Recent Grants Awarded

Arts Grants Awarded in 2008

Please note these relate to former programmes which are now closed.

Flagship Partnerships

  1. Galapagos Conservation Trust
    £60,000 (£30,000 in 2008 and £30,000 in 2009) for the third year of the Galapagos Gulbenkian Artists' Residency Programme and for exhibition R&D costs.

  2. Tate Britain
    £25,000 for a public programme to broaden the public reach of the Tate Triennial 2009.

The Arts and Science

  1. The Clod Ensemble
    £6,071 for the visit of Antonio Damasio to London for a Gulbenkian Foundation symposium on the Embodied Mind and two other events organised by The Clod Ensemble.

The Arts in Public Spaces

  1. An talla solais, Ullapool Visual Arts/Isle of Martin Trust
    £12,000 for the New York based artist Alastair Noble to develop a public art installation based on the topography of this small Scottish island inspired by a Jorge Luis Borges story.

  2. Artsadmin
    £12,000 towards the creation of eight short films, inspired by Charles Darwin’s anniversary, by leading performance artists for Channel 4’s ‘3 Minute Wonder’ series, for broadcast in February and November 2009.

  3. Big Things on the Beach
    £20,000 towards the further development of a public art commissioning programme for the promenade and adjacent streets and gardens in Portobello, a seaside resort near Edinburgh.

  4. Brunel Festival Association
    £7,000 for a feasibility study for the commissioning of a landmark public artwork to raise awareness of the national importance of Neyland in Pembrokeshire, formerly an important passenger port between Ireland and South Wales.

  5. Churchill College, University of Cambridge
    A sum of up to £30,000, including £5,000 for direct activities, to host a major UK exhibition of the work of the British photographer Mark Power, originally curated for the Foundation's Cultural Centre in Paris.

  6. Falkland Heritage Trust
    £5,000 towards the development of temporary site-specific sound installations by the artists Louise K Wilson and David Chapman on the Falkland Estate, a former Royal Hunting Park in Fife, Scotland.

  7. Music 55-7
    (Classical Music Society)
    £12,000 towards a site-specific interactive music piece on the river Foyle, Derry, Northern Ireland, as part of a civic regeneration programme.

  8. Natural History Museum
    £80,000 towards four major new commissions for the main galleries in the Museum, as a culmination of the Foundation's six year partnership with the Museum.

  9. NVA
    £20,000 towards the first year of a three-year development programme for this enterprising Scottish public arts organisation.

  10. NVA Organisation
    £15,000 towards the transformation of a 100 acre woodland site, involving communities of multiple deprivation, around Cardross, Firth of Clyde.

  11. The Photographers’ Gallery
    £60,000 for three projects (one involving the Portuguese community) as a feasibility study for a London-wide public art display during the 2012 Olympics, involving international photographers to document life in the city’s 203 international communities.

  12. Scottish Arts Council
    £30,000 towards the costs of a pilot project to explore the potential for a coherent public art programme for six Scottish island groups.

  13. Shropshire County Council
    £10,000 towards research and development costs for a multimedia installation as part of a well-thought-through large-scale public art programme which follows the course of the River Severn.

  14. The Torch Theatre
    £15,000 for the artist Alison Hayes to create filmed artworks inspired by hairy wood anthills in the forests of Coed y Brenin, Wales.

Exceptional Grant

  1. The Arvon Foundation
    £15,000 towards a pilot for (M)Other Tongues, a new creative writing programme for young people from emerging communities in the UK, starting with a Portuguese community.

Arts Grants Awarded in 2007

Flagship Partnerships

  1. Galapagos Conservation Trust
    £35,000 towards a pilot programme of four artists' residencies on the Galapagos Islands with a view to creating new work for the anniversary of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 2009.

  2. Galapagos Conservation Trust
    £40,000 towards a second year of the Gulbenkian Galapagos Artist Residency Programme.

  3. Liverpool Biennial
    £50,000 as the first payment of £100,000 per annum from 2008 to 2010 to be paid in instalments towards the costs of Gulbenkian European Commissions at Liverpool Biennial: International Festival of Contemporary Art.

  4. The Natural History Museum
    £65,000 towards the organisation of a competition to select and commission an artist to create a permanent artwork for the ceiling panels in the inner gallery in the museum’s reception hall, and for related education activities.

  5. The Natural History Museum
    £30,000 for the development of a new art and science exhibition, planned for 2008/9, inspired by Darwin's 1871 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, a collaboration between the Museum and the Centre for Literature and Cultural Studies in Berlin and the Centre for the History of Knowledge, Zurich.

  6. Tate Britain
    £50,000 as the first of three annual grants to Tate Britain for the Gulbenkian Curator of Contemporary Art for the Tate Triennial 2009 exhibition.

