envision

The context

The organisation

Scarborough Art Gallery currently occupies the ground floor and first floor of a nineteenth-century Italianate Villa on Scarborough’s beautiful Crescent.  

On its ground floor it has two rooms devoted to displaying works from the permanent collection, which includes mainly oils from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and works on paper from the twentieth century.  The Gallery also has a Resource Room which houses art materials, books and dressing-up clothes and is used for regular art workshops.  The Coffee Lounge on the ground floor has a regularly changing display of art by makers living in the Scarborough region.  

The first floor has three rooms devoted to showing temporary exhibitions on a varied range of visual art including sculpture, textiles and paintings.  The exhibitions are either originated in-house, touring shows or partnerships with other galleries.  There are at least four different exhibitions each year, which are supplemented by associated events and talks.


•    Partners and funders

The Gallery is funded by Scarborough Borough Council although applications to the Arts Council are made to fund individual projects or exhibitions.

•    Number of staff and annual turnover

The Gallery is currently part of the Museums & Gallery Section of Scarborough Borough Council’s Leisure and Tourism Service.  Many of the staff work across the Section and all have a remit to support and work towards things and services for the whole Section.  How-ever, the following staff are mainly dedicated to the Gallery:
Curator of Art – 3 days a week
Assistant Curator of Art – full time
2    full time attendants

Website: Scarborough Art Gallery

The situation

What problem or opportunity was the project intended to address? Why does that matter?
 ‘Young Vision’ provided an opportunity for us to find out which parts of the gallery are welcoming to young people and why. This is important because Scarborough Art Gallery is going through a period of change as it moves out of Local Authority control and into a Museums Trust.  As part of this change there are plans that the Gallery building will be transformed into a Museum and Gallery housing collections that include archaeology, natural history and social history as well as art.  
This is a real opportunity to act on information gathered through Young Vision; to en-sure that in the future the gallery provides an accessible and welcoming environment for young visitors and those who are not  ‘confident gallery-goers’.

The idea

The original idea – ‘to find out what young people thought of Scarborough Art Gallery’ was eventually fine-tuned to focus on levels of comfort during the project.  This involved a lengthy period of discussions between Gallery staff, the Chief Executive of the newly formed Museums and Galleries Trust, the artists and engage.  
It became clear that there are a number of variable factors in the possible options for the future of the gallery. This meant that we needed to agree an aim that would be useful and relevant to any future manifestation of the organisation.
After consultation with the Chief Executive of Scarborough Museums Trust and Scarborough Borough Council’s  Marketing Project Officer, it was agreed that it would be useful to learn what factors make young people more comfortable in the building, in order to help the service build it’s core audience and become more accessible.

The project

Planning

Lara Goodband, contacted Rachel and Rachel, as she knew they are both experienced artists and project managers, with a youth specialism. There is no capacity within SAG to run a project of this nature, and no education department, so Lara needed to bring in freelancers to deliver the project. The ideas for content, and contacting the young people were developed between Lara and the artists, based on their pooled knowledge and experience.
There were no young people involved in the planning of this project; this is the first time SAG has worked on this scale with youth groups, so there were no existing relationships with youth organisations, and budgetary constraints made it impossible to take this approach.
The first draft of the plan submitted to engage involved broad investigation of how the gallery could better meet the needs of young people, and included a trip to another gallery, ‘blue sky thinking’ abut their ideal gallery, and workshops to design maps, plans and art-works of their ideas.
Then Lara, Rachel and Rachel all attended the compulsory residential training in Norwich, and began to reinvent the project, with a single more specific aim. A full day discussion took place between the artists with input from Lara, Claire Longrigg and Kathryn Welford (en-gage), in order to agree on the new project plan.
By the end of this day, freelance staff had spent a total of 6 days in planning the project; almost a third of the budget had been spent on negotiating the aim and objectives. There was still a lot of work to be done in terms of recruiting young people, partnership work, lesson planning, workshop preparation, evaluation and project delivery. It became clear that the project would have to be scaled down further, in an effort to work within budget.
It was agreed that Rachel Massey should be the main contact for the project, responsible for disseminating information, overall planning and preparation and evaluation. She worked closely with the rest of the team to develop recruitment strategies, workshop plans, monitor-ing and evaluation plans, and liaise with relevant people: Shirley Collier - Chief Executive Museums and Galleries Trust, Museum and Galleries staff (Shirlie Stone - Marketing Project Officer, Kerry Metcalfe – SAG Front of House Manager), Scarborough Borough Council staff (Rowena Marsden – Arts Development Officer), Youth projects (Youth Offending Team, DIY Collective, Stephen Joseph Theatre Rounders, Foundation Housing), engage (Kathryn Wel-ford, Jo Wheeler).
The one remaining challenge in the planning of the project was the recruitment of young people. The organisations identified above had all expressed an interest in being involved, during the earliest stages of the project planning. However, a combination of factors made the reality rather different; the young people at YOT who were interest were too young (12years), and staff did not feel that the older one’s would be interested. SJT Rounders do not meet during August (the project had originally been planned for the Autumn) – they ran a summer school with our target age group for one week, but none of them were interested in Young Vision. DIY Collective are going through a slightly unstable phase, and are not meeting regularly – their youth worker contacted them all by text message but got no re-sponse. Foundation Housing and e2e (YH Training) identified 5 interested individuals.
This required a change of strategy, as we only had 4 bookings in the week before the project started. Rachel Welford contacted youth workers who she had worked with previously, and managed to find another 7 potential participants. This patchwork recruitment method, combined with budget constraints, meant that partnership work with youth organisations was limited to brief emails and phone calls. We were forced to accept that this would be a necessary weakness in the project, and proceed without any youth workers in attendance at the sessions.

