Tag Archives: Museums

ARTiSTORY launches its 2023 creatives to a global audience

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ARTiSTORY has revealed its 2023 Spring Summer global arts and cultural trends and themes to licensees, retailers and DTC brands across the world.

The online global event on 6 April 2022 presented new collections inspired by trend research and the wealth of artists and artefacts in the archives of ARTiSTORY’s museum partners: The National Gallery, London; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The National Palace Museum, Taipei; Dunhuang Inspiration, China and the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Spain.

In addition, ARTiSTORY announced its collaboration with the Benaki Museum, Greece for a multi-year, global licensing programme, and a new partnership with the presitigious Parsons School of Design at The New School. The New York based university, which provides world-class education in design and art history, will work with ARTiSTORY’s Global Artists Programme to reinterpret museum pieces for a commercial context.

As for serving the global market, ARTiSTORY announced strategic partnership with Sevens Marketing Consulting. The two entities will work together to help Chinese DTC companies build their brand and increase sales in the global markets.

ARTiSTORY’s North America office also shared news of two new deals with Ruggable, a high-end DTC rug company and Jade City Foods, a specialty food manufacturer, who will be both working with ARTiSTORY’s museum partners for co-branded products.

Four new trend-led themes were launched: ‘Marvellous Menagerie’, ‘She Created’, ‘Glitz and Glam’, and a refreshed collection for ARTiSTORY’s popular ‘Botanical Affairs’ theme.

The new collections of prints and patterns are inspired by some of the world’s greatest artists, including Peter Paul Rubens, George Barbier, Clara Wolcott Driscoll, Maria Sybilla Merian and William Morris, with their iconically beautiful designs of florals and animals. Beatrix Potter and her famous bunnies celebrate the upcoming Year of the Rabbit and Easter. John James Audubon and George Stubbs bring together our natural environment, along with stories and legends of the Silk Road.

Female focused ‘She Created’ celebrates the work of Guan Daosheng, the oldest known artist in the collections, dating from the 13th century.

‘Glitz and Glam’ features splendid headdresses made by Chinese court artists and the flappers and feathers of the 1920s, bringing these beautiful crowns and jewels roaring back to life and ready to embrace the dazzling 2020s.

The collections are now available to licence across multiple product categories and territories, supported with storytelling content for merchandising, marketing and immersive experiences.

Yizan He, Founder and CEO of ARTiSTORY, says: “The annually refreshed themes are developed in line with the global fashion trends, and inspired by the collecitons from our museum partners. Via licensing, retailers and consumer brands can work closely with ARTiSTORY to develop attrative new product lines that are appealing to shoppers.  The ‘artifacts to merchandise’ capabilty is a key competitive strength of ARTiSTORY.”

Natasha Dyson, co-founder & licensing director, ARTiSTORY, also commented: “This was our second creative launch and we were very happy to welcome so many new attendees, in additional to those who re-joined us.  As well as presenting stunning designs our themes highlighted some important issues, such as sustainability and protecting the planet and its wildlife. We hope to encourage brands and retailers to create eco-friendly and sustainable products that also match the ethos of our museum partners”.

 

ARTiSTORY launches artist collaborations programme

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Art and cultural IP specialist ARTiSTORY has taken the next step in its licensing model by launching its artist collaborations programme.

The partnerships with living artists will see three-way co-branding between brands, artists and museums and gives established and emerging artists the chance to draw inspiration from the rich cultural and artistic treasures of the archives of ARTiSTORY’s museum partners, and create fresh, contemporary artwork in their own unique personal style.

By bringing together cultural IP, international artists and global brands, ARTiSTORY will further expand museums’ licensing programmes and service the rapid increase in demand for art and cultural IP through its “Artefacts to Merchandise” and digital storytelling model.

“This is a win-win for everyone,” says Alicia Chen, Country Manager of ARTiSTORY’s Singapore Office, who is managing the artists programme. “Artists get the opportunity to be associated with the world’s top museums, brands can provide consumers with access to their favourite artists via uniquely designed products endorsed by museums, and museums can engage new audiences, particularly a younger demographic who follow and support their favourite designers on social media.”

Two famous international artists, Ukrainian artist Sveta Dorosheva and British artist Laura Greenan, are working on new artwork inspired by ARTiSTORY’s museum partner Dunhuang. Dunhuang was an essential meeting point on the Silk Road for travellers passing between East and West one thousand years ago and this gathering of diverse people and cultures led to the creation of great legacies such as the world-famous stucco sculptures and the murals of Mogao Caves, which are now providing rich inspiration for artists to continue the cultural creativity of Dunhuang for a new era.

