art
MyCake’s morning with AWAD (Association of Women Art Dealers)
Today Marion has been hosting a session in London with AWAD, the Association of Women Art Dealers, AWAD is an international network for women art dealers providing masterclasses, networking opportunities and online resources to members and others in the arts community. Current AWAD members include founder Susan Johnson Mumford and Board Directors Francesca Fiumano and Isobel Beauchamp.
For our session this morning art dealers, gallerists, consultants and independent curators were invited along to hear about the different ways we at MyCake put creative entrepreneurs in control of their finances.
The workshop includes details of how MyCake works for small commercial galleries.
We cover the basics of the system and demonstrate how MyCake can help from bookkeeping tasks, tax and VAT returns, through to business planning. Our workshops are ideal for anyone who is tired of spreadsheets and for those who want to get on top of their finance.
Email us at support@mycake.org to find out more about the sessions that we can deliver for your networking organisation.
For further details on AWAD membership visit their website: http://womenartdealers.org/contact-us/
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Hello Culture – Transforming Culture Through Digital – 22-23 November
The 2-day Hello Culture conference, in Birmingham, will explore how organisations produce, interact, create and engage with cultural experiences and their audiences through digital transformation.The event brings together digital agencies, developers, programmers and arts and cultural institutions to discuss audience development, engagement and collaborations under one roof.
This year’s themes include -
• Transforming Cultural Heritage
• Transforming Cultural Business Models
• Transforming Audience Participation & Engagement
For the full programme and speaker profiles visit the Hello Culture website. Keep an eye on the Hello Culture blog for news and updates.
To book tickets to the event see below:
Book tickets for Hello Culture 2012
Contact us on 0121 200 0910 or email info@hello-culture.co.uk
Join the conversation: @helloculture2012
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Great Blurb books & articles to peruse with a hot toddy
With Blurb the online creative publishing tool, Sarah has put together a series of photo essay books documenting the hidden gems of her visits to the Middle East – a great source of inspiration for those intrigued about this part of the world.
Sarah has also written a fair few articles about the fashion design sector out in the Middle East for the British Council and online platform Not Just A Label, have a browse through her insights below.
Sarah was out in the Middle East at the beginning of the year with the British Council delivering the Start Up to Success Beirut programme and the Start Up to Success programme in Saudi Arabia.
Thus followed a series of inspiring articles about the creative industries in these countries:
The Lebanese Way: Introduction
The Lebanese Way I: Route for Emerging Designers
The Lebanese Way II: Policy & Production
The Arab Market – how fashion fares in the Arab world
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WEAR MIMA
Calling all jewellery fans, fashionistas and lovers of wearable art.
#wearmima went live on http://thespace.org the Arts Council England and BBC’s new digital arts channel on Monday 23 July with a cast of interesting people wearing and talking about jewellery from mima’s collection.
The Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art (mima) is behind this innovative way to showcase its own designer jewellery collection. Featuring the work of Atelier Ted Noten, Marga Staartjes, Hans Stofer, Otto Künzli, Felieke Van der Leest, Karl Fritsch, Willem Honing, Gijs Bakker, Sigurd Bronger, Alexander Blank, Marjorie Schick.
Follow the project on twitter #wearmima
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Benchmarking come rain or shine
What a week! Two umbrellas down, soggy trousers and don’t get me started on this weather’s potential to wreak havoc with everybody’s hair. Alas we must soldier on and here at MyCake home of the Culture Benchmark we are announcing the dates for a series of free half day workshops that will boost your benchmarking skills and ignite in you a passion for your organisation’s data.
Culture Benchmark free workshops
We are offering a set of benchmarking workshops across England for current Culture Benchmark, RFO Benchmark, MMM Re.volution peers and any other non-profit arts organisation who wishes to explore the benefits of benchmarking.
Benchmarking has gained quite a bit of press coverage over the last few months and an increasing number of arts organisations are starting to explore how it can benefit their strategy and development planning. As a leading provider of benchmarking services to the non-profit arts sector MyCake is offering a set of free workshops across England to provide the opportunity to ask questions, start benchmarking and, for those already benchmarking, to improve your benchmarking skills.
