Each year, our Awards for Artists recognise exceptional visual artists and composers. In this blog, we explore one of its defining aspects – an art award with no strings attached.
Most other funding seems to place significant demands on artists to address particular and important social and academic agendas, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is important that there should also be funding that is less instrumentally motivated and demanding.
A key aim of Awards for Artists has always been to ease the pressures artists face – particularly financial pressures. Monetary awards in the art world can therefore have a significant impact on an artist’s career and life, but they often require something from the artist in return – the creation of new art, or an exhibition or performance, in service of the award.
The current value of an Award is £75,000, which is made over a three-year period. In contrast to many arts awards, however, Awards for Artists are given with ‘no strings attached’ – an artist is free to do whatever they wish with the money they receive, and they are required to produce nothing in return.
I was able to use materials I could not have afforded and investigate new ways of working. Without the Award it would have taken me longer to develop significant aspects of my practice that required learning new skills I now had time to pursue.
The Awards for Artists can have a profound, positive and lasting impact for the better on the life of an artist. The no-strings support provides a rare sense of validation that is entirely generative.
Receiving the composers award was literally life-changing for me. I expanded my artistic ideas with many recordings and actually funded some concerts. It also allowed me to buy some extra instruments which again helped the way I could express my musical ideas.
This year’s Arts Pay Survey suggests a quarter of artists starting out struggle to cover their basic costs, and stories about artists struggling to maintain an artistic practice alongside financial security are all too common. These financial pressures can constrain an artist’s ability to develop their practice and narrow the field of who can forge a career as an artist.
By offering artists some breathing room, the Awards aim to help artists make choices that centre their practice and livelihood, rather than the need to generate an income. For some artists, the Award has also given them the crucial breathing room to sustain their artistic practice.
I really believe my artistic practice would have been put on hold for an indefinite period of time and I would have lost all of the momentum I had built up to that point in my still very nascent art career. [The financial support of the Award] has been a life-saving and stabilising factor.
It has given me confidence to go into conversations knowing I could [fund things], and avoid all the ‘begging stuff’. And then there is the fact that it just covers the basics, the groceries, and gives you the time to spend on the process.
Precarity for artists can have a significant impact on their ability to further their career and develop their practice. Last year, we spoke in-depth to twelve past recipients of the Awards. Speaking to them about the impact of the Award, we heard stories of how the Award had directly impacted their artistic practice – composers having the resource to record albums and visual artists acquiring studio spaces.
More fundamentally, however, precarity for an artist can impact their ability to survive. Alongside these stories of developing artistic practice, we also heard about the Award helping an artist afford intensive driving lessons so they could more easily co-parent, or another artist being able to move out of the country to somewhere they could more easily afford to live.
By having no strings attached, the Awards put trust into the hands of the artist – trust that they know best how to support their own careers and lives.
If I hadn’t won the Award, my life would have been a lot more stressful and a lot more precarious… If you’re anxious for too long everything just becomes so negative and that’s not a creative place to be.
We established Awards for Artists in 1994, recognising artists with a financial award to give them freedom to develop their practice. To date, the scheme has benefitted 357 artists with awards totalling £11.29 million.
We are delighted to announce the 10 recipients of Awards for Artists 2024 – the largest individual awards given to visual artists and composers in the UK.
To celebrate 30 years of supporting artists at critical points in their careers, our Awards for Artists, given annually to five visual artists and five composers, will increase from £60,000 to £75,000.
