We are in a political moment. The sector is scared, and that fear is understandable. However, we need to hold multiple truths at the same time. A sector that fights only to protect its current structure is fighting for preservation.

If we use this crisis to defend the gatekeeping, the resource hoarding, the narrative control, and the labor exploitation and call the things that the Power and Control Wheel names, then we are protecting a system that was already harming people before the external attacks began. We win the battle and lose the point entirely.

Liberation asks what we look like beyond survival. It asks us to fight what is coming from the outside while doing the honest, difficult, necessary work on the inside. That is difficult and it requires us to hold complexity in a moment that is pushing us toward simplicity. But it is the only path that leads somewhere actually worth going.

An Invitation

These wheels are tools. They are built to be used in organizational assessments, strategic planning, field convenings, board retreats, and community dialogues. They are built to give artists, practitioners, funders, and advocates a shared language for dynamics that are real but too often go unnamed because naming them feels dangerous.

It should not be dangerous to name the truth. And part of what these frameworks do is make the truth harder to dismiss.

This framework is for artists and cultural workers of the global majority who have spent years trying to name what they were experiencing and been told they were difficult, ungrateful, or wrong.

This framework is for practitioners and administrators exhausted by performing transformation without the power to structurally create it. Use these wheels as a diagnostic tool and ask the harder question: are we renovating, or rebuilding? Because some foundations cannot hold what we are trying to build.

This framework is for funders and institutional leaders. If you read the Power and Control Wheel and felt seen in uncomfortable ways, that discomfort is important. Liberation work is a structural shift. If none of those things are changing in your organization, you are not building anything new. You are only redecorating something with “old bones” as they say on HGTV.

The field needs frameworks that make equity visible, measurable, and accountable. That is what these wheels are for.

I always tell people that there’s a reason we are here in this moment, at this particular time in time and space. We are here to build something our descendants will one day be grateful we had the courage to imagine and create.

We already know what control looks like. The question now is whether we are brave enough to build what liberation can look like.

Special thanks to my colleagues and friends who helped me pilot this and gave amazing feedback over the past couple of months