VIEW THE PDF: CREATIVE CITIES, SUSTAINABLE PARTNERSHIPS: COLLECTIVELY IMAGINING FUTURE ARTISTIC LIVELIHOODS
Executive summary
This City Research Insight reports on Sustainable pARTnerships: Collaboration and reciprocity in creative cities (“Sustainable pARTnerships”), a multi-faceted initiative that brings together the cultural and academic sectors to explore artists’ lived experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, imagine a future in which artists can have thriving artistic livelihoods, and illuminate a role for the academy in supporting a precarious sector.¹ Guided by an imperative to foster long-term, reciprocal relationships, Sustainable pARTnerships employs arts-based research and action, as well as curatorial practices, to collaboratively co-create and mobilize knowledge on which policymakers, researchers, and institutional bodies (such as universities) can draw to enact positive changes and support sustainable livelihoods for artists.
This project was initially supported by the School of Cities’ COVID Recovery Research Fund, with subsequent funding provided by a SSHRC Connections grant.
Issue at a glance
Project team:
- Dr. Nasim Niknafs, Faculty of Music, PI
- Dr. Laura Risk, Department of Arts, Culture and Media, UTSC, Co-PI
- Dr. Ely Lyonblum, Faculty of Music, Co-PI
- Adrian Berry, MMus in Music Technology and Digital Media, UTSC, Research Assistant
- Anne-Katherine Dionne, PhD in Music Education, Research Assistant
- Hayley Janes, PhD in Music Education, Research Assistant
- Emma Schmiedecke, DMA in Performance, Research Assistant
Creative cities, Sustainable pARTnerships: collaboration and reciprocity
The pandemic and art sector precarity
Researchers have documented the deleterious effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the livelihood of those working in the arts sector.² The pandemic exacerbated the vulnerability that many artists and others working in the sector routinely experience and widened the disparity between artists with limited access to opportunities and those supported by well-resourced organizations.³ Sustainable pARTnerships seeks to address threatened and lost artistic livelihoods and desires to create a future in which artists thrive.
The genesis of Sustainable pARTnerships
In early 2020, Nasim Niknafs, Laura Risk, and Ely Lyonblum began conversations about the challenges that artists and arts organizations were facing during the COVID-19 pandemic. As performing artists and contributors to arts and culture event organization, policy-making, and research, they considered how they could draw on their positions as university faculty to access and use academic resources to support the creation and sustainability of artistic livelihoods. They gathered a team of research assistants who are also performing artists and began fostering reciprocal relationships to collaboratively inform, envision, and support artistic futures.
Co-creating knowledge
Sustainable pARTnerships’ initial project focuses on collaborative, arts-based research: artists and members of the research team collectively examine artists’ lived experience of precarity during the COVID-19 pandemic and explore their vision for thriving artistic futures. Using artwork commissioned from five artist-collaborators and research methodologies that reflect the creativity of the artist-collaborators’ work, the research team and artist-collaborators co-create knowledge that informs subsequent Sustainable pARTnership initiatives. These efforts bring together the academic and arts sectors to collaboratively envision futures in which artists can thrive by considering:
1.
The knowledge artists seek, keep, and share through their craft
2.
How artists embody and contribute to knowledge through lived experience
3.
The value artists bring to society and what society values in artists
Creative cities, artist-collaborator experience and vision
Sustainable pARTnerships recognizes the imperative of work that centres the experience and vision of artists who have lived precarity. Their lived experience offers knowledge that brings to light the challenges artists face and shows where changes can be made to better support their livelihoods. Believing artists’ experiences to be foundational to tenable change, Sustainable pARTnerships develops relationships with artist-collaborators that are reciprocal rather than extractive.
The research team established relationships with five Toronto-based artists by commissioning each to create artwork on the theme “imagining a post-pandemic future.” These artist-collaborators were chosen for their commitment to drawing attention to social inequality. Their work uses media across arts disciplines including ceramics, visual arts, literature, music, performance art, and multimedia video creation. The artist-collaborators subsequently met with members of the Sustainable pARTnerships research team and, using their commissioned artwork, further explored their pandemic experience to envision a future in which artists can realize livelihoods that go beyond mere economic stability.