Originally from Ukraine and currently based in Israel, Sveta’s narrative art and detailed illustration reveals her fascination with myth and fairytales. Sveta has published best-selling books and has been shortlisted twice for the World Illustration Awards. For ARTiSTORY’s artist programme, Sveta is creating canopies, murals and flying images of Dunhuang, taking inspiration from the murals of the Mogao Caves.

Laura Greenan’s style has been described as “Jelly Candy Pop Art”. Her vibrant, joyful illustrations include elements of psychedelia, Art Deco and fantasy, and she takes influences from the 1960s as well as current popular culture including computer games and films. Laura has previously worked with Vogue Japan, Francis Wren Candle and The Wall Street Journal. She is currently working on creations inspired by Dunhuang’s architecture, canopies and Mojing patterns which will be licensed by ARTiSTORY for co-branded products.

ARTiSTORY strengthens UK sales team with the appointment of Caroline High

ARTiSTORY to celebrate its first birthday at Brand Licensing Europe

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Exhibiting for the first time at BLE, licensing agency ARTiSTORY will be marking its first anniversary at the event.

The company was established last year in the middle of the global pandemic by licensing entrepreneurs Yizan He and Natasha Dyson, with support from Sinofaith IP Investment Company (SIPIC). Twelve months on, ARTiSTORY employs nearly 50 sales, marketing and creative staff in offices in London, Barcelona, Shanghai, Singapore, Beijing and Boston, and has launched its first creative trends and themes ready to be licensed on behalf of its cultural partners.

ARTiSTORY’s first museum partner, The National Palace Museum, Taipei came on board in February 2021, quickly followed by cultural institutions across the world: the National Gallery, London; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Dunhuang, China and most recently, the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

By securing multi-year master licenses with its museum partners, and through its unique “Artefacts to Merchandise” business model, ARTiSTORY creates and licenses on-trend, contemporary prints and patterns inspired by some of the most celebrated artworks in the world. In addition, ARTiSTORY helps global retailers and consumer brands tap into the growing interest in art and cultural content from younger audiences, by providing storytelling content in engaging formats, such as videos, live streaming from museums, immersive shop windows, and pop-up stores.

ARTiSTORY is looking forward to welcoming retailers, brands and manufacturers in all product categories to its stand, B219, which features artwork from its latest style guides.

“I’m so proud of what we’ve achieved in a year”, says Natasha Dyson, Co-Founder and Licensing Director of ARTiSTORY, “Securing five fantastic museum partners and building a global team has been hard work, but at the same time very rewarding. Now we can’t wait to ‘wow’ licensees with our 2022 global creative themes at BLE”.

Yizan He, Co-Founder & CEO of ARTiSTORY, adds: “It’s been my vison for many years to bring art and cultural licensing to a global audience.  Setting up ARTiSTORY has been an incredible journey so far, and with more museum partners joining us soon, and artist collaborations in the pipeline, we’re set to have another busy year ahead.”

Heritage Month | Modern history: The Cartoon Museum and the role of museums in a post-pandemic world

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There’s no question that the pandemic had a huge and still reverberating impact on the country’s cultural and heritage sector, forcing shut the doors of establishments across the UK, and applying a financial squeeze on an industry largely dependent on footfall and wallets of the nation’s leisure and tourism market.

According to the latest research from Art Fund – having drawn together some 400 responses from museum directors and museum professionals, the most pressing concern for almost all organisations across the country is safe reopening and attracting audiences back. In fact, 85 per cent of directors have expressed concern over the ability to attract visitors upon the continued easing of restrictions.

Among the many to be hit by the pandemic was London’s Cartoon Museum, an institution that shares strong ties not only with the cultural and heritage sector, but the licensing space, too – housing some of the most iconic comics and cartoons to have populated popular culture of the modern era.

Last year, the museum found itself the focus of a fundraising campaign to help keep its doors open – when doors were allowed to reopen, of course – that had ignited the passions of the comic book and cartoon fan communities across the country. The museum is now happy to report that those doors have firmly swung back open, and the museum is already welcoming back visitors from schools and pre-booked groups looking to get their cultural fix this year.

But from the pandemic, suggests the team, a new era for museums, and the cultural and heritage sector overall, could be arising, as organisations are forced to look towards local communities and audiences and less on the tourist trade. 

Here, Licensing.biz continues its look into the heritage sector and catches up with The Cartoon Museum’s Director, Joe Sullivan, to uncover the museum’s learnings through Covid-19 and what the future role of the museum could like in a post-pandemic world.

