#arts funding

a_n Professional Development Bursary 2018

I will be travelling to New York during May thanks to a development bursary via a-n: https://www.a-n.co.uk/news/n-artist-bursaries-2018-70-artists-receive-share-65000

The residency will allow me to attend Open Engagement: 

Open Engagement 2018 — SUSTAINABILITY will take place May 11–13, 2018 at the Queens Museum and a constellation of sites across New York City. This year’s conference will feature presenters including Lucy LippardandMel Chin.

Now in its 10th year – the last in its current form – OE will bring together hundreds of artists, activists, educators, students, organizations, institutions, and thinkers from every corner of the globe. This year’s program will explore the theme of SUSTAINABILITY, as well as take stock of the field of socially engaged art.

OE 2018 will feature a selection of focused trainings to provide attendees with tools for more impactful and sensitive creative work anchored in community-building and social justice, as well as opportunities for intimate discussion during our Dinner Conversation Series. In the evenings, femme-fronted, queer-inclusive nightlife organizers will host celebrations, guided by the belief that transformative acts of change are deeply indebted to these marginal spaces of collective joy.

OE is working with partners spanning New York City’s five boroughs to represent the work being done at the intersection of art and activism across the city. Current partners include: A Blade of Grass, American Folk Art Museum, Bad at Sports, Bronx Museum of Art, Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, Community Access Art Collective, Eyebeam, Fourth Arts Block, Interference Archive, International Center of Photography, Knockdown Center, Lesbian Herstory Archives, Maker Park Radio, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York Hall of Science, No Longer Empty, Recess, Social Justice Tours, Studio Museum in Harlem, Swale, Decolonize This Place, Discwoman, Sylvia Rivera Law Project, The 8th Floor, and Visual AIDS.

Research Question: Why is the opportunity provided by this bursary crucial to your artistic and professional development?

It will place within a research-lead, conference-based, international environment the central tenets of my practice over the last 20 years. Namely an exploration into the politics of material values within socio-economic frameworks. I often question financial imperatives, environmental impacts and the disjuncture inherent within our ‘relationship’ between the two.

Attending the conference will offer an unprecedented access to global and local thinkers, to ‘change-agents’ and artist-lead initiatives and to key-note presentations from Lucy Lippard (Feminism, dematerialization, 'cultural amnesia as political strategy’) and Mel Chin (cross-cultural aesthetics, complexity, multi- disciplinarity). 

It will also allow me to question how arts practice can encourage communities, as well as individuals, to critically review their existing ‘visual cognitive strategies’ whilst developing new methodological approaches ‘that dislodge discipline boundaries, override media conventions, and disrupt political interests’ (Sullivan, 2012), whilst also exploring work that shifts the focus from objects to relationships (Capra, 1996, p28). 

You can find out more about the conference here: http://openengagement.info/queens-2018/