National Portfolio Funding Success

Meadow Arts Gets 

Arts Council England Funding

Arts Council England has made its decisions on which organisations will become part of their National Portfolio Funding programme for three years from 2012-15 and they have chosen to fund Meadow Arts. 

Here is Meadow Arts statement on the news:

"Since its creation in 2001, Meadow Arts has relied on gaining separate funding for each individual exhibition and programme it has undertaken.  Arts Council England has now acknowledged the contribution Meadow Arts makes to Contemporary Art by placing Meadow Arts into its National Portfolio Funding Programme. The Arts Council grant to Meadow Arts for 2012-13 has been set at £160,000 with inflationary increases over the following two years.

Whilst this is good news for Meadow Arts, we deeply regret the loss of funding to so many other arts organisations across the country."


We are absolutely delighted to know that we can plan for the next three years of exhibitions and have a stable and secure future for that time.  We have got lots of exciting work in store and are currently really busy getting ready for the July opening of our House of Beasts exhibition at Attingham Park, a National Trust property in Shropshire.

Since Wednesday, when we heard about the funding decision, we have all been torn between celebrating our own success and feeling sympathy for all of the organisations who didn't make it into the portfolio. It is going to be a real struggle for many of them. There is still another funding strand from Arts Council England, called Grants For The Arts, which some of them will be able to apply to (this is how we have gained a lot of our funding up until now). The private funding that the government is telling people to go for seems to be quite elusive at the moment, so we will have to wait and see whether there will be any incentives for philanthropy that will help the arts.

Arts Council England said that many good organisations would not get the funding and we can see some that do brilliant work around us who didn't get funding. It feels like getting really good exam results and then finding out that your best friend failed them...