Welcome to the new website for the St Hugh’s Foundation for the Arts! Let us begin by telling you a little bit about how we got here.
In July 2014, the Foundation underwent some major changes in terms of our team. Our former Chair Clive Fox and Administrator Julia Fox both stood down, having worked tirelessly for the Foundation since its inception, along with long-standing Trustee Ann Turner. At this moment of transition, and in the year in which we awarded our 100th and 101st Arts Awards to Gyoko Taiko and Sarah Daniels, it seemed pertinent to take stock of the work we were doing, to look again at the Foundation’s guiding objectives, and to check that we were delivering those objectives in a way that was responsive to the needs of artists and arts organisations in our area. So we decided not to offer an Arts Award in 2015, and instead to take some time to think about our future.
In talking about our aspirations for the Foundation, several key themes emerged. Trustees agreed unanimously that we wanted to be artist-led, to support artists of all disciplines at all stages of their practice and to support work of the highest quality. We talked about what we wanted to see in future applications to the Foundation and came up with words and phrases like ‘ambition’, ‘quality of concept’, ‘independence of mind’, ‘intellectual underpinning’ and ‘awareness of context’. We also wanted more people to know about us, and therefore to increase the number of high-calibre applications we received and the profile of our Award scheme in the future.
It was incredibly useful to have the opportunity to think about our unique offer as a Foundation; to step back from patterns of business with which we had all become familiar and to question what we could do better in order to be able to respond to artists in our area. Having gone through this process, we started taking a few steps in a new direction.
We commissioned Lincoln-based design agency Optima to work with us to create a new website that would more clearly reflect what we do. We began moving our Trustee meetings around the geographical area we were established to support so that we could start to engage with the arts venues within that area and learn about the great work they were doing. We started to develop a pilot workshop scheme which will enable us to offer professional development support to a greater number of individuals than we are able to work with through our Award scheme, also providing a forum for us to enter into dialogue with local artists. We also set in motion a review of our Awards programme (which will be re-launched in January 2016). In particular we want to revisit the idea of inviting our Award holders to become ‘Fellows’ of the St Hugh’s Foundation for the Arts, therefore beginning to build a network of exceptional artists who would engage with the activities of the Foundation longer term, potentially working as mentors to future Award recipients or delivering workshops for the Foundation where this was appropriate.
Here you can begin to see our first steps in a new direction for the Foundation. Working with Optima we have worked to create a site that allows much more space to share news about and images of the work we support. Take a look around and let us know what you think!