Wakefield
Contact: Belinda Eldridge, Commercial Director.
The Yorkshire Sculpture Park supports many young artists, free of charge, through their projects, sometimes as artists in residence.
Although student placements are not advertised, students arrive at YSP through many pathways, including by making direct contact.
The renovated property on site allows for artists to be in residence, and is a well- utilised resource.
YSP has relationships with several universities – York, Leeds, Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam and Huddersfield – at different stages of development.
Conversations are ongoing with The University of Leeds over the Fine Art Ambassadors scheme, working with three students a year with visits, events and the cross-promotion of YSP.
For Sheffield University’s week long ESRC Festival of Social Science, YSP hosted the exhibition Migrant Narratives of Citizenship: a Topographical Atlas of European Belonging by Nishat Awan. Senior staff also assisted in the delivery of a module on the Landscape Architecture post-graduate course onsite at YSP, giving critical feedback on the students’ proposals for site-specific projects at YSP.
YSP is also working with University of York to support their Partnership Studentship Programme 2016/17, which includes an opportunity for students studying MA History of Art to undertake a curatorial placement there.
The curator has given student talks on art catalogue collation and production at the University of Huddersfield, and discussions are in progress about hosting a workshop and performance by German Sculptor and instrument maker Hannes Fessmann, in support of MA and Research students. YSP is also working with the university to host their annual conference: Tracking the Creative Process in Music.
In terms of diversity, YSP has seen a young curator make the leap from being in the visitor experience team to doing the online curatorial programme and then later progress to an MA course at Chelsea; also through Jerwood funding, a young black curator has gone on to do a PhD.