Delivery

There were 4 sessions over 3 days.  
Workshops took place at SAG between 11am and 1pm on 29th, 30th and 31st August 2007 and 2 -5pm on 31st August.
14 young people booked places on the Young Vision project. ; 4 were referred from Foundation Housing and/or YH Training services Ltd, 3 from Scarborough Hip Hop School (Community Education Service), 3 from Youth Arts Training Scheme, 1 from Social Services Residential Care and 3 from word of mouth/ invites from peers.
11 young people came to the first session. 6 attended the remaining three sessions.
Each session followed a pre-determined format, agreed by the artists and laid out in a de-tailed session plan.
29th August 2007
The artists met participants outside the gallery, and asked them to have a look around on their own without any guidance, interaction or advice from artists.    
The artists observed and documented the behaviour of the young people using stills and video camera, notes and sketches – body language, comments etc – in terms of where they appeared comfortable/ uncomfortable.
A selection of observations;
One young person wandered in to SAG with a can of coke, which was gently but firmly re-moved by the attendant.
The group hovered in the entrance hall for some minutes, texting friends, chatting, walking in small circles and glancing into gallery. One participant, Charles, a wheelchair user, talked to his friend about being fed up of always finding stairs everywhere. The friend was very sympathetic. Eventually they went up the stairs in small groups. Charles crawled up the stairs, and didn’t want his chair taking up, saying he was ‘used to it’.
Two young people talked about the painting of ‘old’ Scarborough on the stairway – ‘I like old Scarborough – it looked better then’.
Young people were enthusiastic about the sculptures and readily climbed into them. There was a lot of general banter, and the young people stayed in each pod sculpture for some time. Banter was centred round their experience in the pods.
They were a little unsure as of the correct procedure regarding shoes, and put their shoes back on to walk to the next pod until gallery attendants informed them in a friendly manner that they could just leave shoes in the box and until they had finished looking in them all.
The young people stayed in the larger pod longest, and particularly liked the small compartment, enjoying the difficulty in getting in and out, and the squash when they were in. Charles was determined to participate fully, and climbed in all pods (and the small compartment) despite his disability. I had to ask the last group of young people to come out of the large pod in order to get on with the project. Whilst not wanting to interfere with their visit, they could well have stayed there the whole session if left to their own devices. There were lots of beaming grins as they explored!
All the young people spent between 15 and 30 minutes inside the pods, talking and joking about ‘space ape’. They laughed about the soundtrack inside the pods and made sounds to go with it.  They talked about them looking like a giant womb and feeling ‘reborn’. One participant wanted to buy one.
6 participants walked downstairs and glanced into the permanent collection (the longest visit to the permanent collection was 22 seconds), before sitting in the café. The others remained in the pods, until the artists eventually asked them to come down to the café. Everyone seemed relaxed in the café, talking about Alton Towers, mutual friends, enjoying free tea and coffee.
The artists then led a discussion to find out more about the young people’s experiences. This involved introducing the young people to using two different ‘comfort charts’, and taking part in a group discussion.
Selected observations from participants;
Entrance Hall – ‘it’s not how I expected – it’s more like a normal house when you go in – I thought there would be a room full of pictures. I didn’t know where to go’.
‘one of the men who sits in there looks really grumpy.’
Totally Tactile –
‘It wasn’t what I expected in a gallery – I just expected paintings’