Livelihood
For Sustainable pARTnerships, the meaning of livelihood goes beyond the commonly understood definition of financial income. The term initially referred to a person’s course of life, which then shifted to denote a way to keep a person alive. It later came to mean “a lively state or condition” or a “lively hood.” This meaning allows us to consider the notion of livelihood more broadly than just economic stability to also include what artists need to live an artistic life and to thrive. Sustainable pARTnerships thus examines what it means to support artistic livelihoods when a lively hood requires more than just an income.⁴
Creative cities, creative research approaches
To reflect the creative artistry of the artist-collaborators, Sustainable pARTnerships deploys a multi-faceted, arts-based approach to collecting data and mobilizing knowledge. The research team draws on Ellingson’s crystallization framework to facilitate deep engagement with the lived experience of artists and cultural workers.⁵ A crystallization framework allows for multiple approaches to data collection and dissemination. This allows Sustainable pARTnerships to amplify voices traditionally absent from mainstream arts spaces and reach an audience beyond the academic community.
Inspired by the crystallization framework, Hayley Janes and Adrian Berry innovated the practice of crystal-scaping to interview the study’s artist-collaborators.⁶ Crystal-scaping provides multiple entries to conversation. In action, it looks like the researcher and participant sitting together at a table to chart significant moments from the participant’s life through conversation and artistic expression. They use arts and crafts supplies and create a physical crystal-scape on a canvas reflecting the participant’s experience. The session is documented through video and audio recording using 3 cameras: a wide-shot, an interviewee shot, and an aerial top-down shot capturing the crystal-scape.
Additionally, the research team draws on photovoice methodology to document the artist-collaborators’ experiences and knowledge.⁷ In place of photographs, they use the artist-collaborators’ commissioned artwork and crystal-scapes.
Crystallization
Crystallization as a research methodology acknowledges multiple ways of generating knowledge, analyzing data, and representing research results by combining standard qualitative research approaches such as interviews and focus groups with arts-based modes of participant engagement (e.g. poetry, visual art, etc.).⁸
Crystallization
Accepts that there are different and sometimes contrasting ways that knowledge is produced, presented, and interpreted, thereby normalizing complexity
Requires researchers to be aware of their own positionality, biases, and knowledge, and to engage reflexively to acknowledge how each shapes their approach to the research
Acknowledges that claims and knowledge are shaped by power structures
In Sustainable pARTnerships, the crystallization framework informs the research team’s approach to deep, exploratory conversations with the artist-collaborators. Hayley Janes and Adrian Berry were inspired by the crystallization framework to innovate crystal-scaping as an arts-based, participatory action approach to interviewing artist-collaborators. This approach works to co-create knowledge about the artist-collaborators’ lived experiences of precarity and their vision of futures in which artists might thrive.
Crystal-scaping
In crystal-scaping, the researchers and participants collaboratively create knowledge though conversations that occur while engaged in the process of making art. Discussions about the art-making process and feelings introduce diverse perspectives to the conversation/interview.⁹
In Sustainable pARTnerships, the researchers prepared for crystal-scaping by:
1. Asking the artist-collaborator in advance of the creative interview session to identify a significant moment in their journey as an artist/cultural worker
2. Providing sample questions to the artist-collaborator in advance of the creative interview session to help them reflect on that significant moment
3. Providing sample questions to the artist-collaborator in advance of the creative interview session to help them reflect on that significant moment
4. Providing a photo of the interview room set-up to the artist-collaborator, including a diagram of the crystal-scaping seating arrangement and camera placement, and a picture of a sample crystal-scape
“Centering creative, collaborative, and caring ways of being together [supports longer-term relationships and] also speaks to the state in which we currently find artistic livelihoods.”10
Photovoice
Photovoice is a participatory action research, arts-based interview methodology that invites participants to respond to research prompts, document their experiences through photography, then annotate the images they create.¹¹
Sustainable pARTnerships reflects the eight stages of photovoice research in the following ways:
Identify
The research team identifies arts workers and organizations in the Greater Toronto Area, focusing on artists and groups facing acute crises and vulnerability.
Invite
The research team invites artists to collaborate in the research project, focusing on a diverse range of arts disciplines and media. The research team also reaches out to stakeholders and representatives for potential collaboration in events and exhibitions.
Educate
The research team educates themselves on ethical practices and informed consent processes.
Document
The artist-collaborators create artworks exploring the theme imagining a post-pandemic future. Each artist-collaborator created a multi-media work and synopsis for presentation on the Artists’ Broadsheet website.
