Image via carriageworks.com.au
Lisa Havilah, Director Carriageworks, has garnered a reputation for turning multi-platform organisations into dynamic financial and publically engaged successes, with Carriageworks described as the fastest growing cultural precinct in Australia.
Today she delivered the paper, The next generation of the cultural institution, to a group of arts professionals at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia as part of the Currency House Creativity and Business Breakfast Series.
In the extract below, Havilah reveals her recipe for success: entrepreneurial thinking and new artistic and business models are vital for growing our institutions.
Key points:
- Survival should never be the aim.
- We as a community and as individuals should demand a lot of our institutions.
- Culture in Australia will continue to suffer unless we have a national arts policy.
- Arts and culture needs to be de-institutionalised.
- We need to constantly rethink our management and operating systems to develop new hybrid models of activity and outcomes.
- Our growth has been achieved through taking an expansive notion of collaboration and embedding it across the institution.
- Collaboration has to be considered core business and the commercial and the public must be constantly colliding in new ways.
The next generation of the cultural institution
by Lisa Havilah
The story of Carriageworks is a great one. It was born like all cultural institutions through valiant battles, through triumph and failure.
Carriageworks is a place that is grounded in its context. It is one of the very few cultural institutions in Australia to be imagined and created in this century. Forever tied to now.
(It) is the next generation of cultural institution and one of the fastest growing in Australia. Carriageworks is a step forward from the great sandstone institutions that have come before us. We are red brick, more suburban than civic – an entrepreneurial hybrid, made for generations of workers for us to continue to work.
How has Carriageworks become this hybrid success?
We have through our practice re-thought what a cultural institution is and can be and worked consistently in modelling and implementing an ambitious multi-year strategy that has clarity of purpose.
Our strategy not only asks a lot of us but asks a lot of our artists, collaborators, our partners and our communities.
As a result over the last 4 years:
- Audiences have doubled each year and over 1million people will engage with Carriageworks programs in 2016.
- Our investment into our Artistic Program has grown by 400% and this year we will commission and present over 54 projects supporting more than 850 artists.
- Our earned income has more than doubled and in 2016, Carriageworks is forecast to generate more than $7m in revenue.
So how have we done this? We have:
- Developed and presented of a contemporary multi arts program that commissions and presents work across music, dance, performance and visual arts
- We have implemented an innovative business model in which we entrepreneur 75% of our turnover through the application of a curatorial framework that brings together the Artistic Program, Major Events and Commercial Programs. This is a circular model, which is complex in application but simple in form. We invest into our Artistic Program, which grows our profile, which in turn grows our commercial and major events programs.These commercial returns are then invested back into the Artistic Program.
- We present an Artistic Program that directly reflects the social and cultural diversity of NSW, that holds Aboriginal practice at its core and engages new communities. Cultural diversity is a key strategy within our Artistic Program and 70% of our artists are from culturally diverse backgrounds.
- We have implemented major multi-year cultural strategies including. A new $2m strategy, Solid Ground in partnership with Blacktown Arts Centre that provides pathways for young Aboriginal people in Sydney and Western Sydney into arts and cultural employment and New Normal a National Arts and Disability Strategy that will commission 10 major new works by artists with disability over the next 3 years.
- We have just begun to deliver our new 6-Year Strategy, which identifies a higher level of growth than what has previously been achieved, and a major capital program.
Actions for change
Our growth has been achieved through taking an expansive notion of collaboration and embedding it across the institution. To integrate artist’s priorities into the heart of our strategic planning we commissioned Agatha Goethe Snape to ask artists – what they need from a cultural institution.
We have taken new approaches to governance through the establishment of a skills based board who work directly on the delivery of our strategy.
We collaborate with the NSW government who support us to take significant risks in the scale and ambition of our projects. This support has enabled us to constantly rethink our capacity as an institution.
We have built long-term relationships with Destination NSW, Biennale of Sydney, Sydney Festival and the City of Sydney. This year we will work with over 150 partners across our Artistic Program.
We have re-thought and constantly rethink our management and operating systems to develop new hybrid models of activity and outcomes. Our curators and producers have been integrated into one team working across artistic, commercial and community outcomes.
Cultural institutions should be radical and participatory. They should lie in the heart of their communities, providing moments of great joy and wonder, they should provide pathways, lead social change and create and deliver on our individual and collective ambition.