‘someone told me it was a mint exhibition, and then I saw them and I thought, oh’
‘I felt a bit scared when I saw them because I wasn’t expecting it’
‘the music inside them was really scary’
Permanent Collection
‘ I didn’t go in to the long gallery, because although I like pictures of old Scarborough, it just seemed tucked away’
‘the pictures on the walls put me off.. like… oh no more pictures’
‘yeah – like, oh right, pictures, I’ve seen them before, I’ve got pictures, …….whatever’
‘it looks like a really old room.’
‘it’s really dark – it needs something bright in there’
‘sculptures are better than paintings – it needs more sculptures in the middle of the room to make you go in there’
The Café
‘ the café is OK – the paintings are  a bit weird, but it’s not so dark’
‘ free tea and coffee is the best thing’
Participants were then introduced to the idea of making art works to express or address some of their comments, possibly inspired by Totally Tactile or the Permanent Collection.The artists described the comfort charts, and scrap book diary, their role and function. Participants were encouraged to plot their levels of comfort on two charts – one representing different spaces within the building, and one representing a time-line.
Young people then took part in an exercise to elicit ideas about their first impressions of the gallery – they were asked to write observations on post-it notes and stick them on the gal-lery walls.
Artists then asked the young people to design artworks (possibly ‘dens’ inspired by Totally Tactile) to express something about their levels of comfort. All the participants had ideas about how the Permanent Collection could be made more appealing to young people, and created designs based on their ideas.
30th August 2007
The main aim for this session was for participants to begin to make installation art works based on the descriptive words on the post-it notes – take inspiration from the Totally Tactile exhibition – make ‘dens’ that represent the way the young people feels about this area in the gallery, or this art work.
Participants arrived gradually after 11am, and the session eventually started at 11.15am with 6 young people. The artists had spent the previous afternoon sourcing and gathering materials and equipment, based on the designs made by the young people. They presented their construction plans to the young people, and asked each group to review their ideas, in terms of materials available, and how their idea related to ‘comfort in SAG’. Some plans had to be adapted, for a range of reasons; to fit with the aim/ concept of the project, to fit within time constraints, to fit within budget, to be achievable with a much smaller group of partici-pants.
We later learned during the evaluation interviews that some young people found this process of compromise easier than others, but there was not much time to explore their feelings about it, as there was only one remaining session in which to create all the artworks.
Participants worked in groups with the artists to get started on their projects – those that were waiting for assistance were encouraged to continue working in the scrap book diary and on the comfort charts. In reality there was never much time to develop the scrap book diary, but, participants did make a couple of photo-montages.
Participants also met Lara, Curator, for an informal question and answer session. They ex-plained their ideas for their own work, and asked questions and had discussions about the work in the gallery and the running of the gallery.
31st August 2007
This last day of the project was a full day, from 11am – 5pm. All six participants stayed and worked for the duration of the day, keen to finish their artworks for display in the gallery. They worked with motivation and only required occasional technical advice from the artists. Rachel Massey interviewed them all during the afternoon, using engage evaluation forms. They were visited twice by staff from Foundation Housing, who were extremely encouraging about the work they were doing.
 

