Building Economic Power for Performers

One of the Ecdysiast Arts Museum’s long-term goals is to create workforce development programming for performance artists and cultural workers.

Artists are frequently expected to accept exposure instead of compensation, work without clear agreements, absorb their own production costs, and undervalue the labor required to create an experience for an audience. Many performers navigate irregular income, unsafe working environments, and industries that offer little support for long-term financial stability.

We want performers to have access to something different.

Future museum programming will help artists learn how to price their labor, negotiate contracts, understand their expenses, manage irregular income, protect their intellectual property, recognize exploitation, and build more sustainable artistic careers.

Performers should understand the true value of their labor and have the tools to demand it.

This work is also about preservation.

Artists need support documenting their careers, protecting their materials, and understanding that their work belongs to a much larger history.

Hedy Jo Star Exhibit at Ecdysiast Arts Museum.

When performers learn about the people who came before them, they do not have to imagine that they are starting from nothing. They can see the lineage of BIPOC, women, LGBTQIA+, disabled, working-class, and gender-expansive performers who built their own economies when society shut them out of traditional pathways to safety, income, community, and freedom.

And that history deserves the same care, scholarship, preservation, and public access afforded to any other major American cultural movement in the history of this country.

Help Us Make This Museum Permanent

Behind a pink door in downtown Davenport, Iowa, is a 4,000-square-foot museum, archive, library, food pantry, and gathering place. The Ecdysiast Arts Museum preserves the history of burlesque and stripping while creating a space where people can learn, perform, organize, eat, connect, and experience art that might otherwise never reach a working-class Midwestern community.

The museum has become a home for conversations about democracy, labor, gender, bodily autonomy, political power, and collective liberation. It is a place where Iowans can access food without shame, where artists can perform and develop their craft, and where people can learn about the women and gender-expansive performers who used burlesque and stripping to feed themselves, support their families, build community, and create their own economies when traditional systems shut them out.

Today, nearly all of this work is being carried by a small team of 5 people.

We are raising an initial $150,000 to protect the museum’s archive, compensate the small team keeping the space running, continue food distribution and public programming, and build the administrative foundation needed to make the museum a permanent institution in Davenport. Once we reach that first goal, we will work toward a second goal of $300,000 so the museum can move from immediate stability into long-term growth.

This campaign is about giving a proven community resource the foundation it needs to last.

We believe Davenport deserves a permanent institution dedicated to preserving burlesque and stripping history. We believe the labor and economic histories of women, gender-expansive people, queer and transgender people, people of color, disabled people, working-class people, and performance artists deserve serious preservation.

We believe a cultural institution can preserve history while feeding people. We believe performers deserve the tools to understand their value, protect their labor, and build sustainable lives. We believe communities can create the institutions they were once told they did not deserve.

Please contribute what you can and share this campaign with people who care about art, labor history, bodily autonomy, queer and feminist history, food access, Iowa, the Quad Cities, or the power of communities to build something lasting together.

Help us reach our first goal of $150,000.

Help us protect the archive, sustain the people doing the work, feed our neighbors, educate future generations, support performers, and build a permanent home for this history in Davenport.

The museum is currently operating as a social enterprise and exploring fiscal sponsorship to expand its future access to grants and charitable funding. At this time, contributions are not tax-deductible. Every dollar raised through this campaign will directly support the museum’s archive, operations, team, public programming, food distribution, and community work.