I welded a staircase railing for the art building at a community college in 2004. Not a sculpture technically, but they wanted something that looked like one. Paid fifteen thousand, which felt fine at the time for six weeks work. Twenty years later I still get five hundred dollars a year from that college. They call it a maintenance and consultation fee. Theyve never called me once. Its in the contract my old self signed and I keep meaning to tell them to stop. But I dont. That five hundred is the only passive income Ive ever had in this trade. Everything else was show up, get dirty, get paid, do it again. And I know people online talk about recurring revenue like its something you design into your practice from day one. I never did. It just happened because I wrote a stupid clause into a bid for a staircase.