Outcomes

Impact on participants

Communication  - 4 young people felt they had not learned very much about communication, 1 felt they had no learned anything, and 1 felt they had learned an ‘OK’ amount.
The young people mostly felt that they already knew everything about communication so didn’t have anything to learn. This was challenged by the artists at times, eg. One participant said she had nothing to learn about communication, and then described a situation where she had felt disappointed about not being able to complete her original design idea, and had not talked to the artists about her disappointment. She later recognised that better communication skills could have helped her deal with this differently.
Working with others – 4 young people felt that had not learned very much about working with others, 1 felt they had learned nothing and one felt ‘OK’. They all said that they were already good at working with others, and everyone was really nice so there was no conflict.
Being reliable – 4 participants felt they had not learned very much about being reliable in this project. 2 felt that they had been more reliable than normal, especially considering that some of their friends had dropped out.
Being Creative - All the participants felt they had learned more about being creative, about ‘what art is’, and about being comfortable in SAG. 3 participants felt they had learned ‘fairly’ and 3 felt they had learned ‘OK’.
Leadership – there was not much opportunity for leadership in Young Vision; participants worked collaboratively, and the time-scale was too short for leaders too emerge. This was reflected in the feedback from participants – none of them felt they had learned about leadership.
These findings reflect the fact that this was a very short intense project, with little time to explore or develop any of the issues outlined above.
Artists observed changes in the behaviour of the participants as they became more comfort-able in SAG – chatting more loudly, relaxing in the Permanent Collection not just the Re-source Room. Participants seemed to enjoy sharing ideas and opinions about the work in SAG throughout the project, not just during guided sessions.
Staff from Foundation Housing noticed that two of the participants were particularly bright and cheerful on the Monday following Young Vision, and were talking about attending the preview event in two weeks time.
Three young people attended the preview of ‘Spotlight on St Ives - from the Arts Council Collection.’ One came on her own, and felt proud that people were admiring her work. She spent 20 minutes looking at the St Ives show, and said she liked some of it. Two young peo-ple came together, and one of them brought his relatives, who had never been to the Gallery before. They told him that they were really proud of him, and spent half an hour looking at his work and the display from the Permanent Collection.  The artists felt that it was a great achievement for three challenging young people, with unpredictable lives to remain committed to the project and return to a formal event two weeks later.

Impact on others involved

Corinna Sutherland - Foundation Housing Activities Officer; ‘you can tell that this project has gone a bit deeper by the way the young people have responded and by the excellent work they have made. This makes me think it would be good to do a project like this every six months’
Rachel Massey – Project manager/ artist; ‘I am proud of this project…. I was so happy when the young people came to the preview, and stayed for a while… I was pleased that visitors could see the value in ‘looking through young people’s eyes’…. I think we discovered some useful information for the organisation to take forward into the future… I think it was all really worthwhile!’
Lara Goodband – Curator of Art; ‘the best thing about the project was seeing teenagers in the Gallery – seeing their work in amongst the collection displays – meeting and talking to the young people.’
Gallery visitor; ‘I understand why you want to get teenagers in, and I can see it’s worked, but I don’t really like seeing their stuff all over the gallery – maybe I’m just old fashioned.’
Rachel Welford – Artist: ‘The residential made me really question our plans and devise new versions that really grappled hard with the project aim and embedded evaluation as an integral part of the project. I felt I learned an enormous amount at the residential that will continue to be very useful in the future. I also perceived that the young people were mainly motivated by the chance to make exciting artwork (dens), and contributed to the evaluation ‘scrap-book’ and comfort charts rather begrudgingly.’
An interpretative display was set up in the Resource Room during the two week exhibition period. Visitors were invited to write their comments about the project. Comments included;
‘Fabulous and inspiring! Looking through young eyes is very enlightening. Adults are so seri-ous!’
‘V. interesting project. Did the young people have chance to talk to other gallery visitors in order to exchange ideas?’
‘Very interesting work. Chidren’s art is very underrated. They see things with such a fresh eye.’
‘Very good to keep young people interested in the gallery.’

Institutional change

Lara Goodband, Curator or Art;
‘Scarborough Art Gallery is already going through huge institutional change, which will affect the remit of current staff as we move from Council to Trust control.  As it is currently unclear what these changes will be it is hard to say whether the Curator of Art will be able to adopt different practices.  However, I would eventually like to see more engagement between the Front of House and all visitors as I feel that the young people’s original dislike of the displays from the permanent collection were altered mainly by the opportunity to talk about them to the artists.  I would also like to see a regular rolling programme of ‘artistic interventions’ within this space that would appeal to young people and keep in contact with this group through the programming of such things.  However, this would require additional funding and adequate staff time.’

