The Collective Debt Project began in the spring of 2021 during my last semester in graduate school at Cranbrook Academy of Art. It stemmed from hearing fellow students’ anxiety about how to price their work for Cranbrook’s annual fundraiser event called STUDIO. The anxiety I noticed often sounded like this: “I don’t want to price my work too high → because I need it to sell→ because I need money → because I don’t yet have a way to provide for myself financially after school or between school years.” The undertone to all this, of course, is that students were feeling stressed about how to make money without the support of federal, or equivalent, loans. 

So in hearing these conversations I began thinking that even if students sold their work, it would still not be anywhere close to equivalent to the amount of debt many of us had to take on in order to come here. And then that led me to an even simpler curiosity of – what is that debt? Could there be a way to know EXACTLY how much debt our graduating class of sixty-four students had? With encouragement and support from classmates I began reaching out to collect everyone’s individual debt numbers to discover what the collective debt number would be. In the end, fifty-eight out of sixty-four students responded to learn that the total is: 4,057,144.79

This debt amount along with the sales ad, tax cost, and Cranbrook’s cut, was woven on a TC2 loom and then put for sale on the STUDIO event. The goal of this project was to signify to potential buyers just how unbalanced this system is. The sales students would receive from their artwork would never amount to the student indebtedness. Therefore the patron support would never be enough and never amount to the debt we will carry for years to come.  In the end the project was attached to over fifty student pages. It was priced for the averaged amount of debt: $67,398.31 per person. The item never sold.

 For the next step in this project (as detailed in the STUDIO image), the weaving of “Buy Our Collective Student Debt” will be subdivided into sixty four parts, representing the sixty four graduating students. It will then be digitized and minted into NFTs and sold on a digital marketplace. If sold, the sale proceeds will be equally divided among the graduating students. In this way, transforming the collective burden into a collective benefit. The item will be put for sale on the day that the class of 2021 will lose the grace period and begin repaying: November 15, 2021. Six months after graduation date of May 15, 2021.