By Cathleen Enns

Riddle: what is the difference between an arts council and an arts council?

Answer: ‘Arts Council’ means different things when naming different types of organizations. There are, essentially, two types of arts councils whose activities are primarily different but complementary.

They are:

• arts funding agencies
• arts programming organizations.

Arts Funding Agencies

The Manitoba Arts Council is an arms-length funding agency of the provincial government established to award grants to artists and organizations in all art forms and disciplines, through such programs as Media Arts, Touring Grant for Organizations, Dance Creation Production, and Project Grant for Periodical Publishers, etc.…

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A Breakdown of the Life Cycle of a Manitoba Arts Council Grant

By Diana Sefa

If you happen to be an artist or a member of an arts organization, you’ve most likely worked diligently on assembling a grant application, painstakingly double-checking that all requirements from the guidelines have been met. You’ve managed to submit your grant application by its program deadline date – so, what exactly happens during the wait-time between submitting a grant application and finding out whether it has been awarded or declined?

Here is the breakdown of the life cycle of a Manitoba Arts Council grant*:

Download the Life Cycle of a Manitoba Arts Council Grant Application Infographic [PDF]

1) Grant application arrives to our office by hand, mail, courier, or in our drop box (which is checked daily) and is date-stamped and logged at reception.…

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By Akoulina Connell

Manitoba Arts Council’s new strategic plan, Designed to Thrive 2017-2022, makes a firm commitment to increasing outcomes for diverse groups through our granting.

These groups include:

• Deaf and disability;
• Culturally diverse;
• Indigenous;
• LGBT2Q*;
• Rural and northern.

The Voluntary Self-Identification Form

The Voluntary Self-Identification Form is a tool in our grant applications and peer assessor registration form that helps MAC stay accountable to our commitment to serving all Manitobans.

When putting together your application to MAC, you may ask yourself:

Why is completing the Voluntary Self-Identification Form important? What happens to the data? Is my privacy protected?

Holding our own feet to the fire

We use demographic data gathered by Statistics Canada as our main measuring stick: How do the percentages of applications and grants awarded stack up against our provincial demography?…

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By Stephanie George

Hi! My name is Stephanie and I’m so excited to join Manitoba Arts Council as their Archives Intern. I’m hoping “Artchivist” might catch on?! I was completely thrilled when this job came up, as it connects both of my passions – I have a Masters in English from the U of M and another in Library and Information Science from the University of Western Ontario. I’ve worked and volunteered in both fields, including at Millennium Library, St. John’s College Library and with the Envoi Poetry Festival.

I remember reading over MAC’s strategic plan when prepping for my interview and feeling so encouraged by the following passage: “As the pace of change in our province continues to accelerate, the value of the arts is amplified – they are our oldest and most reliable tools for imagining how we might respond to change, and for prototyping new models of cultural resilience.” This is exactly why I studied literature and I’m so pleased to work for an organization that shares the same values.…

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By Martine Friesen

Next to your project proposal, support material is the most important part of your grant application. This is material that you send with your application to show the kind of work that you create. It can be a sample of your writing, images and/or videos of your art work, audio recordings, catalogues, books and reviews.

It’s important to choose the best support material for your specific project. It will be shared with the peer assessors and will have a big impact on the success of your application. Here are some tips to help you.

1. Read the General Guidelines – Read through the General Guidelines to find out what MAC will accept in support materials.…

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By Martine Friesen

Almost all of MAC’s programs require a budget as part of a project application. A budget simply outlines how much your project is going to cost and how you plan on paying for it.

A good budget reflects the scope of the project and should support everything you have outlined in your proposal. So, for example, if you talk about renting a studio space, there should be a rental fee for that studio in your budget. And, for your application at least, your budget must balance, i.e. revenues must be equal to expenses. We all know that may change if you are awarded and have completed the project—you may not have made as much revenue at the box office as anticipated, or your other funding requests did not come through and that’s okay.…

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The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency provides professional artists with an opportunity to be inspired and create their works in the park’s setting. In return these professional artists invite visitors to interact with them and uniquely discover the park through their eyes and works.

Michelle Wilson’s work with bison began this past summer when she was an artist in residence at Riding Mountain National Park in 2016. Every day for two weeks, she observed and captured audio recordings of the bison that inhabit the Lake Audy plain enclosure. Collaborating with conservation officers, members of the local indigenous communities, naturalists and most importantly the bison themselves, Michelle formed a connection to these creatures and their biosphere.…

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The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency provides professional artists with an opportunity to be inspired and create their works in the park’s setting. In return these professional artists invite visitors to interact with them and uniquely discover the park through their eyes and works.

During Diana’s Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency, she will be creating miniature tableau landscapes, which, once photographed, will become part of the series Black Forest (dark waters).

“Normally I work indoors and use merchandise that mimics elements of a natural landscape, but while at Riding Mountain, I will be combining the outdoor environment surrounding the cabin, with products that are normally reserved for studio use,” said Diana.…

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The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency provides professional artists with an opportunity to be inspired and create their works in the park’s setting. In return these professional artists invite visitors to interact with them and uniquely discover the park through their eyes and works.

Curtis L. Wiebe is a multi-disciplinary artist, musician and filmmaker.

Identifiable by flights of the fantastic in settings of winter forests and prairie landscapes, Wiebe’s art is full of imaginative characters brought to life as puppets and elaborate costumes often through the medium of film where music plays an important role.

Curtis will be creating an album of songs by Calvert Wander, a fictional cowboy balladeer from the 1960s. …

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The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency provides professional artists with an opportunity to be inspired and create their works in the park’s setting. In return these professional artists invite visitors to interact with them and uniquely discover the park through their eyes and works.