Lessons learned

What worked and what didn’t

1.    we successfully found out which parts of the gallery were comfortable for young people, and which weren’t and why.
2.    the participants made the gallery more appealing fro their peers - we made a noticeable and significant change to SAG for two weeks, temporarily changing the tone of the Permanent Collection – Lara and Claire were extremely pleased with this change, despite some negative comments from visitors who felt that they preferred it to look more traditional
3.    the participants and artists had fun working together.
4.    the participants created some really good artworks - 5 out of 6 of the participants that completed the project were proud of their achievements, and expressed enthusiasm about attending the St Ives preview to show off their work.
5.    once the young people made the effort to look at individual paintings in the Permanent Collection they expressed interesting, original opinions about them and 3 participants ac-tively enjoyed looking at them – ‘they are better than photos’.
Identify practical ideas (including some of the things done in sessions that were particularly successful).  
•    The sessions were planned in a lot of detail with constant referral to the project aim. This helped the artists to keep the sessions focussed and achieve a lot in a short time.
•    The two artists are experienced in working with young people and each other, so they were able to move the young people’s s ideas forwards quickly.
•    The café, with free tea and coffee, provided a useful ‘time-out’ space for young people to take a break from the intense project.
Identify things that didn’t work in hindsight, mistaken assumptions, missed opportunities and any other things that need to be taken into account.
•    Financial constraints - Whilst the meticulous and detailed planning required by en-gage (as exemplified at the training weekend), had a direct result on the success and potential legacy of the project, it consumed a significant portion of the grant, and limited the amount of work that could be done with young people. In the end the time and money spent on project planning and preparation seemed out of balance with the time and money spent on actually delivering the project. The project man-agers/ artists have worked at rates well below their normal daily fee, in order to en-sure the success of the project, in effect, subsidising the project. Obviously this would not present the same problem to an organisation who can put salaried staff time in to the project – maybe in the future, additional funding could be made avail-able to fund freelance project managers, where required.
•    Partnership work with youth organisations was limited – there was not enough money or time to develop new partnerships. Fortunately the project managers/artists have worked closely with individuals within Community Education Service, and this made communication easier.
•    All of the participants, project organisers, gallery staff and staff from Foundation Housing felt that the project was too short. Once again, we anticipated that this would be the case, but had to work within budget. It was due to the detailed plan-ning and commitment of the artists, and enthusiastic involvement of the participants that we managed to achieve the interesting and inspiring exhibition of works in such a short space of time. However, there was very little time to testing or developing ideas, and the artists had to be very directive in their approach. This led to disappointment from two participants who were not able to bring their original designs to fruition due to lack of time and money. They accepted a simpler, cheaper version of their idea, developed by the artists, but would have benefited from more time to re-solve the problem themselves.
•    There was not enough time for working in the project diary, or group discussion/reflection
•    The theme of the project presented a barrier to one participant – one young person did not feel able to take part in the project, and dropped out after the first session because she had suffered from clinical depression. It was extremely difficult for her to think about how she was feeling, or what her levels of comfort were. We only be-came aware of this towards the end of the project. If we had anticipated the problem we could have placed less emphasis on feelings, and asked participants which areas of the gallery they liked / disliked and why.
•    The amount of support from ‘engage’ was higher than we had expected. Whilst it is always useful to have guidance and input, it would have been preferable to have ac-cess to more funding to deliver the project, and less funding for additional training and support. The residential weekend was extremely valuable, as was the time spent discussing the project on the train (Lara, Rachel, Rachel and Kath travelled together). The lengthy follow up meetings and feedback, in order to revise the proposal took a lot of time and money. It was useful to have Kathryn’s support and help during the first session with the young people.
•    The target audience, (as specified by ‘engage’) were challenging young people. This factor needs to be considered in future planning, to accommodate the potential needs of a more natural audience. Scarborough Art Gallery does not currently have any youth audience, and the views of this particular group of 10 young people does not necessarily represent the needs of the Gallery’s natural young audience. How-ever, we have been able to draw broad conclusions from this action research to in-form future planning.

Next steps

Shirley Collier, Chief Executive;
‘Here are my comments about the Young Vision evaluation.

I think it's a thought-provoking piece of research.  It would be interesting to know what other museums and galleries have gleaned from action research both with more natural young audiences as well as with this hard to reach/challenging group.

My overall feeling, is that there are lessons here that we can use to build up more natural audiences amongst young people, and over time, once we've managed to develop younger audiences, we will be better placed to work on the social inclusion end of things, ie with more challenged youngsters.