We as a community and as individuals should demand a lot of our institutions.
They must reflect our everyday lives and allow us to step outside of ourselves – if just for a moment.
I was the Director of Campbelltown Arts Centre from 2005-11. The Strategy that we developed for Campbelltown Arts Centre was designed to deliver social plan outcomes through a culturally relevant internationally focused contemporary arts program.
This collaborative artist and community led approach, resulted in extraordinary audience growth, making Campbelltown Arts Centre at the time the most visited cultural institution outside of a metropolitan city.
This artistic programming approach further enabled the leveraging of diverse government investment including health, housing and crime prevention, which grew our turnover by over 400% during this period.
At Campbelltown we never looked to the major institutions for leadership.
We were our own leaders, not outside the centre, but constructing our own centre. We never attempted to educate anyone and as an institution we never saw ourselves as the professionals with the authoritative voice within our communities.
Dreaming bigger and better
We all yearn to be part of something that is bigger than us. There is the community that you imagine, but the one you haven’t seen yet. You don’t even know that it exists but you feel that because of what you have heard or experienced it could exist.
Our young culturally diverse Carriageworks audiences, our future communities, the ones we imagine and the ones that are yet to exist are looking for the detail, for the relationship, for the fine grain, for the experience. As the next generation of cultural institution we are in the middle of the great age of creative entrepreneurship.
No one understands this better than artists and they are now turning away from the mega stadiums and from the megalopolis museums that are replicated in the same ways but in different forms across the world. They as artists, like all of us are looking for community.
Arts and culture needs to be de-institutionalised.
Collaboration has to be considered core business and the commercial and the public must be constantly colliding in new ways. Institutions need to be places that are entrepreneurial, expansive and multi centred. Survival should never be the aim.
At Carriageworks we have aimed for excellence with a clarity of purpose and an unflinching commitment to taking risks.
As a new institution we have to work to earn the right to have an equal seat at any table. To compete equally within the known government policy context with those bigger and older than us.
Policy drives vision
Last year NSW adopted its first ever Arts and Cultural Policy: Create in NSW. This Policy is being consistently applied by the NSW Government with great clarity of purpose. Within this Policy framework the Government has clearly articulated its vision and provided opportunities for the sector to deliver outcomes. Not everyone agrees with the priorities but everyone is clear on the direction and how they fit or not within a broader policy framework.
Policies are critical rules and directions that everyone understands. This is good government and policy directed investment results in strong returns.
Where things fall apart for the arts is when decisions are made by Government outside of a consistent policy framework. Within a reduced Federal resource base for the arts, inconsistently applied policy and government protectionism for parts of the sector result in inequity for some organisations and complacency by those protected.
Michael Lynch set up the Australia Council’s Major Performing Arts fund over 20 years ago as a bold initiative that that led to extraordinary growth and stability across the performing arts sector in Australia. 20 years later those companies are still our major performing arts companies but is that it? Will we have the same group of major performing arts companies for another 20 years?
How do we ensure that we provide pathways and opportunities for new companies from the small to medium sector such as Sydney Chamber Opera, Force Majeure and Performance 4A to become the national Major Performing Arts Companies of the future?
Like any innovation in science, research medicine, sustained protected performance managed government investment is required. Shouldn’t ambitious, new work, new companies and new institutions have an equal opportunity to deliver on any level of ambition that they may have?
We as a community should expect this.
Culture in Australia will continue to suffer unless we have a national arts policy. This policy needs to be ambitious and enable a new way of thinking about how we support the arts and to what level. We need a policy that centralises Federal government investment to ensure that it is consistent, delivers sustainability across the sector and supports the new.
The ongoing lack of a national policy has resulted in unprecedented damage to the sector. It is not acceptable for the Australia Council who after authoring their strategy a Culturally Ambitious Nation to now be put into a position where they can no longer deliver that strategy to any great degree.
Is it possible for the Australia Council to remain relevant when their decisions aren’t supported through a broader national policy?
The reality is that this is a new ecology. Within this ecology we should strive be more ambitious, have higher expectations of our artists, our partners, government and our communities. This new ecology also requires a different type of rigour not only around what we make but how we make it.
I hope that when the next generation of cultural institution emerges that it will be provided the space, the support the belief and the resources so it can be as ambitious as difficult and as risky as the artists it will support.
Currency House is the national platform for conversations on the value and impact of the performing arts.