Who would benefit from attending?
Existing Culture Benchmark and RFO Benchmark subscribers who wish to develop further skills in interpreting the results, setting up bespoke filters & scenarios and who wish to develop their thinking about the external advocacy and internal strategy uses of benchmark data.
MMM Re.volution peers who want to work more closely with MyCake on both entering the evaluation data and gaining the benefits of the organisational benchmarking that they now have six months of access to.
Organisations who participate in one or more clusters or are members of sector bodies such as the ITC, VAGA etc. MyCake has developed bespoke group analysis for a number of clusters over the last year and this enables members to compare their activities to their immediate peers and for the group to develop evidence for advocacy activities for the group as a whole.
Any arts organisation whose business model is going through significant change in the light of funding cuts or changes. Benchmarking enables these organisations not simply to compare their past achievements against the sector norms but to compare their assumptions of their future business model against the best in class e.g. for the percentage of income achieved from private giving of individual donations or sponsorship.
What will the workshop cover?
This set of half day workshops will provide a brief introduction to the principles of benchmarking and the products and services offered by MyCake before moving into a highly participatory approach designed to get you benchmarking and gaining the benefits from it within the workshop itself.
You will need to bring a laptop plus a couple of years of management accounts data (annual) and (if appropriate) RFO survey data (the stats part you provided to ACE) and we will provide wi fi access so that you can benchmark your organisation on the day.
After the workshop you will continue to have access to the free products that MyCake provides but only subscribers will have access to the paid for services. All participating organisations will also be able to book a one hour telephone conversation with Sarah Thelwall (MyCake founder) to discuss the results and ongoing uses of benchmarking in their organisation.
Workshop dates:
Places on these workshops are limited to 20 per session and your free place can be booked via our eventbrite page – http://mycakeculturebenchmark.eventbrite.co.uk/
Any no-shows will be charged £100 + VAT … we anticipate high demand and need to discourage that bad habit of booking to reserve a free place but without prioritising it in your diary!
• Manchester – 19 June
• Newcastle – 21 June
• Birmingham – 26 June
• London – 2 July
Comments from current benchmarking workshop participants:
“The development of MyCake’s benchmarking is essential to intelligently and coherently demonstrate the strength of the arts sector as a valid industry/sector; creatively and economically.??For small organisations, it offers a comprehensive approach to enable us to describe our effectiveness without compromising our trajectory, commitment to our ethics, processes, and outputs.
MyCake’s benchmarking will enable us to challenge misconceptions of the importance of the arts in a growing climate of austerity and conservative thinking.”
Sandra Hall, Co-Director
Friction Arts, Birmingham UK
“Sarah is working with a cluster of Birmingham’s independent arts companies to help us articulate the cultural, social and economic impact of what we do. She is using a variety of approaches, resources and skills to enable us to do this. Some tools are tangible, such as the My Cake Culture Benchmark system: the most fun and interest I have had comparing figures and interpreting their messages.
Other tools are less tangible but no less effective: Sarah’s approach has kept a diverse, challenged and challenging group of companies working together to find our common successes and ways of sharing them. It is to her enormous credit that she has facilitated this group with enormous skill and sensitivity. This has contributed to this group beginning to find it’s statistics, stories and voice.”
Noel Dunne, Director of Creative Alliance and co-chair of the Birmingham Independent Arts Sector Group
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Spring clean and reflection – Esther Sabetpour
A personal account and guest article from MyCake subscriber Esther Sabetpour.
I feel Spring is truly on the way, so in anticipation of the season I have been sprucing up my wedding website http://www.weddingsbyesther.com/
It brought back so many good memories and inspirations while editing my photos for a fresh selection of work for people to browse through. I’ve also been doing some updates to my personal site by adding two new galleries http://www.esthersabetpour.com/recovery-2.html
My latest news is about my current art project “Body Work”.
After an accidental, near death electrocution in Spain, when I sustained severe 4th degree burns and had a 15 meter fall, I awoke in hospital. I had complete amnesia of the event and had a series of emergency operations. I was in an isolated burns unit for 3 months. I began to photograph myself in a similar unit in the UK from November 2010.