Some of the ideas I had having read the report were as follows;

1) this age group prefers to see art when others are not around (someone explained this to me on the night of the private view, hence building the den with the torch so that they could look at the paintings but not be observed).  To address this we could consider extending opening hours into the evening, once a month, specifically for that age group?

2) this age group seems to find single works less off-putting than a whole room full of paint-ings.  Some kind of intervention (such as quick chat in front of one painting by the curator) might help to address this issue, if planned in conjunction with 1 above.

3) they want to use time spent in the gallery as social time (as all users do).  What other things do they expect in a social space?  Music?
This would not be difficult to provide, nor prohibitively expensive, again if it were part of a particular time when they visited solely.

4) they like free drinks. If in the future, a teenagers' night were sponsored, we could offer free drinks.

5) they like to know the "rules".  Maybe they should be invited to a workshop where they write the rules.  We can explain our rules, they might like to invent a few of their own, par-ticularly if 1 above is feasible.

These are the kind of areas where I can see that the project might have an impact.’

Images

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Appendix

Young Vision  - Summary of Research Findings

Aim; to work with 10 young people aged 14 -18, to find out where they feel more or less comfortable within Scarborough Art Gallery (SAG) and to document how this changes over three days.
The young people will make their own site specific art works in amongst displays from the permanent collection.

Who was involved
Project managers – Lara Goodband, Curator of Art, Rachel Massey, Artist / arts consultant, Rachel Welford Artist / arts consultant

Young people - 11 young people attended part or all of the Young Vision project. 3 were referred from Foundation Housing and/or YH Training services Ltd, 3 from Scarborough Hip Hop School (Community Education Service), 3 from Youth Arts Training Scheme, and 2 from word of mouth/ invites from peers.

Dates and times
There were 4 sessions over 3 days. 
Workshops took place at SAG between 11am and 1pm on 29th, 30th and 31st August 2007 and 2 -5pm on 31st August.

Factors that made the young people less comfortable in the Gallery

•    Not knowing where to go when they first arrived – the entrance hall confused them, as it didn’t look the way they thought a gallery should look ‘it’s more like a normal house than a gallery’
‘There were no signs telling us where to go, or what to do, or what to expect’.
‘one of the men who sits in there looks really grumpy.’
•    Silence – the young people didn’t like the big quiet rooms
‘are you even allowed to talk in here – it’s like a library’
•    The low lighting – the young people didn’t even want to go in to the rooms on the ground floor – ‘they just look dark and boring’
•    The stairs – one wheelchair user felt disappointed that as soon as he got in the door he was faced by a huge staircase.
•    Feeling ‘different’ -
‘There’s no-one else like us in here – no-one young.’
•    Lack of sculpture – one young person felt that he would be more inclined to go into the Long Gallery if there was sculpture, or some other 3D work in the middle of the room – ‘paintings are not so interesting’
‘sculptures are better than paintings – it needs more sculptures in the middle of the room to make you go in there’
•    Admission charges – ‘none of my mates will come to see my work if they have to pay. You wouldn’t pay to come in here, because you don’t know if you’re going to like the art and it could be waste of money’


Factors that made the young people more comfortable in the Gallery

•    The coffee lounge and resource room – all the participants were quickly at ease in these less formal spaces.
•    ‘Totally Tactile’ – not all the participants were immediately comfortable with this work, as it challenged their preconceptions about what art should be, and how you should behave in a gallery. Once they got over these initial reservations, they all enjoyed ‘claiming these spaces as their own’.
•    Lighter brighter rooms – all the young people felt that the temporary exhibition spaces were more comfortable, regardless of the exhibition – ‘they are brighter and lighter’. This was confirmed by the 3 participants who attended the ‘St Ives’ preview.
•    Looking at the art more closely – finding their own narratives in the works – once the participants were persuaded to look at the works from the permanent collection, they appreciated the ideas, skill and beauty of the paintings.
•    Having their own ideas about the art – The participants enjoyed imagining stories about characters in the paintings. They did not appear to have a sense of reverence or history in their approach, but enjoyed creating their own interpretations.
•    Learning about the art – participants felt that finding out about the art helped them enjoy looking at it. This worked best when they had already looked at the work themselves, and devised questions about it.
•    Learning about the gallery – participants felt more comfortable in the gallery when they learned about who owned the work, who selected exhibitions, how the gallery is run – most of the participants did not understand terminology like ‘permanent collection’, ‘temporary exhibition programme’.  
•    Friendly staff – ‘everyone who works here has been really nice’
•    Levels of comfort increased over the duration of the project – the participants gradually made their own art works, designed to attract their peers into the gallery, and to provide stimulation to look at the work in new ways (from higher or lower view points, through spy holes in screens, through prism viewers, or whilst hidden a bright and shiny ‘den’). They all felt increasingly comfortable in the gallery as the project progressed – this was demonstrated by the fact that 3 participants returned to the gallery to the next preview – one on her own, one with family and one with a friend who had visited the gallery before.

