There are many resources to help you establish studio practices that protect the health and safety of both artists and the environment. Your local college or university likely has a department of health and environmental safety, with guidelines for waste disposal, clean-up, spill procedures and more. The following resources are available online.
Health & Safety in the Arts
This is one of the best resources, a online database where you can search by art mediums, studio safety topics, and other resources.
Arts, Crafts & Theater Safety
This non-profit organization provides health, safety, industrial hygiene, technical services, and safety publications. They also offer consulting services, and a part of the fees from these services goes to support their free and low-cost services for artists.
Vanderbilt Environmental Health & Safety
This resource provides information on health and safety use in arts, crafts and theater.
Best Management Practices in Fine Art Painting Studios
Click the link to download The Narragansett Bay Commission’s guide, which is designed to protect artists’ health and the environment in the studio setting, and to help studio managers save money and comply with existing environmental regulations.
Exposing Ourselves to Art, by Scott Fields
The following is an abstract from Environmental Health Perspectives Volume 105, Number 3 March 1997. Click on the title above to read the entire article.
Artists are exposed through their work to a number of potentially harmful chemicals, fumes, dusts, and heavy metals. Each discipline has its own hazardous materials, such as the potter’s lead glazes, the painter’s toluene-based solvents, the printer’s cyanide electroplating solutions, and the sculptor’s sand and rock dusts. The art world is full of anecdotes about artists who have had serious health problems related to the materials they used. It’s not just professional artists at risk, either – it’s any hobbyist, art teacher, student, or summer camper.
The hazards associated with the fine arts have been recognized since at least the early 18th century. The brilliant colors that characterize many of the Old Masters’ works were created with the use of toxic heavy metals, materials that caused disease in artists such as Rubens and Renoir.
But the danger to artists includes more than just the raw materials. A devotion to experimentation combined with a general unfamiliarity with proper safety procedures can yield disastrous results. It is difficult to regulate the art world because of the diversity of its population, and most professional artists work alone and are therefore not accountable to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Furthermore, some artists may purposely put themselves at risk in the belief that it is required by their calling.
In 1988, the Labeling of Hazardous Art Materials Act required art supplies to start carrying warning labels for materials that are unsuited for use by children. But such labels may be incorrect and incomplete and have no bearing on the stock of old supplies sitting in school art closets and artists’ studios. In addition, there are materials in use today that specialists suspect may someday be found to be hazardous.