Narrate
The research team interviews the artist-collaborators while collaboratively creating the crystal-scapes.
Analysis
Takes place simultaneously with the next stage (Presentation).
Presentation
Researchers analyze the commissioned artworks and narratives for thematic threads to curate the exhibition “art(un)done: private lives, public encounters” to be shared with members of the community.
Confirmation of impact
The research team convenes roundtables, panels, and workshops to discuss findings, impact, and policy with artist-collaborators, artists, stakeholders, and community partners.
Creative cities, creative outputs and entry points to Sustainable pARTnerships
This project provides opportunities to engage more deeply with the artist-collaborators’ experience of precarity and vision for environments that promote and support artists’ flourishing.
THE ARTISTS’ BROADSHEET
is an interactive, multi-media website for sharing Sustainable pARTnerships’ artist-collaborators’ commissioned artwork, knowledge, and art co-created by the research team and artist-collaborators, and ideas discussed at Sustainable pARTnerships roundtable events. The Artists’ Broadsheet imagines the many facets of Sustainable pARTnerships as absurdist grocery store “coupons,” critiquing common consumerist ideas around artistic labour.
ART(UN)DONE: PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC ENCOUNTERS
is a travelling, multimedia exhibition of the work that the artist-collaborators created.
ART(UN)DONE: PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC ENCOUNTERS: ALL HANDS ON BRICKS EDITION
brought Sustainable pARTnerships to an international audience at the Keep It Simple, Make It Fast (KISMIF) Conference in Porto, Portugal in July 2024. The research team led conference attendees through a participatory arts-based action experience to create a foundation for a stimulating discussion about the role of arts and culture in resistance and resilience. Through participation in the conference, Sustainable pARTnerships has identified potential international research collaborators.
Another facet of the Sustainable pARTnerships initiative is its engagement with artists, arts and cultural workers, arts organizations, academics, and researchers around transformation in the academic and arts and culture sectors to explore paths to meaningful change that would support sustainable artistic livelihoods. Hosted by the University of Toronto’s Creative Community Commons at the School of Cities, Sustainable pARTnerships facilitated collaborative exploratory roundtables to:
- imagine new venues and opportunities for the creative arts (see: Securing the Future: Reimagining public spaces, opportunities, and supports for creative arts in a post-pandemic world);
- consider how an increasing dependence on digitization might shape arts and culture (see: Artistic Stories: Laying groundwork for intervention in digital (in)justice and algorithmic culture); and
- expose moments of hope despite the precarity of work in the arts and culture sector (see: Quiet Victories in the Arts: Celebrating order in the chaos).
Roundtable meetings help establish relationships and build connections that permit collaborative considerations of how universities as an institution could better support artistic futures.
In May 2024, Ely Lyonblum and Adrian Berry facilitate an exploration of community-based research resource mapping for Community-Based Research Canada Communities of Practice using Sustainable pARTnerships as a case study. The exercise prompts participants to consider the intersection of academia and the arts and culture sector as well as identify resources that academic and similar institutions have at their disposal to support to support artists who experience precarity. The infographic, “Resource mapping for community engaged research: a case study of curating-as-method” summarizes the robust discussion using a “Think-Feel-Share” framework.
Insights
The diverse, collaborative initiatives that comprise Sustainable pARTnerships reveal multiple paths to conditions that permit artists to experience thriving livelihoods.
1
Acknowledge expertise and unique perspectives
Artists’ lived experiences demonstrate the challenges that inhibit their ability to flourish while concurrently providing a frame of reference for how they conceptualize futures in which they can thrive. Bringing the needs and desires of artists into focus assists with identifying opportunities for catalyzing change that is responsive to the artists’ experience.
The unique perspectives of the academic and arts and culture sectors enrich roundtable discussions by allowing for enhanced conversations, connections, and sharing of ideas to effect meaningful change. Together, the academy and arts community can create new understandings of artistic livelihoods and construct new imaginings of strategies and possibilities. Cultivating long-term, reciprocal, trusting relationships permits the research team and arts and culture sector stakeholders to jointly explore how the university might responsibly deploy resources to address the needs of artists and arts communities.
2
Provide centralized information
While financial instability remains a challenge within the arts sector, a strategy to support the work of those addressing this barrier is to create a centralized data source for the sector. Arts organizations and the broader community could use this tool to inform advocacy efforts and policy decisions.
