£200k awarded to support artists’ legacies

£200k has been awarded to 33 artists and estates to safeguard their legacies through the first round of Art360, a three-year project launched by the DACS Foundation.

Each of the recipients will receive up to £6k to obtain technical services and advice that suit their particular legacy needs. They will also take part in an interview directed by filmmaker David Bickerstaff.

The 26 successful applicants, including Eva Rothschild, Angela de la Cruz and the Peter de Francia Estate, join seven artists already taking part in Art360’s pilot phase. Their artistic practices range from photography and sculpture to performance and site-specific art.

Legacy challenges

The project organisers hope that tackling the varying legacy planning challenges facing each applicant will have a “resounding effect” on future generations of artists directing their own legacies.

The challenges facing artists and estates include:

• How works and materials should be handled and stored.
• How to preserve cultural identity and snapshots of history and activism.
• How to protect legacies on different ends of the archive management spectrum, such as analogue collections of slides and drawings, and unseen or unavailable works outside the public domain.

The project is supported with public funding through Arts Council England’s Grants for the Arts programme. It draws together organisations including The Art Fund, DACS, The Henry Moore Foundation and The National Archives.

Artists Thomson & Craighead, members of the Art360 selection panel, said: “It was clear from the consistent high quality and range of applications this year, what a great need there is to help artists make their archives sustainable, whether it is bolstering the early life of an artist’s estate or using the process of archiving itself to help fix an ephemeral practice.”

Peter Heslip, Director, Visual Arts for Arts Council England, said: “It is vital not only to preserve the physical and intellectual contents of these artists’ archives but to empower them to be author of their own legacies. It should leave us all the richer.”

Art360 plans to invest in 100 artists and estates over the three-year project. The application process will open again in 2017 and 2018.