My journey of recovery from this accident is told from the position of an invalid, burns survivor and life model. This is an exploration of self-image, identity and beauty for the purpose of emotional recovery. Self-image and identity have been the core themes of my self-portraiture work that dates back to 1997.
Locations in Iran, USA, Italy and the Grand Hall exhibition space in Parc Des Ateliers in Arles, amongst others, were places that inspired me to take self-portraits in. Finding my mind and body in such unfamiliar states brought home the desire to connect with the trauma, to delve into the effects of a life-changing experience.
These locations reflect the texture, isolation and empty landscapes which tell of my actual physical and emotional story. Self-image is an internal dialogue, expressed outwardly by my body in its environment, representing my psychological and physical journey. The gallery setting in Arles inspired me to explore the notion of my scarred body as art its self.
I have just begun my personal blog by uploading a selection of photos from a January 2012 trip to the Salton Sea – California. My blog can be found here http://esthersabetpour.wordpress.com/
It is currently a challenge for me to balance the wedding work with my personal creative art work in my life at the moment. As my personal artwork has become a means of aiding my recovery and discovering myself. At this new place in my life – I am drawn in deeper into the project month by month.
MyCake has been a blessing on the organisation side of things during these tough times! Having the support has been both practical and encouraging – Thank you to all in the MyCake team!
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Cockpit Arts Announces New Growth Loan Fund in Partnership with Ingenious
A new Growth Loan Fund is to be launched this month by Cockpit Arts in partnership with Ingenious, an investment and advisory group renowned for their work in Media & Entertainment. Cockpit Arts is an award winning Social Enterprise and the fund aims to support the growth of independent craft businesses based at its London incubators.
The Cockpit Arts & Ingenious Growth Loan Fund will provide low interest loans, coupled with intensive one to one business support to studio holders at Cockpit Arts, the UK’s only creative incubator for designer makers. Talented, ambitious designers and artisans from a broad range of disciplines including ceramics, printing, glass, jewellery, millinery, shoemaking, couture fashion and textiles will be eligible to apply.
Loans of up to £10,000 can be accessed to support developments such as improved production processes, new routes to market and taking on staff. In each case, the loans support the owner-manager to create a more sustainable business, capable of economies of scale and increased profits as the business continues to grow and develop.
The new fund comes after a successful 3 year pilot loan scheme supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. The pilot loan scheme achieved zero bad debt and loan recipients have reported an average increase in turnover of 28%, and an average increase in profits of 75%. A Social Return on Investment (SROI) approach was used to understand the wider impacts of the pilot and demonstrate the value created by the programme. The full report can be downloaded at www.cockpitarts.com.
Vanessa Swann, CEO of Cockpit Arts says: “The partnership with Ingenious will enable Cockpit to provide affordable loan finance, allied with tailored, one to one business development support for another five years. It’s a unique aspect of our incubation package and we’re thrilled to be working with Ingenious to deliver it.”.
Patrick McKenna, CEO of Ingenious, welcomed the new partnership with Cockpit Arts. “I am delighted that we are going to be able to help Cockpit to carry on providing growth finance as part of its successful package of support to growing craft businesses.”
“High quality, design-led crafts are an increasingly sought after element in the wider UK creative industries’ landscape. Cockpit provides a model template for nurturing young businesses in this sector”, he added, “and I’m glad to be associated with their organisation”.
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Connecting the Arts in Baku to their peers in the UK
In the course of conversations over the last couple of days I’ve been asked various questions about where to find a variety of resources so I thought I’d do a short post with signposts to a few that folks might find useful and with luck the regular readers of the MyCake blog will add a few ideas of their own. So a quick Q&A session:
Q – is there a list of all the UK venues (performing arts particularly)
A – well I’ve not come across a comprehensive list but my suggestions would be to scan the list of organisations who have been RFO’s or are now part of the national portfolio. Theatre Bristol’s directory is also an excellent source of information on this sort of thing
Q – I want to find out more about film sector skills training and film distribution in the UK where should I look?
