MA Week 30 - Funding and working internationally

Funding and working internationally – 3^rd June 2016

Sharon and Annabeth presented this session on the topic of gaining funding and working internationally.

Working internationally is a bit beyond me at the moment but there were a couple of things that might be within my reach. The first is using social media. I have a few international followers. Could I gain more? I’ve certainly gained more UK-wide coverage over the first year of the course. The second would be to attend local conferences with international speakers. So far I haven’t seen any likely opportunities for this, but that doesn’t mean to say there aren’t (or won’t be) any.

Some pointers on funding:

• Think like you have the funding! – continue your practice and keep searching for the funding.
• Look for opportunities for collaborations/art in the community
• Can you get sponsorship from companies? Perhaps put their logo on your project? (reciprocality).
• Assess the impact of your work to help with funding applications. Can you use a comments book or a form of social media to do this?
• Collaborate with others to gain expertise – join with them on funding applications. Join Leeds Creative Timebank?

Funders

• Craft Council – have a look at this every month
• Fenton Arts Trust
• The Arts House Wakefield produce info re pots of money
• Ideas Tap
• Leeds City Council – Arts Development
• Leeds Inspired – promote your event through this, e.g. if you’re doing a pop-up show

Match Funders

• National Heritage Lottery Fund (could be of interest to me?) - Can you do something round an anniversary, or an oral history?
• Wellcome Trust – would be good to visit theme
• Leverhulme Trust – will fund artist in residence in a University department

Crowdfunding – Artsfund, Indiegogo, Kickstarter - be careful, you may not get any of the funding! The project has to be partly up and running to stand a chance of success.

Not sure if any of these are relevant to me at the moment – but documented here for future reference!

MA Week 29 - some inspiration from Lesley Sutton

Visiting practitioner : Lesley Sutton (www.lesleysutton.co.uk)

27^th May 2016

Lesley has been an artist/curator for 16 years and during that time she has made plenty of opportunities for herself. A really fascinating and inspiring talk.

She started by stating that “art has to make sense to your audience” – this helps them to connect, so observing current life can provide rich source material for this. This can move out into working with and in the community. “You    ->    Art    ->    Other” – what a simple and excellent way of envisaging it. Her art stems from herself, and so does mine. How can I open up my pylons and wanderings to others? Not sure yet… not sure if I’m ready to do it yet.

Lesley herself had realised that her practice was moving into the community and undertook a Community practice course at Staffordhsire University. From this she learnt the idea of “Social Capital”: trust, co-operation, cohesion – producing items for the common good. She articulated three types of social capital, and stressed the need to “tick box” all these criteria when applying for funding: 

• Bonding – close ties, family, friends.
• Bridging – loose friendships, clubs etc – people with whom you share a certain context
• Linking – reaching out to unlike people, vulnerable, excluded – these are the groups that funders really want to reach because working together increases our understanding of each other.

Lesley had previously decided to undertake a residency at Norton Priory Museum for her degree final project. She undertook this like a piece of business planning (so I could do this… I just need the artwork to go with it!) – working out how she could be an asset to them. She investigated the place and its history and sent them a proposal, which they accepted. Her advice was to consider what space might show your work and what boxes need to be ticked to get it in there. Research the space, approach half a dozen spaces, and be persistent!

She subsequently moved on to work with local galleries and local communities, all the time using the same idea of thinking how she could be, or produce, an asset to the gallery or community. For example, she produced some ephemeral garments which depicted fear or constriction. But she wanted to use these garments to tell people’s stories of child abuse. However the gallery saw this as too risky and difficult and was not interested in the proposal. This didn’t put her off, though, and she has had many successes since. One such example was “Stories of Cloth”, looking at the role of cloth in our lives. This brought together six communities, not all of whom could speak English, to explore a shared human condition and to understand one another – so, “life histories” in Bathmaker’s terms. Bringing together isolated communities and also women-only ticked boxes! This was a successful exhibition and it opened doors for her. She had lots of similar examples to this. Working with the community isn’t always easy though. There may be a tension between what the community wants to do and what the artist is being funded to do. Unsurprisingly, Lesley also had examples of this.

She commented that if you are curating, you need to know the space and how to direct visitors around. What do you want them to know? How are you telling your story? An interesting idea of narrative… so could I join with someone else for an exhibition and our narratives could complement and strengthen each other? That would be something to think about. She also mentioned the idea of the gallery as a vessel for other people’s memories. How do I plug into this? I don’t know yet, but again it ties in with the idea of opening up your art to others, as she’d mentioned earlier.