Hello Joe, it’s good to catch up with you again, and under happier circumstances with the museum now reopened! What has reopening the museum been like for you? What has reaction been like from visitors and public?

It has been wonderful to finally reopen to the public after another enforced lengthy closure during the Winter. During the downtime we worked hard on enhancing the museum to make it even better for our visitors – painting floors and walls, boxing noisy pipes off, hanging comic art in our learning space, revitalizing the shop, and putting up two new exhibitions. Visitors have enjoyed coming back to the site over the past month, with half term particularly busy, and it has been great to chat with people about cartoons again in person.

A really encouraging thing for us is that we have had a lot of first-time visitors. We hope that this continues as we bed into our new home properly (we still haven’t had a complete year open at the new site), and as people start to feel more comfortable leaving the house. Reopening has also been tinged with sadness however – we lost our Front of House Manager, Alison Brown, to COVID-19 in January. She was the heart and soul of the museum for 14 years and we all miss her terribly.

Can you talk us through some of the latest developments for the museum? You’ve mentioned some new exhibitions – can you talk us through these and what reception has been like so far?

 The two new exhibitions have been received fantastically, and I feel like our visitors can see the direction of travel we are taking and are enthused by it. By taking a larger theme – such as protest in the case of V for Vendetta: Behind the Mask – we can connect with visitors in a more personal way. 

The V exhibition not only displays incredible high-quality original art and rarely-seen film designs, it also encourages visitors to reflect on the world of V, how it relates to the world now, and what a subject like protest means to them individually.

We are very lucky with V as David Lloyd, the artist, is a close friend of the museum (he very kindly auctioned an original V page as a fundraising donation to our survival appeal last year). His support through the exhibition has been invaluable, allowing us to really dig into how V was made, and why certain design choices were made.

This focus on people stories and more universal themes crosses over to our In-Focus exhibition, Natasha Natarajan: FML Comics, a display of the work of British-Indian web cartoonist and animator Natasha Natarjan. The first two people through the door on the day we reopened were two older visitors who had travelled all the way from Scotland, one of whom went away grasping a copy of Natasha Natarajan’s FML Comics book. I was delighted to see this!

The book – which is linked to our current In-Focus display – is full of frank, funny, very personal cartoons about Natasha’s experience as a young millennial woman in modern London. The fact that people from a different demographic and part of the UK related so strongly to Natasha’s work really showed the strength of the stories and art we are sharing, and how it can connect to people’s experiences universally.

 You’ve also mentioned the return to learning and engagement work with young people. What does this look like for the museum? What spurred the decision to return to this kind of work through the museum, and is this indicative of a new ‘post-pandemic’ role of museums and their position in the community?

Engagement work is my personal passion, and has been very high on the agenda since I came to the museum. The great thing about cartooning is it has a very easy ‘in’ – anyone can pick up a pencil, and our collection ranges from the finely engraved detail work of Hogarth to the comedic minimum-line doodles of Times cartoonist (and Museum founder) Mel Calman. The point this makes to me is that anyone can pick up a pencil and draw a cartoon.

Alongside restarting our cartooning workshops in an online form (we hope to return to physical workshops in the summer), we have spent the last few months building local partnerships in our local London borough, Westminster. Westminster has one of the highest indices of deprivation in London (the gap between richest and poorest areas) and it is essential that the museum serves and represents all of our local audiences.

We recently started a project with local youth centres called Life Under Lockdown, which works with local young people to draw comic strips telling their personal stories of their lockdown experiences. We will collect these for the future but will also compile them into a comic book to give to participants and libraries, and will hopefully display some of the work either on the museum site or on our website. 

Our team attended a street festival during the May bank holiday, taking cartoon and drawing resources with them for local families to take part in, and we are currently planning a really exciting local offer for the summer.

So, the big question: What does running a museum post-pandemic look like today? How do you think the public’s method of engaging with heritage and history has changed over the course of the pandemic, and what are you guys doing to tap into the new ‘lay of the land’?

Running a museum right now is based on balancing hope against financial pragmatism! The reality is that it will be a slow road back for visitor numbers, especially as foreign tourism will be absent for a while longer, and it isn’t certain that there will not be further lockdowns.

It is important that we are careful with our spending as 70 per cent of our income is through the door, and we have no idea when fluctuations and growth on that front will happen. On the other side is the hope – we want to be open so people can come in, and we have to move forward hoping that all of the doom and gloom lifts!

During the pandemic a lot more audiences went online, and at the times where there haven’t been lockdowns, people are not travelling far to go on outings. We need to ensure local audiences can find us and enjoy themselves, and we need to keep our online offer in mind.

