A toolkit for visual arts organisations to explore and support approaches to intersectionality
The third ‘call to action’ toolkit aims to help organisations consider intersectionality by unpicking how we can think beyond the single-identity narrative to recognise the multiplicity of barriers facing marginalised and underrepresented communities. It includes prompts to think about the organisation’s culture towards intersectionality, the importance of data, ways of working and platforming intersectional voices.
This toolkit is designed as a prompt, to help you consider how you can explore and address intersectionality in order to be able to support artists and arts workers from marginalised and underrepresented communities.
The PowerPoint versions can be used to write on and are available for download.
We recommend using this toolkit in conjunction with the Fair and Equitable programme research report, Fostering Equity in the Visual Arts Sector. The report includes 20 recommendations for organisations to take action around creating an equitable and inclusive visual arts sector, focusing on marginalised and underrepresented communities.
Responses to CVAN’s Fair and Equitable ‘Survey of Individuals’ 2022, demonstrated the complexity of the barriers facing marginalised and underrepresented communities in the visual arts sector. As Dr. Cecilia Wee, author of the above-mentioned Fostering Equity in the Visual Arts Sector explains, ‘Whilst the 2010 Equality Act has brought the nine protected characteristics together under one legal definition, this can mean that the struggle for equity shows up as conflicting equality priorities. Rather than viewing aspects of identity as in conflict with one another, an intersectional approach to fostering equity acknowledges the multifaceted construction of identity; for instance, that a Black, disabled older woman, will experience the world in a different way to someone who identifies with only one of those identity markers².’
²Dr. Cecilia Wee, Fostering Equity in the Visual Arts Sector, 2022, p22