Lesly’s latest exhibition was a Lent and Easter mindfulness exhibition, “Be Still”, in various bigger Manchester venues (Cathedral etc) with some big name artists. Through her persistence and her excellence in her work, she has become quite a big name in the Manchester art scene. She is clearly a gifted women with a good deal of drive, but also a good deal of grace, and her story of making it happen was inspirational. I could see how she had done it, though whether I could do it is another matter. Perhaps by starting with small steps?

 

 

MA Week 7 - facts and figures

Some relevant facts and figures

 

Bob & Roberta Smith discussing the value of the arts to the economy
at Creative Networks Event, Leeds College of Art, May 2015

As part of my research for my “Professional Context” presentation, I’ve been looking at what the “Creative industries” actually comprise and how much they give to the economy.

Origins of the term “Creative Industries”

The term “Creative Industries” actually comes from the government of Tony Blair. This government identified these industries as important to the economy, and brought 13 sectors together under the umbrella of “Creative Industries”. Digital technologies were seen as a particularly important facet. The approach combined “new labour” modernisation with some “old labour” cities. Blair wanted to find a concept in which the UK could still be identified as a world leader in the UK’s post-industrial age. However, some of the traditional Labour-held cities had already moved culture to a central part of their economy once traditional industries had declined. Sheffield and Manchester are examples of this (interestingly, Leeds isn’t mentioned – but here we moved to a financial sector economy). The concept of Creative Industries was exported to other countries and is seen as a successful marketing exercise for the UK. (Flew, 2012, pp9-15)

USA

I chose to look at the USA because their cultural capital is so large. America boomed post-war and their culture now permeates the whole of Western culture, and possibly (probably?) world culture. Think of American movies, music, fashion, food. Yet in spite of this they have no national creative industries policy. Some funding is available via the National Endowment for the Arts but the sector is strongly reliant upon private philanthropy. Another factor is the strength and power of the commercial entertainment sector (Flew, 2012, p 40). However, the NEA, established by congress in 1956, does partner with the state and federal agencies and the philanthropic sector to support and promote access to arts and culture for all Americans (National Endowment for the Arts (1), n.d.). It awards grants to organisations which meet its aims up to the value of tens of thousands of dollars (National Endowment for the Arts (2), n.d.).

Despite no national creative industries policy, Flew (2012, pp 40-41) identifies the expansion of cultural activity in some American cities as the idea of arts and entertainment quarters aimed at attracting creative practitioners to live and work in the city. Flew quotes a text by Florida which influenced urban policy and cultural planning to take up the idea of “creativity strategies”. This meant that city planners began to actively seek to promote the “three T’s” of technology, talent and tolerance to cause creative practitioners to work, live and contribute to the economy of their city. Seattle, Austin and Boston are amongst examples quoted of cities with strong, dynamic creative economies.

The US does have an organisation that lobbies on behalf of the arts, “Americans for the Arts”. Their aim is to lead and to bring together organisations and individuals who promte and support the arts such that all and any Americans can access culture and the arts. Any individual can join and their website is full of information about how to lobby for the good of the Arts.

The US definition of creative industries does not include the commercial entertainment sector (Flew, 2012, p 39). However, the industry is still healthy. According the the NEA,

(National Endowment for the Arts (3), n.d.), in 2014 the creative industries sector was worth $698bn (£459bn), equivalent to 4.3% GDP.

 

Italy

Italy is clearly another country whose culture has had a profound effect on the world. Think Italian couture, Roman Catholic church, Roman monuments, Renaissance artists.

Traditionally there has been public funding for heritage, music, theatre and the like, initially provided centrally, but more recently provided less centrally and more via the regions and local authorities (Compendium, 2015, (1) & (2)). However, with the pressure on public finances, the state has increasingly turned to the private sector for help. This has resulted in sponsorship of renovations by private companies. For example, the luxury leather goods manufacturer Tod’s has given £20m for the restoration of the Colosseum. This gives them the right to have their logo on the tickets for a period of time, and to associate the Colosseum with their branding. This engagement with the private sector has yielded funding for a variety of projects (Fendi are sponsoring the Trevi Fountain restoration, for example), but also friction as there is a view that Italy is simply selling its massive cultural heritage to the highest bidder. A further complication is the active solicitation of foreign sponsorship, e.g. “a preliminary agreement with Saudi Arabia to fund the restoration of the Mausoleum of Augustus” (Faiola,2014).