We have had good success with our free downloadable drawing resources and our online workshops have reached a wider audience than we have done in the past, so we will be keeping a part-online approach to our engagement work in the future.

What is the role of a museum in today’s culture?

I believe a museum should form the hub of its community, both in terms of topic (in our case cartoon and comic artists) and locality (for us Westminster, and London). For a long time museums have been unique in that they are considered a trusted source of information. The work by academics over the past few years that has led into the so-called ‘culture war’ have started to challenge that, both for good and bad, as questions are being asked of the truth presented and how truly representative they are of Western Europe in the 21st Century.

I personally think that museums need to continue to be upheld as arbiters of truth, but to do that they need to take that responsibility seriously and ensure they are fully representative of the people, audiences, objects and stories that they champion.

 What’s the next big move for you guys? What does the future have in store for the Cartoon Museum?

Excitingly, we are currently pulling together our exhibitions programme for the second half of 2022, and getting ready to announce our next In-Focus exhibition that starts in August. We are also looking forward to getting schools and events back in the building!

With a slightly wider lens, we are beginning a period of collections work that will audit our current collection to understand exactly what we have, and the stories that it tells. This will feed into new collection policies that inform what we will collect and display, to ensure we can tell as full and representative a story of the cartoon art form in Britain as possible in the future.

Spring budget | Retail restart support, extended furlough, and £300m more for the Culture Recovery Fund

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A restart programme to support retailers reopening next month and a £300 million culture recovery fund have been announced in a budget described as the Government’s “use of the full fiscal firepower of the country,” by Chancellor Rishi Sunak this afternoon.

Among the first issues addressed by Sunak as he outline the plans for the 2021 budget – billed as a ‘budget of our time’ – as England makes its preparations to ease out of lockdown, was the return to business for the country’s non-essential retailers.

Under a Restart Programme described by Sunak, non-essential retailers who will be on track to have suffered a 17 week closure through the country’s third lockdown, will be offered a £6,000 grant to help them get them moving forward again.

The support will be part of a £5 billion scheme for businesses across the country, adding to the total direct cash support system for business to now total £25bn over the course of the pandemic.

For hospitality and leisure businesses, the grant has been increased to £18,000 in accordance to the staggered re-opening and social restrictions that will be enforced as they return to operation. Business rates for such businesses will remain 100 per cent suspended for these businesses for the next three months, at which point rates will be discounted by two thirds for the remaining nine months of the year.

Meanwhile, the Culture Recovery Fund which provides financial support for music venues, independent cinemas, museums, galleries, theatres, and heritage sites as they weather the financial storm of the pandemic, will receive a boost of £300 million.

The first recipients of support from a fun that now totals £1.87bn were detail in October last year, with over 1,385 theatres, museums, and cultural organisations across England benefitting from a £257 million share of the fund.

The Prime Minister’s roadmap out of lockdown has also raised hopes around the return of the live music scene, with June 21st earmarked as the date of full relaxation on any and all coronavirus restrictions.

Elsewhere, a final key point to have arisen in Sunak’s afternoon budget address was the introduction of a increase to corporation tax from 2023 to 25 per cent. The tax will be applied to profits of the businesses in excess of £250,000. Companies with profits of less than £50,000 will remain at 19 per cent corporation tax.

“It’s a tax rise on company profits, but only on the larger more profitable companies, and only in two years’ time,” said Sunak.

The Chancellor also went on to confirm that the furlough scheme will be extended until the end of September with employees set to continue to receive 80 per cent of their wages until the scheme ends, but with firms asked to contribute 10 per cent in July, and 20 per cent in August and September as it begins to wind down.

Chris Brook-Carter, chief executive of retail industry charity retailTRUST, said: “Retail will have an absolutely vital role to play in tackling issues like youth employment and social mobility as we move out of this crisis so decisions taken now will not only protect vital jobs and businesses, but the social, economic and cultural importance of the sector to the UK. 

“People working in retail have been hit hard financially, emotionally and physically during the entire course of the pandemic. They have had to cope with extremely difficult changes in their working conditions, livelihoods have been placed on hold during the lockdown periods, and, very sadly, tens of thousands of people have been left with no jobs to return to due to the pandemic’s devastating impact on shops and businesses up and down the country. This has led to record demand for retailTRUST’s services.

“It is essential that the government and businesses now work together to safeguard our colleagues’ long-term interests and their wellbeing. And as a sector, we all have a responsibility to come together and make the most of initiatives which will help to protect, support and create roles.”