Project details

Learning from visual artists in the Netherlands from an intersectional perspective

Precarity in the arts and culture field is a pressing problem due to job insecurity, low pay and mental health issues that specially hit women and young people. In response, over the past decade, Dutch Universities of Applied Sciences have increasingly introduced cultural entrepreneurship support programs and facilities to help students better prepare for their study-work transition. Yet, survey after survey, arts alumni in the Netherlands -most of whom have been women for as long as cultural entrepreneurship education has been introduced- keep on voicing their discontent with the way their education prepared them for the labor market. When assessed for impact, embedded cultural entrepreneurship education in the Netherlands, Germany and the UK has been shown to be in a poor state, and the entrepreneurship discourse underpinning that education is plagued by biases of gender and ‘race’. In other words, there is an urgent need for the development of inclusive cultural entrepreneurship education that takes into accounts the needs and experiences of minoritized groups. My research explores the way in which visual artists in the Netherlands enact cultural entrepreneurship from an intersectional perspective to contribute to cultural entrepreneurship theory and education.