A £3m investment package has been pledged by the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) National Lottery Fund to enable Wasps Artists Studios to move out of revenue funding. Wasps, already one of the UKs largest artists studio providers, supports around 750 artists each year by providing affordable studios at 17 locations across Scotland. The new funding programme will transform it into one of the largest social enterprises in the arts, creating 140 new studio spaces for around 200 visual artists and crafts makers each year.
£2.5m has been earmarked for 53 (Five Cubed), a new strategy aiming to develop five new arts buildings in five communities in five years. Wasps will raise a further £2.5m from other sources to buy and develop the buildings, the locations for which will be agreed by Wasps and SAC in the coming months. £520,000 will be spent on restructuring the organisation and adding new staff to deliver the expansion. Wasps waiting lists, currently numbering more than 400 artists, will be reduced by half, and hundreds of exhibitions, educational workshops, arts commissions and other events will be created each year.
The aim is for Wasps to grow sufficiently in scale over the next five years to be able to survive solely from its own resources thereafter, without any further revenue support from SAC. Ian Wall, Chair of Wasps Artists Studios said, Wasps has always worked hard to stand on its own feet financially and to date we have raised more than £11m of capital funding to buy and develop buildings& This investment will ensure that work can continue& Iain Munro, SACs Head of Lottery, said,&over the course of five years, [this investment] will help meet the high demand for artists studio space while placing Wasps on a secure financial footing, independent of revenue support from SAC. This will be a unique funding arrangement in the arts in Scotland.