Work with Artquest to make the arts more equitable for artists by finding out about artists’ working lives and lived experience.
Artquest works inside and outside the arts to help make the art world more equitable for all artists. Our consultation and advice is backed up by evidence on how artists work to build better processes, reducing barriers and making sure all artists voices can be heard.
We gain insight from our standalone research projects and consultancy partnerships around the arts. All of our projects also help us better understand artists working conditions, particularly the effects of inequality on artists careers.
We have a particular focus on artists from lower socio-economic and working class backgrounds, those with caring responsibilities, and those marginalised on the basis of their sexuality, gender, and membership of the global majority. We are also particularly interested in professional artists without formal qualifications, who make up about 15% of the artists using our other services.
As well as one-off project partnerships, we work on an ongoing basis through:
- Our data partnership: Applied: Artists Workforce Data is our data partnership with arts sector partners, combining surveying and monitoring forms to build the only longitudinal dataset of artists working conditions and demographics in the UK. We produce reports from our data.
- Our consultancy: working with arts organisations to deliver projects and help them improve their processes and practices to make the art world more equitable for artists.
- Our research: we learn from our artist projects and build research into everything we do, for example helping artists with small grants to make their careers more sustainable and learning from their experiences with researchers.
Each year we collect data, insight and expertise from around:
- 2,000 artists through our other live, hybrid, or online projects
- 190,000 artists who connect with our website
- over 600,000 artists on our social networks
- reflecting on 25 years of direct project delivery to artists
Our work lets us ask responsive questions to understand how professional visual artists use studios, earn money, and care for their families. We can also better understand the other incomes artists earn, and how their work adds value outside of the sector.
Future resources
Coming up, we will:
- Develop public data dashboards giving baseline demographic information about who artists are, their sources of income, their ambitions and career barriers.
- Continue to embed researchers in all our projects, directing them to work with artists to find out more about how they work.
- Link with researchers in academia and beyond and develop tools to support artists working conditions.
Contact us to explore where we can work with your ideas
We are keen to build on the 300+ partnerships we have forged since starting out in 2001, and aim to be the leading providers of intelligence about visual artists. We work with individual artists and strategically with policymakers, arts organisations, HEIs and business. Contact us about your research and projects.
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