Many artists cannot afford rental fees for traditional venues that host performances and other arts events. One strategy to address this issue would be to create a centralized database, accessible by artists, of unique, small-to-mid-sized spaces suitable for arts events at the University of Toronto and around the Greater Toronto Area.
Train and educate
The academy and the arts sector should provide education and skill-building training opportunities for artists to develop and support their creative work. Both should work to demystify pathways to arts careers by providing a structure for conceptualizing viable careers in the arts and culture.
Additionally, the academic sector and arts and culture collaborators must address how people can access art more easily. These sectors should work together to respond to calls for people to know more about art, and how they might participate, attend, and engage with it.
3
4
Develop responsive policy
The arts and culture sector urgently needs policy that more effectively protects arts workers and their labour, and responds quickly to the changing technological and social landscape. Arts work contributes significantly to the economy, bolsters well-being, and strengthens society.¹² Policies must:
- reinforce and reflect the value that arts work brings to local and broader communities
- respond to current challenges
- anticipate and address barriers to thriving artistic livelihoods
- acknowledge the standard of work performed by artists
Additionally, while the COVID-19 pandemic heightened the precarity of arts work for many artists, such global disruptions are not the only significant threat to the sector. Arts work remains vulnerable to rapidly changing technology and, in particular, to generative artificial intelligence. Comprehensive policies are needed to protect intellectual property and to ensure that algorithm-driven programs do not eradicate opportunities or devalue outcomes of artists’ work.
Although audiences often only see a finished product, an artist’s creative output reflects a significant commitment of time and investment of resources in the artist’s training and development. For continued high quality art output, policies must be created to ensure the standard of artists’ work is recognized in a way that supports their creative production and economic stability.
Future directions
Sustainable pARTnerships is committed to partnering with other researchers, organizations, and arts and culture stakeholders to forge pathways to sustainable livelihoods for artists and arts workers. Future activities aim to inform public policy and establish infrastructure that allows artists to thrive beyond mere financial stability. In addition to making information available to the broader public and interested stakeholders, Sustainable pARTnerships strives for project scalability by sharing information, research, and resources; modeling a process for cultivating a community of practice dedicated to arts and culture research; and connecting university resources to arts and culture stakeholders (such as researchers and those working in the arts and culture community).
Information, research, and resources will be compiled in an openly available multi-modal digital flipbook that documents Sustainable pARTnerships in action, including:
- witnessing through the collaborative interview approach of crystal-scaping
- supporting art-making through commissions
- curating through the exhibit art(un)done: private lives, public encounters
- sharing through the website The Artists’ Broadsheet
- discussing through gatherings, workshops, and roundtables
- advocating for policy change
Additionally, the digital flipbook will be expandable to reflect Sustainable pARTnerships’ ongoing work.
In late winter/early Spring 2026, Sustainable pARTnerships will partner with three commissioned GTA-based artist-curators to present a multimedia performance of works by Black and Indigenous artists commissioned to engage in collaborative artistic creation.
Project team
Dr. Nasim Niknafs, Faculty of Music, PI
Nasim Niknafs (PI) is Associate Professor of Music Education at the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto, where she also serves as Associate Dean, Research. Her interdisciplinary research concerns philosophies and cultural politics of contemporary music education as they intersect with collective action, anarchism, popular music, and improvisation. Niknafs’ concern for artists, musicians, and cultural workers’ lives has led to research revolving around geopolitics, international affairs, and the constructs of death and deadly living. Niknafs is the editor of the special issue on anti-racism, anti-fascism, and anti-discrimination in and through music education for the journal Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education (ACT), and co-editor of the books, Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Music Education, and Traumas resisted and (re)engaged: Inquiring into Lost and Found Narratives in Music Education.
Dr. Laura Risk, Department of Arts, Culture and Media, UTSC, Co-PI
Laura Risk (Co-PI) is Assistant Professor of Music and Culture in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough, with a graduate cross-appointment at the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. Her research proactively builds out public archives to amplify unheard voices and critically interrogates the notion of tradition, with a focus on traditional music historiography in Quebec. Her publications have appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Ethnomusicology, MUSICultures, and Critical Studies in Improvisation, as well as The Globe and Mail and Le Devoir. She is also a fiddler.
