Changes are afoot at the Michael Aldrich Foundation. After some twelve years (and ten years since my father’s death) I am stepping back. Control and management of the Foundation, including the cultural assets, are being handed to the University of Brighton.
The last few years have been very challenging and trying to focus attention on arts education and community engagement ever more difficult in a higher education system buckling under financial and political pressures.
I am very proud of what we have achieved and believe that we have gone some way to fulfil the potential of the Foundation which my father and his colleagues envisaged in the heady days (as it turned out) of the 1990s:
- commissioning new work (Jack Durling’s Terra Mural & St Dunstan’s Garden Mural; Tommy Sissons’ Megabus to the Trash Vortex)
- sharing the Aldrich Collection of art with the local community (Into the Arts, Balfour Primary project & our lockdown project, Image of the Week)
- supporting young artists and makers (Designer, Maker, Artist & Poet)
- And our biggest project to date, the Drug of Art where our network of artists delivered workshops to nearly 400 children in studios, community centres, SEND schools and local primaries over two years.
We adopted values which reflected those espoused by the University and explored the wonderful principles of JONK, a philosophy of education devised by my fellow trustee Marcelo Staricoff. We also commissioned research and set up an EDI Reference Group to review our work.
It has been an absolute pleasure to work with so many talented and dedicated people including brilliant artists and makers and I am very grateful for everyone’s enthusiastic and creative contributions to our projects:
Jack Durling, Tom Meades, Finola Thomas, River Jade, Elbie Owens, Chantal Spencer, Clare o’Leary, Isobel Creed, Enayball, Gina Leonard, Steve Gallagher, Tommy Sissons, John Vernon Lord, Nadia Chalk & Creative Waves, Becky Hancock, ArtRoom Brighton, Molly Aldrich-Wincer, Charles Palmer, Denise Stephens, Jenni Lewin-Turner, Alison Lapper, Victoria Holden to name a few
Thank you also to our trustees, Marnie Middlemiss, Marcelo Staricoff, Isobel Creed, Andrew Comben, Stuart Hedley and in particular to our fearless and inspirational former chair, Dr June Crown. And thank you too for the funding support (from Sandy Aldrich, Cass Art and the Drug of Art) and the very many volunteer hours which keep small charities like this alive.
With the Aldrich Collection, the University of Brighton will inherit a unique art collection rooted in the history of creativity in Brighton and beyond. It is my sincere hope that the University under its new Vice Chancellor can recognise this priceless legacy and apply to it the care and resources it has been promised and so richly deserves.