  7. Tate Britain
    £50,000 for the second year of three years' support of the Gulbenkian Curatorship at Tate Britain.

The Arts and Science

  1. Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway
    £15,000 towards the realisation of a computer-generated website artwork that attempts to find and display ‘the most blue skies’ in the world.

  2. Camden Arts Centre
    £5,000 towards the cost of renovating a large mobile by the British artist Kenneth Martin (which was originally commissioned for London Zoo in 1967 with a grant from the Foundation), and of reinstating it in a forthcoming exhibition.

  3. Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT)
    £10,000 towards an international conference to open the first major British exhibition of biotechnological art, organised at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) at the start of European Capital of Culture year in 2008.

  4. Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge University
    £10,000 towards the development of a new programme of activities to bring together leading international experts from the arts and from science to explore the Aesthetics of Astrophotography.

  5. Magnum Photos
    £10,000 towards the cost of commissioning a body of work from the photographer Stuart Franklin who will explore ways of making effective visual representations of climate change in Europe.

  6. Random Dance Company
    £15,000 towards an intensive creative process with international cognitive scientists, neuroscientists and artificial intelligence experts towards the creation of new performance pieces.

  7. Royal Society of Arts (RSA)
    £15,000 towards the development of a public art project in the city of Bristol addressing concerns about environmental change.

  8. University of Westminster
    (Alexa Wright, Principal Investigator, Andrew Carnie, Co-investigator)
    £6,000 towards interdisciplinary research into the experience of heart transplantation, with a view to assisting clinicians in envisaging patients’ self-identity, and creating new artworks.

The Arts in Public Spaces

  1. Artichoke
    £20,000 towards three years research and development for a series of new, large-scale public art productions.

  2. Arts in the Peak
    £8,000 towards the creation of a series of artist-made guide stones to complement the existing eighteenth-century waymarks in the moorlands of the Derbyshire Peak District.

  3. Canolfan Crannog
    £10,000 for the artist Teena Gould to undertake research with local experts into the history, geology and culture of the coastline of Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire, in order to create a new body of ceramic work using site-specific materials.

  4. Chapter Arts Centre
    £20,000 to commission four artists to create 'social spaces' as part of a programme of continuity at this Cardiff-based arts centre during its twelve-month period of redevelopment.

  5. Chrysalis Arts Development
    £8,000 towards the research and development of a Slow Art Trail to take place in the North Yorkshire market town of Skipton and in the surrounding Yorkshire Dales.

  6. The Collective Gallery
    £14,000 towards One Mile, a programme facilitating artists to make public artworks with local groups within a one-mile radius of the gallery in central Edinburgh.

  7. Fevered Sleep
    £10,000 towards the development of a site-specific installation and performance piece about the quality and nature of coastal light, to open in Brighton and to be subsequently adapted for the coasts of northern Scotland, West Wales and North Yorkshire.

  8. Folkestone Sculpture Triennale
    (Metropole Arts Centre Trust)
    £10,000 towards the development costs of an ambitious programme of site-specific works for this Channel port town.

  9. Ikon Gallery
    £20,000 towards research and development costs for a programme of new works by international artists to be sited in various communities across the city of Birmingham.

  10. Interlude Arts Community Interest Company
    £5,000 towards research into the practicalities of establishing a Dispersed Gallery in various locations in the city of Bath in order to find ways of making new contemporary art more accessible in this historic setting.

  11. IQUN
    £7,000 towards the development costs of a new site-specific performance in Manchester by the writer and director Neil Barlett.

  12. NVA
    £20,000 to develop ideas, in partnership with the National Theatre of Scotland, for a series of visual-art installations over 150 square miles of ancient landscape recently made accessible in the Argyll forests.

  13. O + I
    (Camden Arts Centre)
    £6,000 towards the development of an archive, a pilot series of artists' residencies and a touring performance by the artist Barbara Steveni, co-founder of the influential Artist Placement Group.

  14. Platform for Art
    £20,000 to explore the potential for presenting a high-profile programme of public art at Stratford Underground Station in the lead-up to the 2012 Olympic Games.

  15. Poet in the City
    £10,000 towards research into the use of poetry in the built environment.

  16. South London Gallery
    £15,000 to support the development of a public art programme at a neighbouring housing estate.

  17. Sustrans
    £14,000 towards a new development of the artwork programme for the National Cycle Network, investigating environmental issues and involving artists and scientists.

Exceptional Projects

  1. Awst & Walther
    (The Architecture Foundation)
    £5,000 for research, following their project Digger, for a catalogue called Dreammachine.

  2. The Poetry Archive
    £25,000 towards the cost of extending the international remit of this unique on-line resource of poetry recordings.

  3. Royal Institute of British Architects Trust
    £15,000 towards the costs of a symposium on Le Corbusier, to be held in Liverpool during 2008.

  4. World Monuments Fund in Britain
    £15,000 towards the costs of running a final lead statue conservation workshop in the UK.

Endangered Species, Siobhan Davies Dance Company, 2006