A – For the skills training definitely start with SkillSet and as I know we’re talking about distribution of Azerbaijani films then I’d say becoming familiar with the digital cinema network and the activities of the British Film Institute and Creative England would be good places to start. The Cinema Exhibitors Association might also be worth a look.
Q – What resources and networks should we connect to in the UK to be kept in the loop on the subject of innovations in museums?
A – Many professionals in the arts in the UK subscribe to a weekly publication called Arts Professional. There is an online version as well as a print version. The Museum’s Association is also useful (again it has a magazine in both print and online versions) and their annual conference is a good opportunity to not only attend presentations and talks but to meet many of the key suppliers in the trade fair section.
For resources and connections in Scotland your first port of call should be Creative Scotland as they cover both film and the arts.
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Notes on State of the Arts event #sota12
Sarah and Lauren from MyCake had a trip up to Manchester this week to attend the Arts Council England (ACE) State of the Arts conference or #sota12 as it is lovingly known on twitter.
If you missed the proceedings there is lots of information to sift through on the blog that was updated live from the conference and there’s also the Arts Council’s official State of the Arts 2012 webpage.
Image: The Big Issues panel feedback from the morning debates at the start of the afternoon section.
With just over 550 people in attendance at the event we were all geared up for networking and starting up interesting and challenging discussions with everyone that we could physically get round to. It turned out that a jam packed schedule of policy talk only allowed for a modest amount of networking to say the least. We did meet some great people however.
Best of all was the fact that during the Keynote panel discussion: 2012 and then what? which was chaired by the firm but fair journalist and broadcaster Kirsty Wark, David Edgar brought up the issue that there are certain items of data that Arts Council England no longer measure, he wanted to know why as these facts have not lost their importance to the sector. Liz Forgan, Chair of Arts Council England then went on to say that ACE does collect a lot of data but this does not get used creatively or even at all in most cases! ‘There is too much of an emphasis on a universal approach to data collecting it is not targeted enough’, she commented. A comment from the audience came in about the myriad of apps that are available now where you can upload data of almost any kind and generate a creative expression of it whether it be audio, visual or otherwise. These comments really affirm what we are setting out to do here at MyCake.
We say that all this public data should be opened up similar to the approach we are taking here at MyCake with the Culture Benchmark‘s new Charity Benchmark tool launching on 28th February. See our post What will the Charity Benchmark offer to the arts?
Sessions we attended were on the themes of ‘Artists and fundraising‘ and ‘Artists and the creative economy‘ – a few insights arose from discussions such as the benefit of producing a range of tools for your Board of Non-exec Directors to use in advocacy to include short videos hosted online or a marketing pack they can distribute. But we didn’t feel there was anything new bobbing to the surface – we confirmed that small arts organisations are going to find the current emphasis and focus on securing donations from private individuals as a tough call due to current and past trends showing a decline in this area drawn from data that already exists.
Generally the call was for the integrity of the art to be the focus in all these musings and rumenations and that artists and the conference in general needed a more autonomous voice.
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Reviewing the networks of Birmingham’s independent arts organisations
HONK! IF YOU ? CONTEMPORARY ART, by Cheryl Jones, Nathaniel Pitt, and Matt Westbrook. Courtesy of Grand Union, Eastside Projects and PITT Projects.
We’ve recently been reviewing the networks of Birmingham’s independent arts organisations. Last Thursday saw the second workshop with the Birmingham Independent Arts Forum. Following on from the benchmarking workshop in October 2011 this workshop looked not at the quantitative but at the qualitative aspects of small arts organisations. In particular we reviewed the great breadth and depth of working relationships that organisations such as Big Brum, Craftspace, Creative Alliance, Eastside Projects, Playhouse and Women in Theatre establish and maintain in order to deliver their programme.
It swiftly became clear how diverse and complex these relationships are. Their flexibility is based on mutual trust and an in depth understanding of the needs of each organisation. This enables a single relationship to develop to deliver multiple strands of activity over a long period of time; for funding to be channeled through either or both parties depending on the circumstances of the project and for an open and ongoing channel of communication to be maintained both during and between projects.
In some senses the small number of employees in such organisations helps the development of relationships … no silos or departments to lead to Chinese whispers and easy access to directors for rapid decision making.
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