Lisson Gallery in London is offering bursaries worth £10,000 each to Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic students on postgraduate courses enrolled at Goldsmiths, University of London, a college known for its famous art alumni including Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas.
The scholarships will support students currently enrolled on, or who wish to take, either the MFA Curating or the MFA Fine Art courses from 2022 onwards. “Individual amounts of £10,000 will be given to two MFA scholars at a time—either or both in either Fine Art or Curating—and will be awarded in equal tranches over the two years of full-time study,” a Lisson statement says. For Fine Arts students, the initiative also involves a period of mentorship with an established UK artist; curating students are offered a paid internship with Lisson Gallery and another London-based institution, usually upon graduation.
This year’s recipients are Femi Dawkins and Tiffany Wellington, both in their second year studying Fine Art; entrants wishing to apply for the 2022-23 academic year are invited to apply online. In 2020, Lisson also announced a scholarship for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic students embarking on a Masters art history at Columbia University in New York (the Solomon B. Hayden fellowship).
Meanwhile, the digital art platform Circa is also sponsoring two scholarships worth £30,000 in total at Goldsmiths for students on the MA Art & Ecology and MFA Curating degree programmes. The programme is aimed at applicants who have “not followed conventional paths through arts education”, says a Circa statement.
The scholarship criteria statement says that “Goldsmiths will prioritise widening participation markers, i.e. evidence that students are members of communities that are traditionally under-represented in higher education, such as Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic, being care-experienced or estranged from their families, coming from a non-selective state school, coming from a home where neither parent/carer has been to university, and other markers.”
The #CircaEconomy scholarship programme fund is generated from the sale of prints by artists such as Ai Weiwei, Patti Smith and David Hockney.