Yesterday, the provincial government released its budget for 2024-25 titled Stronger Than Ever: Let’s Keep Building. In it, there are a couple of noticeable strides forward alongside some glaring omissions. I wish to convey our apprehension regarding the absence of crucial investments required for the arts and culture sector.
CARFAC and RAAV have been busy meeting with the Federal Government about the Artist’s Resale Right (ARR), and momentum is growing. Now is the time to write to your MP, asking for their support for ARR in a review of the Copyright Act, which is expected to begin this Fall.
The ARR would enable artists to receive a royalty payment each time your work is sold in the secondary market through an auction house or commercial gallery. The ARR matters, because art often grows in value over time, and artists currently have no legal right to receive income from this growth. If Canada had an ARR, artists would benefit from sales at home and abroad, as it is already law in over 90 countries worldwide. Here is a summary of our ARR proposal.
Their advocacy work on this issue has led to a commitment from the Liberals to amend the Copyright Act to include an Artist’s Resale Right, and last fall it was listed as a priority in the Mandate Letters of Minister Rodriguez and Minister Champagne.
There is still so much to do, and your support is crucial. We know that direct interactions with constituents can go a long way. Please use this opportunity to connect with your Member of Parliament.
Not sure how to connect with your MP? Here is a template letter covering key points on why ARR is important to all artists in Canada, especially those who are Indigenous or seniors.
Need more information on the Artist’s Resale Right? Click here to learn more and find a summary of our proposal.
Many of our members contacted us to say that they were interested in our last anti-oppression intensive workshop but weren’t able to make it on a weekend. With that in mind, we’re re-offering the same workshop during the work week!
Carmel is back to facilitate, this time on Wednesday and Thursday, May 25th and 26th.
This workshop continues the series presented to ArtsLink NB members on business development and career-management subjects. Past topics have included budgeting, documentation, and critical arts writing. The decision to hold this workshop virtually was made due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and to allow participants to attend from across the province.
Workshop Description
Dreaming Inventive Futures: Anti-Oppression in the Creative Sector is a two-day workshop and discussion space that combines foundational anti-oppressive modalities, peer-based learning, personal reflection, and active discussion as teaching tools. During this digital space, participants will explore approaches to anti-racist curation, responsible and curious storytelling, organizationally care-based artistic practices rooted in disability justice frameworks, address ways to disrupt genre and aesthetic hierarchies within cultural industries, and discuss sustainable methods to intentional cross-practice collaboration.
These themes will be grounded in disrupting tokenism in the arts sector, moving beyond defensiveness and fear in creative work, imagination, and accessibility. The aim is that participants will feel supported and motivated to engage in systems change work within the arts as well as more confident in continuing anti-oppressive conversations in their work personally and professionally.
About Carmel Farabakhsh
Carmel Farahbakhsh (they/them) is a community educator, arts maker, and youth worker. They have collaborated on the Khyber Centre for the Arts board for four years, and are enjoying their new position as co-director of local music festival EVERYSEEKER. They recently transitioned from a five-year term coordinating South House Sexual and Gender Resource Centre to working as the Executive Director at the Youth Project, seeing a direct link between this community work and access to creative spaces and the arts community.
As the Executive Director of the Youth Project, Carmel holds a youth-centric approach to organizational movement and support. Carmel builds their vision from their community education background and aims to apply an anti-racist and trauma-informed framework to their work. They also collaborate and organize with local initiatives, artist-run-centres, and community partners with an aim to create wider 2SQTBIPOC community and support systems within the HRM.
Registration
The sessions will take place May 25 and 26, 2022. The intensive workshop will be held virtually via Zoom and is free for members of ArtsLink NB. Sessions will run from 9am to 4pm each day. To register, cultural sector workers should send an email to Jericho Knopp, jeri@artslinknb.com, with their name, their field or organization, and a brief description of why they’re interested in taking the workshop.
We are greatly saddened to hear of the closing of CreatedHere Magazine. CreatedHere was established in 2014 to discover and document the stories of New Brunswick artists and improve their ability to present themselves regionally, nationally, and internationally through thought-provoking critical writing.
CreatedHere supported NB’s arts sector by providing opportunities for arts writers and artists to reach a national audience and provided paying work for critical arts writers. Now with the closure of this publication, on top of the closure of Canadian Art Magazine earlier in the pandemic, New Brunswick’s artists and arts writers have very few avenues for promotion and public critique of their work.
ArtsLink strongly believes that critical arts writing is vital to the health of an arts community. To that end, we hosted two intensive workshops on critical arts writing in 2018 and 2019, and many of the participants in those workshops went on to write for CreatedHere. The loss of this publication leaves a void in New Brunswick’s arts landscape.
Without the representation of our artists in periodicals across Canada, our artists are at a serious disadvantage. Whether it is a lack of understanding of the unique qualities of Atlantic art-making or unfamiliarity from jurors, promoters, festivals, or managers outside of NB, this contributes to the export difficulties our arts sector faces. New Brunswick ranks 7th among the 10 provinces for its relative trade deficit, exporting only 29 cents for every dollar of cultural imports.
The critical discourse developed through the lens of arts writing helps cultivate art excellence. It helps our artists frame themselves in an international context, contributing their voices and perspectives to a global arts community. Our sector needs to participate in this larger conversation. Understanding how to talk to artists about their work, how to contextualize work (in contemporary arts discourse, via one’s local influences, the meanings embedded in form etc.), and understanding your audience or market are all integral to taking up the task of writing for the arts.
We are grateful for the contribution that CreatedHere made to the New Brunswick arts sector over the near decade of its existence, and it is our fervent hope that arts writers and artists will once again have many opportunities to publish like those that CreatedHere worked so hard to provide.
