ONLINE Playing Up: Strategies for Artists’ Livelihoods

The Covid19 pandemic has laid bare existing structural barriers, misassumptions about artists’ practice, and the precarious situation many find themselves in as they try to navigate an arts ecology which too often puts buildings and organisations at the top, and artists at the bottom.

Join us at STEAMhouse for a presentation and interactive discussion, led by Susan Jones, exploring the conditions that help and hinder artists’ ability to get ahead, rather than just scrape by, and to sustain livelihoods through their art practices over a life-cycle.

Our Workshop Leader

Dr Susan Jones is an independent arts researcher and commentator with specialist insight and evidence of artists’ livelihoods and arts policy matters.

Her writing has appeared in Arts Professional, Art Review, Corridor 8, Sluice, Engage Journal, The Guardian, TransArtists, a-n The Artists Information Company, Thames and Hudson, the Cultural Value Initiative and CVAN (Contemporary Visual Arts Network).

She contributes to discourse within UK and international peer networks and to conferences and symposia including Another Artworld: Manifestations and Conditions of Equity in Visual Arts (2020), What we don’t talk about when we talk about the artist-led ERS/LJMU (2020), WTF symposium Creative Factory Middlesbrough (2018), ELIA NXT Making a living in the arts (2017), VASW (2016) and Warwick University Cultural Values Initiative (2013).

Her doctoral thesis Artists livelihoods: the artists in arts policy conundrum, Manchester Metropolitan University 2015-2019, exposed baseline flaws in the interrelationship between arts policies and artists’ livelihoods over the last 30 years and articulated a unique new rationale to better support artists to pursue livelihoods through art practices in future.