Arts programme
Report
This year has seen continued challenges for the arts sector, and particularly for artists, though it has also demonstrated how resilient individuals and organisations can be. Despite some notable exceptions such as Stratford in East London – where a new cultural and educational quarter is to be built at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park – the public funding landscape, especially at local level, has remained bleak.
In our Arts Open Grants, there was a significant surge in the numbers of applications we received before the closure of the scheme in October. We received over 100 applications in a month – over a third of all the applications received in the previous year. During the year, we made a record 57 grants, totalling £4,267,000.
We are particularly pleased to have underpinned, for a second consecutive year, the work led by Dance UK to bring together a consortium of four leading dance organisations. This led to a major three-year grant from Arts Council England to create a unified ‘go-to’ industry body. The Association of Dance of the African Diaspora, Dance UK, the National Dance Teachers Association and Youth Dance England will have much more impact together than as stand-alone bodies and we are proud to have supported this development.
A second three-year grant to Lincolnshire One Venues (LOV) will underpin its youth-led community engagement work. This unusual alliance of ten partners has gone a long way in developing from scratch interesting and high-quality provision by and for young people, very much along the lines of the work of the Circuit programme in eight museums and galleries across the UK. The promise of the work undertaken by LOV across Lincolnshire has also been recognised with a three-year grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.
2014 marked the 20th anniversary of our Awards for Artists. During this time, we have provided over £4m of support to 125 individual artists at timely moments in their careers.
We have continued our work in the museums and galleries sector to support organisational change to involve communities and individuals in core decision-making processes. We published a report on emerging learning from the Our Museum initiative that attracted significant interest from funding bodies. The initiative entered its final year in the spring of 2015. We launched a new website to share the resources we have created, including extensive new audio visual material.
Another highlight of our year was a series of events to mark the end of ArtWorks. Over its four years, the initiative reached artists, employers, further and higher education providers, and public and private funding bodies – generating connections that support an extensive community of practice. Through an emerging ‘ArtWorks Alliance’ and the commitment of some of our partners to build on the legacy of our work, we believe we can support the sector to act collectively to promote quality and shared values across the spectrum of participatory arts practice.
We said goodbye this year to three Arts programme advisors, as they came to the end of their terms: Kate Brindley (Director of the Arnolfini Gallery), Jonathan Reekie (CEO of Somerset House) and Claire Whitaker (Director of Serious). We are incredibly grateful for the insight and energy they gave us over the six years they were involved in our work, particularly in shaping our new strategy. Both Claire and Kate continue to chair ArtWorks and Our Museum (until, respectively, June 2015 and April 2016). John McGrath (Artistic Director of National Theatre Wales) remains an advisor to the Foundation for another two years.
As this Yearbook is published, we look forward to implementing our new strategy – particularly focusing on the widening of access and participation in the arts, on education and learning through the arts and on evidence for the impact of the arts. This refocused approach will connect us both to the roots of the Foundation and to the work that we have funded over the years.
Régis Cochefert
Head of Arts
Special Initiatives
awards for artists
Support for individual visual artists and composers
£470,206 in 2014/15
The Awards for Artists scheme supports individual artists to develop their creative ideas by providing funding with no strings attached over three years. The Awards are made on the basis of need, talent and achievement. In November 2014, awards of £50,000, paid in three annual instalments, were made to eight recipients.
Composers:
Martin Green, Shabaka Hutchings and Pat Thomas
Visual Artists:
Bonnie Camplin, Michael Dean, Rosalind Nashashibi, Katrina Palmer and James Richard
In 2014, we celebrated 20 years of the Awards for Artists scheme. We invited previous recipients to the Foundation in advance of the announcement and were delighted that 43 artists were able to join us to celebrate. The guest speaker was the pianist, conductor and composer Joanna MacGregor, who has been chair of the Awards for Composers judging panel since 2014.
breakthrough fund
Support for cultural entrepreneurs
£127,780 in 2014/15
The Breakthrough Fund aims to identify outstanding individuals in the role of cultural entrepreneur, working in a variety of art forms and contexts, who have compelling visions and are at timely moments in their careers. Through committed, responsive and flexible support, the Fund aims to unlock significant developments and outcomes that would not otherwise be brought about. It also helps to achieve transformational impacts for these individuals and the organisations with which they work.
In three rounds of funding between 2008 and 2010, 15 grants were made totalling £3,879,765. During 2014/15, the last six of these grants completed. During 2015/16, consultant Kate Tyndall will draw together an update of the Interim Evaluation of the Fund completed in 2012, looking at the progress across the 15 stories, including a longitudinal review with grantees two years after the end of their grants. She will also form an updated assessment of the strategic context for the Fund and will identify learning from the more recent seven grantees selected in the spring of 2014.
As one of the most recent recipients was not in a position to take up his grant, our 2013/14 cohort is now made up of six grants totalling £1,530,000. These grants have moved into an active phase. We are beginning to see change coming through new approaches to thinking and ways of working adopted through the Breakthrough funding. We look forward to continuing our support for these individuals over the coming years.
In 2016 we will embark on a fifth round of nominations and applications for the Breakthrough Fund.
artworks: developing practice in participatory settings
Support for artists’ training and development
£349,881 in 2014/15
ArtWorks supported the initial education, training and continuing professional development of artists working in participatory settings in order to enhance the quality of people’s engagement in arts-led activity and the arts.
The initiative moved into its final phase during 2014/15, as we scaled up our communication and dissemination and extended the reach of the learning we had accrued. We did this through our existing online community of engagement, a new website which was launched in July 2014 and through a series of seven briefings sent to more than 1500 subscribers.