Recommendations – some suggestions that could make the Gallery more comfortable for young people (and other visitors)

•    Clear simple signs, without jargon, explaining what is in each space
•    One day a month where music is played in the gallery -  live music (local musicians), DJ’s, CD’s, Open Mic’ etc (eg the last Saturday of every month)
•    Improved lighting conditions
•    Interpretative material that provokes questions about the narratives in the paintings as a way to stir initial interest
•    Public talks that relate the work in the permanent collection to contemporary ideas, and artists
•    A programme of educational activities aimed at young people – Foundation Housing are keen to develop the partnership
•    Artist interventions, residencies etc to investigate the permanent collection in new ways

6    Statistical information for envision’s Grants for the Arts Activity Report
6.1    Where did your project take place?
Did your activity happen in a specific place (or places)?
    a    Your activity happened in a specific place (or places)
If your activity happened in a particular place, please give us the address and postcode of
where most of your activity took place.  
Full address
     Scarborough Art Gallery, The Crescent, Scarborough

Full postcode    Y    O 11
1    1        2    P    Ww

If the place where your activity happened does not have an address (for example, it was in a park), please tell us where it took place and give us the name of the lo-cal authority area instead.
      

Other places where your activity happened
If your activity happened in other places, please give us the postcodes of each place.  If any of the places do not have a postcode, please give us the name of the local authority area instead. We have made space for you to give details of up to five other places.  Please use a separate sheet if you need more and write ‘See attachment’ on the first line below.

Full postcode or local authority area:      
Full postcode or local authority area:      
Full postcode or local authority area:      
Full postcode or local authority area:      
Full postcode or local authority area:      

If you have filled in part a, go to question 3. If part a is not relevant to your activity, please fill in part b.

    b    Your activity was not specific to a place
If your activity was not specific to a place, please give details. (For example, ‘This activity happened across a wide area or across a region’, ‘This activity took place on the internet’ or ‘We produced a publication’.)

     

6.2        How many people do you estimate benefited from the activity?
Please give an estimate for your activity.

‘Taking part’ means doing the activity. ‘Audience’ includes people going to an exhibition or performance, and people getting access to work that is printed, recorded, broadcast or on the internet.

This activity    Number
    
Artists    2     
    
Others taking part    11     
    
Audience         

6.3        What are the age ranges of the people who benefited from your activity? Mark all relevant boxes.
    
     
 All age ranges
    
 
 Children under five
    
 
 Children (five to 11)
    
 
 Young people (12 to 15)
    
x     Young people (16 to 19)
    
     
 Young people (20 to 24)
    
     
 Adults (25 to 64)
    
     
 Adults (65 and over)

6.4    Was your activity directed at, or particularly relevant to, any of the following groups of people? Please mark any relevant boxes.
    
     Disabled people
    
x     People at risk of ‘social exclusion’ (not being able to take part fully in society because of, for example, poverty, prejudice or isolation)
    
    
     
 Asian or Asian British (includes Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani
 or any other Asian background)
    
    
     
 Black or Black British (includes African, Caribbean)
    
     
 Chinese
    
     
 Any other ethnic group
 (Please describe below in no more than 10 words.)
    
      

6.5    Please give details of the results of your activity.

This activity    Number
    
Number of performance or exhibition days    14
    
Number of new products or commissions*

         
    
Period of employment for artists (in days)    4
    
Number of sessions for education, training or taking part. ‘Taking part’ means doing the activity (Divide the day into three sessions - morning, afternoon and evening. A ‘session’ is any one of, or part of one of, these. For ex-ample, a half-day education workshop would be one ses-sion.)    
    4