Durham City Arts Announces Closure
It is with great sadness that after twenty one years, the award winning arts development agency, Durham City Arts, announces that it will no longer be bringing great arts experiences to the people living, working and visiting County Durham.
Durham City Arts has run an amazing series of series of arts programmes and events worth over £1.1 million since 2006. However, despite this success, Durham County Council has made the decision that no future funding was possible for the company, as it implements its programme of budget reductions to cope with a thirty per cent cut in government grant. This decision follows that of the Arts Council England, which had announced the company would be among hundreds to be cut from Arts Council England’s new national portfolio. The Arts Council itself has restructured nationally in response to its own funding cuts of fifteen per cent. Without this core funding, Durham City Arts could no longer see a way forward financially and sadly made the decision to wind up the company.
Sue Pitts, Chair of the Board says ‘The work the company has done over the years has become an intrinsic part of Durham’s cultural life. The initiatives developed with hard to reach groups, some of which has won awards, may well be lost. That would be tragic because art can truly be transformative. We simply have to hope that in the immediate future, Arts Council England and local authorities can sustain and develop artistic and creative opportunity in these key areas. We want to thank all our funders who have enabled us to do some outstanding things. Our debt to the artists we have worked with is great and it is sad that it ends.”
Founded by Durham City Council in 1990, Durham City Arts’ mission was to promote, improve and advance engagement with the arts in collaboration with artists and communities. The arts programme that DCA developed to realise this vision has been instrumental in paving the way for Durham’s current cultural success. Each of the three key profile festivals in Durham began life with Durham City Arts: Durham Book Festival, developed and produced by DCA (1990 – 2010), Brass Music Festival was developed and produced by DCA (2001 – 2007) and Enlightenment (2008), Durham’s first international light festival, a visually stunning multi-cultural event which illuminated the heart of the Durham City was forerunner to the hugely successful Lumiere Festival of Light.
In the past five years, the company has had a particular focus on encouraging ‘hard to reach groups’ to access to the arts through the county’s growing festivals and events programme, working with prisons, the youth criminal justice service and adults with special needs. More recently, the company has been producing participatory artist commissions with a digital focus, such as: Pixelware by Andrew Richardson, in association with the Oriental Museum, Gala Manoeuvres by Tim Brennan, a new work based on the Miners Gala and currently The Brass Book by Stevie Ronnie, to great acclaim.
Creative Director, Suzy O’Hara says ‘I would like to thank all of the artists, communities and our supporters who have helped Durham City Arts achieve so much over the past two decades. I am very proud to have been part of a company that has created such a legacy of truly engaging people with great art and arts experiences’ The company will formally close on 31 March 2012.