A new £1.5 million awards scheme has been launched to recognise and celebrate visual art education in the UK, with £100,000 being awarded to three organisations each year for the next five years. The Freelands Foundation announced the award on Monday for recent or ongoing projects demonstrating commitment to progressive art education approaches with demonstrable impact.
The scheme has been developed in response to a prolonged period of underinvestment and neglect of art education infrastructure over the past 15 years. This has included a move away from art subjects in schools, an erosion of art courses at universities, and significant reductions in art education programmes in galleries and museums. Despite increasing pressures from declining funding and rising operational costs, visual arts organisations continue to be important sites of teaching and learning.
Henry Ward, director of the Freelands Foundation, said: 'We wanted to champion organisations that are still managing to do incredible work against the backdrop of 15 years of cuts and anti-art rhetoric.' He added that galleries and museums play a significant role not just within the curriculum and school education, but as resources to educate all of us, working with schools, universities, local communities, artists, prisons, and hospitals.
The award is open to UK-based organisations run with a charitable purpose and offering a consistent public presentation of visual art. The judging panel is chaired by Ward and includes artist Joy Gregory, TV and radio presenter Gemma Cairney, curator and writer Jenni Lomax, and art historian and educator Ben Street. Winners will also collaborate on a case study film to share their work as a resource and inspiration.
The open call for submissions begins on 28 January and closes on 24 March, with the first winners announced at a celebration event in November. The new award replaces the foundation's previous annual award focused on enabling a UK arts organisation to present an exhibition of new work by a mid-career female artist, which ran for eight editions between 2016 and 2023.
