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Applications are now open for the Woon Foundation Prize 2019! Entry is free for the UK’s most generous painting and sculpture prize for graduating artists. 1st prize includes a £20k Fellowship inc. studio, with two generous runner-up prizes of £9,000 and £6,000. Presented by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art & Northumbria University. Deadline: 1 April.

Yorkshire & Humber Visual Arts Network (YVAN) and Corridor8 are looking for a critical/creative writer to become part of a conversation about the Yorkshire visual art ecology.

Project Art Works is seeking a freelance fundraiser to join the senior fundraising team on a short term contract.

Working with organisations, photographers, community groups, academics and curators from across the country, the Open Eye Gallery are building a new network to discuss and accelerate the practice of socially engaged photography. In the spirit of social practice, the network will be shaped collaboratively by its users, beginning with a quick survey to gauge how the network can be as useful as it can be. We would appreciate it if anyone interested in joining could take some time to fill it in. The network is open — join below by signing up to the mailing list.

Aspex is looking for a highly motivated and entrepreneurial individual with a passion for working with people, excellent organisational skills and a ‘can do’ attitude to join its committed team. This is a crucial role, with key responsibility to drive income generation through development of venue hire.

Whitstable Biennale is looking to get to know artists who are working in North Kent and support their practice through their Artist Development Programme.

One-Off Moving Festival invite artists and film-makers to participate in this
second edition of One-Off Moving Image Festival! They’re looking for 1
SECOND MOVING IMAGES on the theme of humans vs. nature.

£5m PPL insurance now available with CuratorSpace. £5m Public & Products Liability (PPL) artist insurance provided in association with specialist brokers Hencilla Cansworth is now included with the new CuratorSpace Artist Plus subscription.

The Live Art Development Agency (LADA) is offering two Leadership Bursaries of £10,000 each for artists and/or arts workers from culturally diverse backgrounds (BME: Black and Minority Ethnic) as part of Live Art UK's three-year Diverse Actions programme.

Inviting Artists and Creatives from across the globe to respond to 20 exhibition and event proposals by early career curators. These will come together as the Fringe Arts Bath 2019 Festival programme, a 17 day free festival of contemporary visual arts.

Working with organisations, photographers, community groups, academics and curators from across the country, the Open Eye Gallery are building a new network to discuss and accelerate the practice of socially engaged photography. In the spirit of social practice, the network will be shaped collaboratively by its users, beginning with a quick survey to gauge how the network can be as useful as it can be. We would appreciate it if anyone interested in joining could take some time to fill it in. The network is open — join below by signing up to the mailing list.

Published in January, a new study by TBR commissioned by the Arts Council concludes that portfolio careers are the norm among artists in a visual artists’ constituency clearly dominated by women. Income levels remain unacceptably low overall and artists’ livelihoods are over-reliant on earnings from work other than art practice. Notably, however like their counterparts in other arts professional and creative industry spheres, it is female artists who experience the greatest barriers to sustaining of art practices over a life-time and are earning less from their art practice than males. Read the research reports including Arts Council’s response here. 

Visual Arts South West (VASW) is pleased to announce the appointment of Paula Orrell to the role of Network Manager. Paula will take up the position in April 2019. 

CVAN celebrates the many successes of our strongly embedded regional base delivering fantastic support to arts organisations through our regional networks but we also need to draw together and do more to promote our interests as a sector overall. So through the coming year CVAN will be looking at how we can work better together as a national network, how we innovate, how we engage across sectors and in creative partnerships regionally, nationally, and internationally, and how we promote diversity in the visual arts.

Recently, Alistair Hill, Brighton and Hove City Council’s Director of Public Health, has produced The Art of Good Health, a report that focuses on the contribution that the arts make to the health of the city’s residents. In his foreword he reflects on the question “should we look closer at the role of arts in health?”:

Welcome to the last Director’s blog for 2018 and our very best wishes to CVAN regional networks and the visual arts sector. Time to banish the gloom and spice the wine!

Let's start with a bit of seasonal roundup cheer. The British painter, Jenny Saville, became the most expensive living female artist in October when Propped (1992) sold for £8.25m (£9.5m with fees) at Sotheby's in London according to the 2018 roundup in The Art Newspaper but her success was drowned out by a shredder! Congratulations also to Charlotte Prodger’s Turner Prize-winning exploration of queer identity, language, technology and time. CVAN celebrates our truly stellar female artists and looks forward to a New Year of innovation and diversity in the visual arts and continued international cooperation…

The new MK Gallery, designed by 6a architects, in close collaboration with artists Gareth Jones and Nils Norman, will open on 16 March 2019.

BALTIC is delighted to present the second BALTIC Artists’ Award, a worldwide biennial art award judged solely by artists. Three internationally renowned artist-judges, Lubaina Himid, Michael Rakowitz and Haegue Yang, have each selected an artist who has the opportunity to realise new work which will be seen in this four-month exhibition

Contemporary arts charity, Bedford Creative Arts (BCA) is delighted to announce it has appointed a new Director, Elaine Midgley, to the BCA team.

We've been incredibly busy over the past month - having published our 3-year strategy, we are now working on a new communications strategy likely to include a rebrand and relaunch in 2020. We're also working hard on developing new partnerships, collaborations, and projects to address the many pressing issues facing our sector.

Whilst Governmental bandwidth is obviously hogged by Brexit this month, we have seen the publication of a new Civil Society Strategy and developments in the ongoing quagmire of Higher Education debt and fee levels which are likely to have a specific impact on the creative sector.

As a sector, the visual arts have always been committed to European membership, movement, and collaboration, but we now have very little realistic hope of influencing the government's thinking on migration and freedom of movement and are increasingly concerned about the design of replacement funding structures. CVAN is therefore looking at what we need to do to minimise the impact of Brexit (in whatever form) on the sector as well as supporting campaigns such as Free Move Create…