Rethinking Community Arts Funding
Supper Sessions at Ace Hotel by Maria Boyadgis. Photo provided by Supper Sessions.
By Hudson Brown
Receiving financial support is a huge barrier to success for working artists. Supper Sessions aims to ease this stress through an approachable micro-grant funding model, where for the price of attending a communal dinner, the arts community funds the work it wants to see.
Federal arts funding has steadily declined in Australia over the past decade. While the 2023 federal budget showed signs of progress, many artists and arts organisations still struggle to keep the lights on.
With most heavily reliant on government support, this stagnant model creates an atmosphere that stifles creativity and invites conflicts between artists competing for what little funding exists.
However, some in the community are finding other ways to support local artists. Since 2021, artist and curator Anna May Kirk has run Supper Sessions, a community-led arts funding model helping artists create without compromise.
Through light-hearted communal dinners featuring renowned chefs and musicians, the arts community mutually contributes independent seed money towards an artist’s project.
Targeted at ambitious ideas that often struggle to attract funding from traditional sources, each recipient of the Supper Sessions grant receives an obligation-free $1,000 to support their practice.
Designed as a piece of the funding puzzle rather than the entire solution, tickets to each dinner cost $90, where 40 per cent goes to the artist and the rest pays for chefs, musicians and miscellaneous costs.
“Everyone gets paid, except me,” Kirk laughs, “But that’s how it is with many independent projects. The mission of this initiative is to put funding back in the hands of the creative community to champion projects that are experimental, timely and critical.”
Supper Sessions at Ace Hotel by Maria Boyadgis. Photo provided by Supper Sessions.
Open to artists from all backgrounds and practices, Kirk conceived the grant to be as accessible as possible. Where mainstream funding sources can feel like they require a “PhD to navigate,” applying for the Supper Sessions grant requires artists to submit only a few basic details - contact information and a rough budget for instance.
This simplified approach means seeking funding doesn’t become just another hurdle for artists to overcome. “This model helps shift the feeling of applying for arts funding away from being a highly pressurised competitive environment, born from a decade of systematic defunding of the arts at the state and federal level,” she explains.
“There’s a lot of toxicity and competition around financing projects in the creative community that should be supporting one another.”
This affirming approach is also reflected in how each Supper Sessions celebrates the arts through a sense of community. Shaped by the meal Kirk plans alongside each guest chef, these collaborative conversations fashion the evening’s agenda.
Dining on inventive cuisine and immersed by musical performances, 30 guests around a single long table toast a local artist. Plus, the communal nature of the events leads to new connections between guests.
“Each event has been so different, but they’re really driven by what the chef wants to do. We've had a dinner with a late-night Hong Kong karaoke vibe and an event focused on fermentation and experimentation,” Kirk recalls. “Ultimately, it’s an attempt to create a feeling of community, of warmth, of breaking bread together.”
To date, Supper Sessions has distributed over 20 grants to creatives working across the visual arts, film, photography and even comedy.
As for where the money goes, the grant’s lack of stipulations is another crucial difference from established funding avenues. Recipients are free to spend the money without restrictions, with some covering materials and travel costs, and others developing the beginning of a larger project.
“Successful grants often use the money to prototype, let's say, one minute of a film or a particular design they hope to upscale,” Kirk explains, highlighting the work of Vanilla Tupu, a Samoan filmmaker who received the first Supper Sessions grant.
“She used the grant to pay for camera equipment and crew fees to make the first minute of a film. Then, she used that work to apply for further funding.”
Supper Sessions at Ace Hotel by Maria Boyadgis. Photo provided by Supper Sessions.
Supper Sessions isn’t alone in its aspirations to reshape how artists access support. ArtsPay – an online and in-store payment solution – directs 50 percent of profits from merchant fees to Australian artists through the ArtsPay Foundation.
For its inaugural grant in 2023, $55,000 was awarded to seven independent artists and two small arts organisations from a range of diverse and marginalised backgrounds.
Similar initiatives have also emerged overseas. In the United States, the Jar of Love Fund is an “unrestricted microgrant” for “artists, curators, and cultural workers of colour.”
Since launching in 2020, it has provided artists over $100,000.
Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, The White Pube Creatives Grant offers working-class artists £500, with no strings attached, formal application process or expectations on outcomes.
“Different places have different funding systems, but it's so important there are alternative ways of generating funding for the arts community,” Kirk says.
“If Supper Sessions can contribute some dialogue or be an example for how simple it is to set a grant up, then that's a great result.”
After leading a dozen Supper Sessions events alongside her day job and art practice, Kirk is already working on the project’s next chapter. She plans to reimagine the valuable experience she’s gained into a recipe book or interactive website where others can learn how to implement the model for themselves.
For Kirk , sharing this knowledge is simply part of the process behind running a community-led organisation.
“I know what works in what settings, and I have learned a lot along the way,” she explains. “If someone in Newcastle or Berlin wants to host a Supper Sessions, the format and learnings will be there to help everyone generate funding in their communities.”