Blair Jackson

Marcus Williams

Keynote speakers will promote the importance of collaboration and networking at next month’s Winter Art Symposium.

Christchurch Art Gallery deputy director Blair Jackson and the Auckland Arts Festival’s ‘Rosebank’ curator, Marcus Williams, will be drawing on their own experiences in focusing on the power of collaboration in creative practice in their addresses at the symposium – itself a collaboration between the Hastings City Art Gallery and EIT’s ideaschool.

The event, being held over the weekend of July 12-14, will offer a series of workshops split between venues – on Saturday it will be held at ideaschool on EIT’s Hawke’s Bay campus and on Sunday it moves to the Hastings City Art Gallery and the adjoining Hastings Library.

On each of the two days, participants will be able to choose one of four workshops – pricing your work, marketing with no money, funding applications and approaching dealer galleries on the Saturday and running a home studio, managing your money, building an online profile and proposals for public galleries on the Sunday.

In his keynote speech A Gallery Without Walls, Blair Jackson will talk about the Christchurch Art Gallery’s Outer Spaces programme.  With the gallery closed for repairs since 2011’s Canterbury earthquake, the initiative is taking art out to the public by using off-site spaces in the wider city.

In April, the gallery won a Museums Aotearoa Award for “outside the box” events that have included a solo exhibition staged in a show home and a free self-guided arts trail for families with questions and activities for children.

Director of the Hastings City Art Gallery Maree Mills, who studied with Jackson at the University of Canterbury’s Ilam School of Fine Arts, says the success of the Outer Spaces programme has underscored the significant role artists play in connecting people and their community.

Marcus Williams, an associate professor at Unitec and Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Creative Industries and Business, will talk about Art in the Everyday.

An artist himself, his family art practice F4 – encompassing Susan Jowsey and the couple’s children Mercy and Jesse – spent six months in New York where they undertook the International Studio and Curatorial Programme after winning the paramount award in the prestigious Wallace Art Awards in 2010.

Williams curated a 2013 Auckland Arts Festival project that focused on the history and environment of Auckland’s Rosebank Peninsula, exploring relationships between art, enterprise and the community.

The seminar will also include a presentation entitled Collaboration in the Arts:  The Power of Many Voices.

Dr Major says tickets for the Winter Art Symposium are selling fast, confirming artist interest in the highly sought-after advice to be covered by the speakers and workshops.  Further information about the event can be found at www.eventfinder.co.nz/whatson/events/hawkes-bay-gisborne