‘Revolutionary’ employment scheme for artists launches

Four artists will be paid £30,000 a year with no prescribed targets as part of an initiative designed to counter precarity and provide stability for people working in the industry.

Gloucester-based Strike A Light, a National Portfolio Organisation (NPO), will provide a salary for the creatives for 2.5 years to enable them to "just be artists".

The Let Artists Be Artists (LABA) initiative is being funded by an uplift funding from Arts Council England. For the 2023-26 period, the NPO will receive £250,000 a year – nearly three times the £85,000 a year it received for the 2018-22 period.

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The initiative launches as early findings of Ireland's Basic Income for Artists scheme, which provides no-strings funding of €325 a week* – just under €17,000 a year – to 2,000 artists over three years, have been reported.

Unlike the scheme in Ireland, where payments are treated as earnings from self-employment for taxation purposes, the LABA inititiative sees the artists paid as employees of Strike A Light through PAYE.

Rethinking support for artists

Lynette Dakin, Executive Director of Strike A Light, said she wants to "challenge entrenched systems and consider new ways of working".

"LABA is about rethinking how artists are supported and, even more broadly, how we can support people without pressure or preconceived outcomes, without hoop-jumping; in ways that make it clear that people’s value is not the same thing as their ‘productivity’.

"We are hugely grateful to the Arts Council who awarded us an uplift in our NPO to support this work. The majority of our uplift went directly to the salaries of these artists.

"We look forward to sharing the findings of this work with them and the wider sector to support and advocate for a step-change in how artists are supported.”

Strike A Light focuses on bringing arts and culture to people within community spaces. Previous projects have included a live dance performance on a moving train, a parkour and acrobatics flashmob in a public square, a streetdance takeover of a sports hall, as well as youth theatre performances.

'Revolutionary scheme'

The four artists being funded through the initiative are Munotida Chinyanga, Viv Gordon, Ed Patrick and Jamaal O’Driscoll.

Patrick, also known as 'Kid Carpet' is a musician, video and theatre maker. "Let Artists Be Artists is a brilliant and revolutionary scheme which recognises and values artists," he said.

"It begins to normalise the haphazard area where art meets economics and salaries.

"Getting appointed to this opportunity/award/scheme/job will enable me to develop my practice, increasing the scale of work that I can offer in primary schools and get some mind-blowing, transformative, co-creative kids projects off the ground."

*This article was updated on 15 December to amend this figure to €325 a week, rather than a month as was previously stated.