Artists Alliance Board says it should close

After more than two decades of supporting visual artists with advocacy and professional development, the Artists Alliance Board is recommending that the organisation close.

While the current Board, Executive and Staff have worked hard to secure a funding model that would enable the Artists Alliance to continue to supply and improve on its core services, the Board has exhausted all available avenues of income to no avail.

We are very proud of our achievements. Artists Alliance has been the only organisation that provides professional development, information, access to free legal information and other vital support services to visual artists in New Zealand, as well as providing an advocacy service on their behalf.

Since 2005 to the present, Artists Alliance has put 69 people through our mentoring programme. We follow their careers with great pride. We acknowledge our great team of mentors.

Since 2011 we have hosted 32 recent graduates on our brokered intern programme, working with organisations such as Auckland Arts Festival, Chartwell Trust, Wallace Arts Trust, McCahon House Trust, Art News, EyeContact and many more. Most recently we have been able to extend this programme to The Physics Room and CoCA in Christchurch. We warmly thank Foundation North and Rata Foundation for their support for these programmes. We are particularly proud of our relationship with Boston University having hosted 15 students as interns since 2006.

Our Volunteer Programme has supported organisations such as Auckland Arts Festival, Objectspace, ArtWeek Auckland, Te Toi Uku, Bowerbank Ninow, Te Tuhi and others, offering industry experience to recent graduates and established workers alike. Some volunteers have gone on to be employed at the organisations for which they volunteered.

Our Boot Camp and Workshop Programmes have provided great professional development opportunities for hundreds of participants.

We have been regularly requested to provide information and professional development support to students at New Zealand’s top art schools, including Elam, Whitecliffe and AUT. We sincerely hope that the art schools can establish a means to continue to provide and even develop these services to their students without our support, as we believe this service is essential.

That all this has been achieved over a time of dramatic decline in funding for and investment in the Visual Arts is a testament to the hard and inventive work of the Executive and staff. We sincerely hope that the work done by Artists Alliance for artists over the last more than twenty years provides the seeds for Version 2.0. in the not too distant future.

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