The Italian creative industries sector figures for 2011 show it adding €95bn to the economy, about 6% of GDP (Forum D’Avignon and Tera Consultants (2014); Italian National Institute of Statistics (2012)), but I don’t have a further breakdown of this. However, it seems healthy in its own right.

 

UK

The UK has also given its culture to the world: the British Empire, Beatlemania, Britpop….

Centralised funding comes from the Department for Culture, Media and Sports via Arts Council England (for England, at least). ACE’s mission is “Great Art and Culture for everyone” (Arts Council England (1), n.d.); they support organisations that facilitate public access to arts and culture of different genres – music, art, theatre, museums etc. The latest funding round shows a significant cut : for 2012-15, ACE distributed £1.4bn of public money and £1bn of National Lottery money. For 2015-18, the figures are £1.1bn of public money and £700m National Lottery (Arts Council England (2), n.d.).

To quote Dr. Ben Walmsley of the University of Leeds, “Art fundraising is in an exciting state of flux. Are we ready for change?” (Walmsley, 2015). Whether we are ready or not seems irrelevant as change is what is happening.  Walmsley goes on to say that arts organisations need to “stop appearing to be needy” and to become embedded in their communities. In other words, they need to get business savvy PDQ. In fact, ACE has inaugurated the “Arts Fundraising and Philanthropy” programme to “transform funding” (Arts Fundraising and Philanthropy (n.d.)) and to “develop an enterprising culture in which income generation is placed at the heart of an arts organisation’s business model and ethos” (ibid).

All this said, the UK creative industries sector is still doing well, generating £76.9bn of value equivalent to 5%GDP. I was quite surprised to find out that 46% of this is from software and games – a sector that didn’t really exist 30 or 40 years ago - and only about 7% from music, arts and culture – which is where I would position myself. (The Creative Industries (n.d.))

 

Leeds

Leeds has given some culture to the world – textiles, Hepworth, Moore, the Kaiser Chiefs (??) – and is bidding to become Cultural Capital of Europe in 2023. But the funding situation reflects that of ACE. In 2012-15 Leeds City Council had a funding pot of around £3m per year for the arts. By 2017-18 that will have been cut to around £2.5m per year (Yorkshire Evening Post, 2014). Most of the funding is distributed to arts organisations (Leeds City Council (n.d.)), to allow citizens to access the arts and culture. However, through further investigation I realised they also fund “Leeds Inspired”, which I’d hitherto only known by its website, and they do small grants of £100 - £1000 to individuals to support artistic activities, such as exhibitions. However, you do have to have a track record of delivery. (Leeds Inspired (n.d.))

 

Discussion

This has been quite a time-consuming but interesting investigation. There is a welcome theme of organisations that support the arts in all the places above, showing that even in these times of financial constraint, at least some importance is still attached to the arts. I do think, though, that the situation in Italy – turning to the private sector – is going to be reflected across the piece. The Arts Fundraising and Philanthropy initiative is, I suppose, a necessary evil in England, to ensure that the arts can remain vibrant across the country. I think we will see more and more of this as the Conservative government squeeze public services further. As the “creative industries” was a Labour invention, it will be interesting to see if the Conservatives actively decide to undermine these sectors.

 

The creative industries seem to be holding their own, even growing in the UK. This, again, is welcome news as it implies the sectors are maturing and established. I was a little concerned to see how much the UK sector relies on the Software sector. I’m not sure if the proverbial man on the street would quote software as part of the creative sector. I wonder if its inclusion in the figures obscures the fact that the “traditional” arts sectors are perhaps not doing as well as they might.

Anyway, on the basis that I am unlikely to be applying for funding abroad any time soon, it was interesting to find out about the Leeds Inspired small grant scheme and it does give me a glimmer of hope. I used to write and critique business cases in a previous life so that “transferable skill” may well come in useful again. I think my next steps need to be to continue my networking strategy, to step it up in fact, and to start to get some creative work done. Then I can see where I fit into the  Leeds scene. Aligning myself with one of the established organisations here, say perhaps volunteering for East Street Arts or similar, would seem to be my best bet to get experience which could help me get funding. I need to develop these ideas into more concrete plans as I progress with the course.