Artes Mundi, the international visual art organisation based in Cardiff, gives the UK’s largest art prize - first awarded in 2003 - with a biennial exhibition to go with it. Next year it celebrates its 20th birthday, and in its first two decades it has developed partnerships, collaborations and commissions. Its director since 2019 has been Nigel Prince who was previously the executive director of the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver.
Diversity isn’t just for people, it extends to the plant kingdom too and a soon to be published study shows that three-quarters of the plants in our city gardens are non-native. Next year Birmingham’s Victoria Square will be given over to PoliNations, a celebration of horticultural as well as human diversity which is commissioned as part of UNBOXED, next year’s festival of the UK’s creativity marking the Queen’s platinum jubilee. Its creative director is Angie Bual, artistic director of the Bristol based arts organisation Trigger which makes outdoor and site specific live theatre.
Social media have become essential to arts organisations, says a new report, and often rely on underpaid and under-resourced operators. Alice Kent of the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre asks what can professional networks, industry, funders and policy-makers do to ensure that digital workers are better supported
On November 5 the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama launches Opera 360, an MA course designed to develop and nurture a passion for opera in music students and through them the wider public. Its leader is James Lea
Ten years ago Margate was the forgotten seaside resort. Its shops were boarded up, its arcades closed, its inhabitants complaining about the influx of supposedly illegal immigrants. Then they built an art gallery on the seafront. Simon Tait finds out what happened next
Marsden is not one of those places whose name resonates in the annals of the arts world. Indeed, for many people travelling by train from Leeds to Manchester it’s no more than the briefly witnessed name of a station as your carriage whizzes past (though perhaps “whiz” is the wrong verb in the context of a journey that takes the best part of two hours to traverse a distance of just over 43 miles).
As the cultural sector works at recovering from the effects of the coronavirus emergency, we urgently need to address exclusion and inequality. However, interior design is falling behind the rest of the creative industries, says Stella Gittins, co-founder and group director of The Accouter Group of Companies interior design consultants, which the government as well as the industry itself needs to address
Opera Rara, the company that rediscovers, restores, records and performs lost operatic masterpieces, is reviving Ruggero Leoncavallo’s second most popular opera (after Pagliacci), Zingari, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the Cadogan Hall in December. It will be conducted by Carlo Rizzi, the former music director of Welsh National Opera and Opera Rara’s artistic director since 2019.
In 2019 Waltham Forest was the first of mayor Sadiq Khan’s London Boroughs of Culture. Lorna Lee, assistant director of culture at Waltham Forest Council, shows how the structure built then helped its communities through the pandemic
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