Collaborative Curation

‘The Creative Case for Diversity is a way of exploring how arts and cultural organisations and artists can enrich the work they do by embracing a wide range of influences and practices. [We] believe that embracing the Creative Case helps arts and cultural organisations not only enrich their work, but also address other challenges and opportunities in audience development, public engagement, workforce and leadership, and collections development in museums.’

Arts Council England, Creative Case for Diversity

https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/diversity/creative-case-diversity

Helix Arts’ pledged an early commitment to Art Council England’s Creative Case for Diversity and undertook a piece of research in 2016 with external partners to:

• develop a greater understanding of how to help participants with learning disabilities to showcase their work with others
• to build and create new audiences for the work made by this group

During our bursary period we worked with:

• People with learning disabilities who make art
• Artists working in socially-engaged practice
• Curators
• Cultural programmers
• People from commercial creative industries

This included Tin Arts, Twisting Ducks Theatre Company and Novak.

We discovered the many different ways people with learning disabilities want to make art. We also investigated what to consider as the ideal features if we were to develop work for large audiences for our participants’ art work.

Findings were presented at a National conference which in summary focused on; intention, context and quality are key factors when it comes to the dissemination of artwork and these have a major impact upon the opportunities available for people with learning disabilities to make and share artwork.