As noted above, a number of agencies and public actors in Sweden award grants, awards, and scholarships to artists and projects in the area of arts and culture. There are common measures for visual artists, musicians, composers and authors, such as working grants for 1-10 years, income guarantees, project grants, travel grants and pension grants. There are also specific schemes which vary from field to field and taking the nature and needs of the different art forms into account.
Through the Swedish Authors’ Fund (Sveriges författarfond) and the Arts Grants Committee (Konstnärsnämnden), the government supports individual artists financially through various grants. The Authors’ Fund is directed towards authors, translators, book illustrators, and cultural journalists. The Fund allocates government compensation for public lending at libraries. A portion of this compensation is given to the individual author, in direct proportion to the number of public loans of his / her work; another portion is transferred to the Fund itself, from which grants and scholarships are allocated to writers etc.
The Arts Grants Committee allocates travel grants, project grants, or stipends for one year or more, to artists who do not fall under the responsibility of the Authors’ Fund. The Arts Grants Committee also runs a studio programme for visual artists (IASPIS), open to artists both from Sweden and from abroad. The Swedish Institute (Svenska institutet) has grants for international exchange within the arts, sciences, and media. There is also a system of state income guarantees, through which chosen artists are guaranteed a minimum annual income.
The National Public Arts Council (Statens konstråd) is responsible for buying contemporary art to display in various premises of the government and government agencies, including universities, county administrative boards and courts. The National Public Arts Council also co-finances non-governmental partners for artistic contributions to housing areas, schools and public places, and even the traffic environment.
The Swedish Arts Council (Statens kulturråd) gives grants to groups, cooperative projects, and non-profit organisations. The Swedish Arts Council gives grants to artists’ centres in various artistic fields. The role of these artists’ centres is to find work opportunities and to find new types of artistic commissions for their members who are professional artists in their respective fields (theatre, dance, music, visual art, applied art, photography, literature, and film). The Swedish Arts Council is responsible for
- distributing national grants to independent theatre, music and dance companies, co-operative art studios, co-operative shops of arts and crafts and artist owned galleries; and
- granting exhibition funding to non-profit organizations, in order to pay remuneration to artists who have placed their artwork at public disposal in exhibitions arranged by these organizations.
Additionally, on the regional and local levels, many regions and municipalities award grants, awards, and scholarships to artists and projects in the area of arts and culture.
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