In March 2015 we launched our final report, ArtWorks: Reflections on practice in participatory settings which summarises what we have learnt and makes recommendations for improving the system of support for artists. Over four years, the programme stretched across the UK, working with over 100 partners and reaching more than 2400 artists, FE and HE providers and employers through 74 conferences and events. Our learning and assets were developed in three key areas: training and development of artists, methods for promoting quality, and creating the conditions for change.
We also issued a Call to Action, encouraging everyone involved in participatory practice to consider what they can do to ensure our recommendations are implemented and artists get access to better support so that they can be the very best they can be when working with participants.
The five pathfinder projects all ended their programmes in October 2014 with a series of events across the UK to share learning and reach new people who share a passion for this work. The creation of the ArtWorks Alliance and the continuation of the work of the pathfinders in Scotland, Wales, London and the North East will ensure that there is a structure through which the work of ArtWorks can be taken forward. To support this further, we also issued a call for proposals for a round of small development grants (to be issued in 2015/16) to apply and embed the learning of ArtWorks.
our museum: communities and museums as active partners
Facilitating organisational change within museums and galleries
£337,353 in 2014/15
Our Museum has been working with nine museums and galleries around the UK to help them embed community participation at the heart of their organisations. Grants to two of the organisations were not renewed for Year 3 of the programme, so we now have seven partners.
The year saw a shift to a more outward-facing phase of the programme, analysing our learning and sharing it more widely. During the year we published an interim report, Communities and Museums as Active Partners: Emerging learning from the Our Museum initiative. Its overall message was that small changes add up: small improvements and changes in many different areas, across the whole organisation, add up to significant transformation in community engagement and participatory practice. We highlighted five key areas of museum practice and management that are particularly critical for participatory practice: governance; staff professional development; how to engage with community partners; evaluation and evidence of change; and the importance of the voice from outside.
This report led to a series of ongoing conversations and workshops with the various bodies that have strategic responsibility for museum and gallery development across the UK. The purpose of these conversations is to ensure that these strategic bodies are aware of our learning and can integrate it into their policies and frameworks.
We also published a paper by Dr Bernadette Lynch, Our Museum: A five-year perspective from a critical friend, a follow-up to her seminal 2011 paper Whose Cake Is It Anyway? Based on her keynote at the 2014 Our Museum peer review, it presents her observations and critique on whether, in her view, the organisations involved in Our Museum have made progress in embedding participatory practice, and what challenges remain.
In April 2015 we launched a web-based resource to showcase and share the learning from the programme. Comprising films, animations, presentations and downloadable documents from the organisations participating in Our Museum, and innovative practice from elsewhere, these resources are a sort of ‘travel survival kit’ – a guide to help organisations on their change journey to become more participatory and to build active partnerships with their communities.
circuit
A national programme connecting 15 to 25 year olds to the arts in galleries and museums, working in partnership with the youth and cultural sectors
Supported with a £5m gift, made to Tate as part of the Foundation’s 25th anniversary in 2013, Circuit connects 15–25 year olds to the arts in galleries and aims to make a positive difference for young people by promoting their creativity, cultural and creative diversity and artistic ownership.
Taking part in the programme are: Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London, Tate Liverpool, Tate St Ives, firstsite in Colchester, MOSTYN in Llandudno, Nottingham Contemporary, the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, and Wysing Arts Centre with Kettle’s Yard in Cambridgeshire.
During its second year, Circuit has seen the first exhibitions and displays curated by young people at Tate Britain, MOSTYN, Tate Liverpool and Kettle’s Yard & Wysing Arts Centre with support and collaboration across partner organisations. The programme produced a wide range of events from film, pop-up shops and dance that symbolise and resonate with young people’s cultural experiences.
One of the participating galleries, the Whitworth in Manchester, reopened in February 2015 after extensive refurbishment. Young people featured prominently in a weekend celebration of culture in the city. The gallery’s young people’s group, Whitworth Young Contemporaries, devised and delivered events including ‘Whitworth on Fire’ in collaboration with Manchester Hip Hop Collective ‘The Mouse Outfit’, featuring live music and an immersive digital film projection.
Circuit has established partnerships with the youth sector at a time when youth provision has been cut dramatically, and has demonstrated significant impact upon cognitive, social and emotional benefits for young people.
paul hamlyn club awards
An access and audience development scheme for hard-to-reach people who do not attend live performing arts events
£25,617 in 2014/15
This five-year scheme was established in 2013 with the announcement of five ‘Paul Hamlyn Club Awards’ as part of the Foundation’s 25th anniversary.
During its second year, a significant number of new audience members have found their way to the five selected venues – Sherman Cymru (Cardiff), Citizens Theatre (Glasgow), Opera North (Leeds), Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Hall for Cornwall (Truro). All five organisations have established new relationships with a range of audiences – community groups, whole families and young people – and, while it is still early days for most of them, they are starting to see patterns emerging of repeated attendance.
In most cases, the Award recipients have created a single new membership scheme that brings together the various aspects of the offer under one brand name – Sherman 5, Encore (Leeds), Leap into Live Music! (Liverpool) and Hall for Cornwall Community Club. The Citizens Theatre, on the other hand, has decided to extend its existing ticketing scheme, the Gorbals Card, while creating dedicated membership schemes for particular groups, such as the Deaf Theatre Club.
Each organisation sets its own goals and approach, and we seek to play whatever part we can in supporting the ambition and success of these. Representatives from the five organisations convene twice a year to update each other on recent developments and share learning. A lead officer at the Foundation monitors progress, with support from a consultant advisor. We also provide an independent evaluator to offer support to each organisation as required, and facilitate learning across all the groups.