Ambassadors

The Ambassadors Program

ARA Ambassadors are an essential component of the ARA Alliance concept, Composed from a team of art practitioners who take a leading role in their locality via the ARA platform.

We believe that an ongoing debate and an exchange of ideas between grassroots cultural community leaders from diverse cultural backgrounds will promote the kind of inclusive, respectful, professional and visionary discourse the ARA project wants to affirm.

The Ambassadors are specialists, volunteering to strengthen the artist-run field in two essential key-points:

– Mapping the changes taking place in their cultural environment such as the opening of new initiatives, thus keeping the ARA map an accurate depiction of their locality.
– Facilitating awareness to local challenges and needs – and helping the ARA IT team respond to these needs in the broader context of the platform.

Want to join the Ambassadors team?

If you are practicing art under the conceptual roof “the artist-run art field”, as an individual or as a group of artists, curators, or other contemporary fine art creatives, and want to join the Ambassadors program, please send us a short text about yourself and your motivations, and some contact details.

Engagement requirements

As this is a young program, we draft requirements for engagement as a baseline for operations. Being an ARA Ambassador essentially means to hold a role as a researcher and culture community leader.

From our past experience, we expect you to dedicate about 2 weekly hours to map the developing changes of your locality in terms of independent art initiatives opening and closing.

We aspire to have a bi-annual web meetup with all ambassadors, and will in the future use a closed Facebook group, or similar, to share ideas.

As a field leader within the artist-run cultural field, being aware of the major needs and challenges of your community is important. You will be the connection point between your locality and the ARA organisation, making sure that we can try and facilitate local needs for any future developments of ARA operations. The extensive communication network we hope to build between our ambassadors around the world, can also help benefit local initiatives in search for inspiration and solutions to any issues that other artist-run initiatives might have faced.

We aspire to be able to allocate funds to the ambassadors program, to compensate and free more time to impact your local culture communities. This action item will be included in future funding applications the ARA makes. It may be that ambassadors could help in taking this forward through your specific knowledge of funding available in your locality.