Arts and Cultural Education in Iceland : Professor Anne Bamford

We talk about art. I wish we could get coloured prints form the gallery as we only have black and white
photocopies. I tried to do colour copies on overhead transparencies, but they are not very good. The national
Gallery used to have a service where you could borrow slides, but this service does not exist anymore.
Comments from the art though also suggest that demand for such services may be low, as
the following quote argues:
The Reykjavik Art Museum is in three locations. There are about 10-12 thousand guests annually and roughly
80% of these are under the age of 25. About 80% of the work in education department revolves around young
people. The Art Museum, in cooperation with the Education department of the City of Reykjavík, have recently
started a "roaming" exhibit – a box that can be opened up, containing art works from the Museum, which travels
between schools. Are teachers excited? Some are interested – however, I've seen teachers go and have coffee
during class visitation. There is a big gap between what it says should be happening in the curriculum and
practice.
At times a lack of consideration of practical processes was blamed for not encouraging more
partnership. For example, the national orchestra did not have weekend concerts and this made
it impossible for more isolated communities to take advantage of bringing children to
performances.
Almost all the school principals interviewed felt that the situation of partnership working
was likely to get worse as a result of the financial crisis. It was considered that the additional
cost of bringing performers into the school of taking children to performances would mean that
these activities would cease. There was evidence that this was already occurring with many
schools reporting that visits and excursions had been stopped as parents, the schools and the
community could no longer afford these.
There are very few examples of industry partnership in education in Iceland. Discussions
regarding industry support of a specialist arts secondary school were underway at the
commencement of this research. But this proposal was not seen as being appropriate for the
situation in Iceland.
By contrast, some local organisations have managed to build highly successful partnerships
by working very closely with schools and after school youth centres. These tended to be
responsive organisations working very flexibly to meet the needs and interests of their
communities. The strength of local support is apparent in the following vignette:
Vignette 3.2.8 The local arts scene is very active
The local arts scene is very active. It was argued that the small and close knit community supported the expansion of
‘ground up’ arts initiatives. Travelling around the country, these are evident, with most members of the art
community working in a range of paid and unpaid roles throughout the local community.
For example, a single performer ran the local amateur theatre, conducted a men’s choir and a choir of elderly people
and ran a local choir festival – as well as teaching the arts in schools. This sort of level of activity was not uncommon.
Such local events were very well supported with on average 3,000-4,000 people attending but from Iceland and
international visitors. Funding for such initiatives tend to come from a number of sources, including local and
municipal government; local business; and individuals.
These festivals probably generate significant value added economic wealth to a community through volunteer
contributions and visitor and attendance figures. This is only conjecture though, as few of these local events gather
robust figures on full economic costing, the value of in-kind support and/or visitor data.
There is an urgent need to ensure funding is provided to more fully measure, record and communicate the key
learning and figures from such events and local initiatives. This would appear to be a very timely recommendation as
these local activities seem to be growing both in terms of frequency of events and number of attendees at events. For
example, one regional music festival reported 300 visitors in the first year in 2000 and now has more than 5000
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