For many years, Derek’s research has explored the political, ethical and philosophical conditions for contemporary abstraction. He considers painting and drawing as cross-and inter-disciplinary modes of practice and his work is deeply engaged with art history.

During the Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency, Derek will create sculptural objects and photograph them in order to explore landscape and the creative potential of things.…

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The Deep Bay Artists’ Residency provides professional artists with an opportunity to be inspired and create their works in the park’s setting. In return these professional artists invite visitors to interact with them and uniquely discover the park through their eyes and works.

For his residency at the Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency, Ufuk Gueray is interested in using erasure as a method to disrupt his own ideas about artistic productivity. His plan is to create drawings on a daily basis in various locations in the park, only to erase these drawings afterwards. None of the works made during the residency will be documented, and all of the erased drawings will be burned in a campfire at end of the residency.…

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The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency provides professional artists with an opportunity to be inspired and create their works in the park’s setting. In return these professional artists invite visitors to interact with them and uniquely discover the park through their eyes and works.

During her residency, Hannah Green will work on a collection of poetry, Do You Know Where We Are. With humour and irony, this collection explores identity—takes up residence in the lawless space between reality and expectation, departure and arrival, who you are and who you want to be. By cracking open idioms and clichés, these poems challenge the authority of language—show that at the right angle even familiarity can become unexpected.…

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The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency provides professional artists with an opportunity to be inspired and create their works in the park’s setting. In return these professional artists invite visitors to interact with them and uniquely discover the park through their eyes and works.

At its’ heart, Kerri-Lynn Reeves’ work explores the relationship between the social and the material. Stemming from her upbringing on a farm in Southwestern Manitoba. Her work often looks at skill, legacy, and hands-on knowledge. Kerri-Lynn is an arts labourer working as an artist, writer, educator, curator, and organizer. Interested in how the skill of making is situated in our world today, she combines multiple material techniques at a basic level, including various fibre techniques, wood-working, drawing, and watercolour painting with high-tech processes such as digital photography, video, and laser etching.…

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The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency provides professional artists with an opportunity to be inspired and create their works in the park’s setting. In return these professional artists invite visitors to interact with them and uniquely discover the park through their eyes and works.

Through a process of examination and re-contextualisation, Kristen transforms mundane subjects into larger social concerns. During her stay at the Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency, she will complete an installation in textiles. This installation will be comprised of the creation/re-production of more than 100 white woven crushed ‘cone style’ paper cups made of cotton and wax. These cotton cups will be woven on a floor loom beforehand, but dipped in wax, assembled and ‘crushed’ while in residence.…

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The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency provides professional artists with an opportunity to be inspired and create their works in the park’s setting. In return these professional artists invite visitors to interact with them and uniquely discover the park through their eyes and works.

We will all die. Yet our society no longer knows how to deal with death, grief and mourning. Drawn to the stories and histories that tie one individual to another, Carolyn Mount reveals the interconnectedness that shapes our world. Utilizing a variety of tools and mediums including drawing, printmaking, ceramics, textiles or relational means of expression, Mount gives material form to our social or personal experiences.…

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Maurice Mierau has been awarded the Manitoba Arts Council’s 2017 Major Arts Grant. This grant will assist the Winnipeg-based writer to work on the manuscript of his second memoir.

The photo was taken by Alex Kopychko in October 2016 at the front in eastern Ukraine, near Avdiivka. Third from left is Edward Kulinich, a national hero for his volunteer work supporting the Ukrainian army, and for surviving a brutal internment by Russian separatists. Maurice Mierau is on the right, beside his translator, Olga Kalambetova.

Maurice Mierau is the author of Detachment: An Adoption Memoir, which won the 2016 Kobzar Literary Award and the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction.…

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The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency provides professional artists with an opportunity to be inspired and create their works in the park’s setting. In return these professional artists invite visitors to interact with them and uniquely discover the park through their eyes and works.

Reva Stone uses a variety of digital technologies to make work about how biotechnological and robotic practices are changing the very nature of being human. Her work has included pieces such as Imaginal Expression, an endlessly mutating interactive 3D environment, Carnevale 3.0, a robot that she created to explore ideas about the nature of human consciousness, and Portal, a work that combines custom software, video, robotics and mobile phones to create a work that appears to be thinking.…

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Winnipeg, Manitoba. April 20th, 2017. Maurice Mierau has been awarded the Manitoba Arts Council’s 2017 Major Arts Grant. This grant will assist the Winnipeg-based writer to work on the manuscript of his second memoir. His last book, Detachment: An Adoption Memoir, was published by Freehand in 2014, and won the 2016 Kobzar Literary Award as well as the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction.

“We would like to congratulate Maurice Mierau on this prestigious grant.” said Akoulina Connell, CEO of the Manitoba Arts Council. “The body of work Mierau has developed over the course of his career is quite varied, and is a testament to his versatility and power as a writer.”

Maurice Mierau is the author of several books of poetry, including Fear Not, which won the ReLit Award in 2009.…

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The Manitoba Arts Council, in partnership with Brandon University Department of Visual and Aboriginal Art, welcomes sound artist Adrien Lefebvre (www.adrienlefebvre.com) to Manitoba from France for a three-month residency exchange program with La Région Normandie and L’ésam – Ecole Supérieure d’Arts & Médias de Caen/Cherbourg. Working on location at Brandon University, Lefebvre will become immersed in the regional artistic community. The residency extends between September 15 and December 15, 2016, with an exhibition of his work at the Glen P Sutherland Gallery on the Brandon University campus, December 1–15.

The intent of the residency exchange program for visual artists is to facilitate the processes of creation and experimentation, in the context of international exchange and networking.…

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