Today we met at school at 8:15 to go into Leeds for the morning. We got on the minibus, (all bar Tomas who was late and missed it) and set off for Leeds. We got into Leeds and started filming and photographing anything we perceived as creative. After this we went to The Leeds Art Gallery to interview Amanda Phillips and these where our questions and answers:
1. What type of audience do you appeal to?
Well there are four different categories. These are classed as Familiar and confident/ frequent visitors- the usual bunch of people, Statutory education- schools, college, university etc... Events- for example conferences, weddings etc... and Convenience visitors- people who want to go to the shop, the library, the toilets the cafe and anything else linked to the gallery.
1a. How do you go about pleasing them?
We aim to inspire cultural communities and we aim to challenge, entertain and inspire our visitors and aim to get them to want to come back again soon. We put on performances and exhibitions to try to lure people in and get them involved.
1b. What data do you hold on your audiences and how is it collated?
There is a political/ data protection act so we cannot give out audience information. We have a periodic questionnaire about our exhibitions for the visitors, we have surveys and a mailing list and we try to collect the postcodes in which people come from to give us an idea on the areas in which people are coming from.
2. How has technology influenced how you work in the art gallery?
Massively!!! Tons of emails and its very stressful reading them all. The software (programs, computers, etc.. ) goes out of date very quickly! Artists expect the best- Touch screens etc... but the speed is really quick with new technologies which is a bonus! There could be some collection issues due to visitors requirements and/ or the computer has a high risk of crashing. Catastrophe!!!
2a. Have you introduced new ways of advertising in recent years, for example facebook and twitter sites?
Not facebook. We don't like facebook and we find it rather confusing. We do use twitter on the rare occasion but tend to just use word of mouth or leaflets made by the council. We used to use posters but we cannot afford them any more so we have to rely on the ones above.
3. How do you connect with different communities within Leeds and Beyond.
We have international relationships and share collections with other countries and we have school links and office links.
3a. The gallery is free to enter, how do you fund the gallery and its projects?
We have donations boxes and Leeds City Council pay our wages, pay for the lighting and pay for the heating. We rent rooms out for special events and we have ambitious exhibitions.
4. What creative process is involved in creating an exhibition?
4a. How do you decide what it is going to involve?
4b. How do you contact artists?
What space will you use?
How many different people from different agencies would be involved in putting on an exhibition?
We snoop through things till we find something we like. Artists contact us not us contacting them and they plead for their artwork to be displayed. Its all trial and error, if something looks good leave it if it looks bad move it and so on. Their is a hierarchy as to who is involved. The worker, the exhibition panel, the managers, the artists etc... We are constantly changing our exhibitions to make it new and interesting. We have debates, arguments, creative discussions and we use mind maps to determine what is going to happen.
5. What merchandise do you have and how do you promote it?
We buy what we can afford and what we think will sell but our shop isn't the best around. Alot of the products are not related to the gallery and we don't promote our shop as best as we could. Places like the Yorkshire sculpture has a very good shop and their merchandise is very specific to the topic. Remember though that this is all my opinion!
6. How do you arrange your workshop?
Do you have an age limit?
How do you decide what to run a workshop on?
Do you charge? If not how is it funded?
Well we have the target audiences to think about when we are planning the workshops. We don't have an age limit for the Art gallery but we do for some of the workshops as they are mainly based for school child ages. In a year we HAVE to get at least 6000 school children from the age 5- 17 years. We have a range of workshops varying from painting to modelling to drawing to acting. Anything that is creative you can guarantee we will do. To decide it is basically one person has a sudden idea. We take it up the hierarchy until it is approved. We try to do a range of workshops including funny child ones, to funkier teen ones to mature adult ones and very many more! We aim to make you want to come back by doing different interesting, entertaining things. We do have holiday clubs which do cost and some of our workshops charge but the gallery is free to enter an so Leeds City Council pay the wage like I said earlier. We have stopped painting things like Monet and we are trying new things so that history doesn't drag on.
7. How do you know when an exhibition is a success? What do you class a a failed exhibition? We never really know. Basically we just use our intuition. We get positive and negative vibes and we take it from there. We do have surveys and evaluations for people to fill out to give us a bit of feedback. People give constructive criticism. We make judgements as to how the artists react when they see the exhibition as well.
After interviewing her we had a look around the Art Gallery and then headed back to the bus. When we got back to school we were with Miss Woffinden for an hour and had a talk about Leeds and Spoke about Testament (a beat boxing visitor coming into school on Monday). We handed in our homework and discussed narration and the use of it in our films. Then we had Mr Romer, where we finished editing our films and looked at what green screening was. Today was very eventful!
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