Dr. Ely Lyonblum, Faculty of Music, Co-PI
Active as an arts educator and producer, Ely Lyonblum (Co-PI) is the Strategic Research Development Officer at the Faculty of Music, University Toronto. His projects, largely focusing on cultural equity, range from the history of sound recording, American Sign Language performance art, and storytelling through music. Ely trained as a documentary filmmaker at Goldsmiths, University of London, and completed a PhD in Music at the University of Cambridge. He has over a decade of experience curating events and contributing to the development of training programs for artists. Ely’s work has been presented and exhibited at cultural institutions across six continents.
Adrian Berry, MMus in Music Technology and Digital Media, UTSC, Research Assistant
Adrian Berry is an omnigender artist/facilitator/musician whose creative practice exists at the intersection of rock & roll and worldbuilding. Their multidisciplinary practice is a synergistic creature born from almost a decade as a composer, saxophonist, and vocalist in American punk bands featured in The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. Nurtured by intuitive investigations into audiovisual technology, animation, and live performance, Adrian’s new multimedia project Gold Cove explores themes of desire, trauma, and the unheroic reality of resilience. Experienced first as a multimedia performance-exhibition at Array Space and Video Pool Media Arts, Gold Cove’s audio-visual work has coalesced into a solo album called “Desire Lines” (2025). With support from Canada Council for the Arts, this work is expanding into a live band. Adrian is a sessional lecturer, researcher, and program coordinator specializing in popular music, music technology, and community-led facilitation/programming at the University of Toronto.
Anne-Katherine Dionne, PhD in Music Education, Research Assistant
A.K. Dionne is a PhD candidate in music education at the University of Toronto. Her interdisciplinary research broadly considers the intersections of community and formal music education. A.K.’s qualitative dissertation research explores how “outside” music educators and community musicians experience prison music work.
Hayley Janes, PhD in Music Education, Research Assistant
Hayley Janes (Sustainable pARTnerships research assistant April 2022 – November 2023) recently completed her PhD in Music Education at the University of Toronto and has a background in arts-based methodologies, collaborative research with children, and community violin teaching. Hayley also holds a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge, where she studied arts, creativities, and educations with a focus on cultural humility. Through it all, she follows the thread of researching, teaching, creating, thinking, and doing otherwise.
Emma Schmiedecke, DMA in Performance, Research Assistant
Performer, educator, and researcher Emma Schmiedecke (DMA) has established herself as a vibrant interpreter of both the classical and contemporary cello repertoire and an advocate for new music and the study of women in classical music. She has presented her research at the College Music Society Northeast Regional Conference, York University, the University of Toronto, and the NYC Arts in Education Roundtable. She recently received her Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of Toronto and holds degrees from McGill University, the Glenn Gould School of the Royal Conservatory of Music, the Bard Conservatory, and Bard College.
- Aspects of the Sustainable pARTnerships project highlighted in this CRI are discussed in greater detail in Hayley Janes, Adrian Berry, Ely Lyonblum, Laura Risk, & Nasim Niknafs, “Imagining a Post-Pandemic Reality through an Arts-based Methodological Framework”, Culture and Local Governance / Culture et Gouvernance Locale 8, no. 1 (2023): 32–44, https://doi.org/10.18192/clg-cgl.v8i1.7003.
- See, for example, Better Toronto Coalition, Shutdowns and resilience in Toronto’s arts & culture sector (Toronto Foundation 2020); I Lost My Gig Canada (2020); Meghan Lindsay & Kelsey Jacobson, Pandemic preparedness: Lessons for Canada’s Live Performing Arts from across the G7 (n.d.).
- Melissa Wong, 1,243 voices: Live performance artists’ hopes for a post-Covid future (Jerwood Arts, 2021), as cited in Janes et al., “Imagining a Post-pandemic Reality,” 34.
- Janes, et al., “Imagining a Post-Pandemic Reality,” 33.
- Laura L. Ellingson, Engaging Crystallization in Qualitative Research (Sage, 2009).
- Janes, et al., “Imagining a Post-Pandemic Reality,” 38.
- Amanda O. Latz, Photovoice Research in Education and Beyond: A Practical Guide from Theory to Exhibition (Routledge, 2017).
- Ellingson, Engaging Crystallization.
- Janes, et al., “Imagining a Post-Pandemic Reality”.
- Janes, et al., “Imagining a Post-Pandemic Reality,” 40.
- Latz, Photovoice Research.
- Canada Council for the Arts, The Impact of the Arts (n.d.).
