Adjunct music educators occupy a paradoxical position in higher education: they are entrusted with shaping students’ artistic and professional futures, yet often work under precarious labor conditions that undermine their own stability and well-being (Slaughter & Rhodes, 2004). Their contributions—ranging from ensemble leadership to one-on-one mentorship—are rarely matched by equitable pay, job security, or access to institutional resources (Standing, 2011). Much of their most impactful work, including mentoring, recruiting, teacher preparation, and sustaining performance culture, exists as invisible labor, performed without recognition or, in some cases, compensation. In music teacher preparation programs especially, where artistic identity, emotional engagement, and creative labor are inseparable from pedagogy, these inequities shape not only instructors’ professional and personal lives but also their relationships with students and the ways they are able to teach and mentor. The study draws on the scholarship on invisible work (Daniels, 1987; Hatton, 2017) and care ethics (Tronto, 1993) to foreground the ways adjunct music educators working in four different kinds of institutions sustain programs through mentoring and relational labor. The aim is not to offer a technocratic fix but to bear witness and make visible their experience creating a record that resists the erasure of adjuncts from institutional narratives and provides language for naming what is too often unnamed.This study documents the narrative stories of adjunct music educators in order to trace how personal, creative, and relational work is bound up with the structural conditions that shape their lives. It addresses experience and context, linking individual stories to the broader systems that sustain and exploit contingent labor (Barrett & Stauffer, 2009). These questions guided the project:1. How do adjunct music educators describe the intersections of their artistic, pedagogical, and relational work with the structural conditions of contingent labor in higher education.2. In what ways do adjunct music educators experience and negotiate the “invisible labor” of mentoring, recruitment, and sustaining music education programs, and how do they perceive the recognition, or lack thereof, of this work.This presentation details and documents how themes around artistry, care, and expertise continue to sustain music education under contingency. Following Stone (2012), we highlight how terms like ‘flexibility’ and ‘cost effectiveness’ obscure our three themes. By juxtaposing lived accounts with the policies and practices that frame them, we challenge common-sense assumptions and invite more just arrangements for teaching, mentoring, and recognition.