Tuesday 21 May, 1-2pm
Online, via Zoom
Click here to book
Bi-monthly Better Together sessions are framed by a different urgent topic that is relevant to the East Midlands and wider arts and culture sector. For Better Together #6: The Art Working Parents Alliance we’ll be joined by Jo Harrison and Hettie Judah, founders of the Art Working Parents Alliance (APW). Jo and Hettie will share a background on AWP and aspirations for connecting with organisations and parents working in the art world.
Aims for the session include establishing an East Midlands AWP cohort and developing a dialogue with institutions in the region on improving working conditions for parents in the artworld.
Better Together sessions take place online and offer an opportunity for change makers in the East Midlands, UK to connect. We particularly encourage attendance from directors, trustees and programme leads and welcome participants to share with the group current challenges that their organisation is facing, helping establish a supportive space for shared learning and development. Sessions last only 1-hour and proritise time for open discussion.
AWP:
The Art Working Parents Alliance (AWP) is a nation-wide network with regional hubs open to all parents working in the art world, mothers, fathers and others. We currently have over 400 members hailing from sectors including academia, commercial galleries, public organisations, museum education, communications and the media, alongside artists.
The Alliance was founded by Jo Harrison and Hettie Judah in October 2022, and we are currently both responsible for all administration of AWP including organising and hosting events, managing the growing membership and sending out regular newsletters.
AWP can be used in many ways – as a social network for those with young children; as a matching service for mentoring; as a hive mind to be turned to for advice and expertise; and as a campaigning group working to make the art world a better place for parents to work.
The AWP is free to join, and volunteer run.
Bios:
Jo Harrison is a curator and arts worker based in London whose practice focuses on gender, work and economies of care. She is Director at The Approach, London and runs ‘Repronomics’ a research project exploring social reproduction and cultural reproduction as invisible and exploitable ‘labours of love’ under capitalism; she also hosts an ongoing itinerant reading group with a focus on feminism, social reproduction, labour and economics. Jo was previously Curator at Almanac Projects, London, has been a visiting lecturer at Birth Rites Collection, Central Saint Martins and Slade School of Art (UCL) and co-founded and runs The Arts Working Parents Alliance with Hettie Judah.
Hettie Judah is a writer and curator. She is currently chief art critic on the British daily paper The i, a regular contributor to The Guardian, Frieze and The Times Literary Supplement, and writes a monthly column for Apollo magazine. Her writing on art can also be found in Art Quarterly, Art Monthly, ArtReviewand other publications with ‘art’ in the title.
Hettie is curator of the Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood which opened at the Arnolfini in Bristol on 9 March 2024, and tours to MAC in Birmingham, Millennium Gallery in Sheffield and DCA Dundee during 2024/2025.
The standalone book Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood will be published in the UK and Europe by Thames & Hudson on 4 July 2024, and in the US and Canada on 3 September 2024.