Date Issued: 28th August 2025
City Arts Portsmouth CIC AWARDED NATIONAL LOTTERY FUNDING
City Arts Portsmouth CIC has been awarded £30,000 through Arts Council National Lottery Project Grants for the Portsmouth Open Studios Event 2025, with extra support from Portsmouth City Council and Portsmouth Creates.
Portsmouth Open Studios Event 2025, also known as POSE, will take place this year over three days, starting from Friday, October 24th and ending Sunday, October 26th. It is a city-wide open studios event showcasing visual art, performance, film, spoken word, installations and emerging music.
POSE supports local artists to open up their home studios or share group exhibition space throughout the city for all to enjoy for free. POSE will also programme a selection of creative workshops and happenings over the weekend, ranging from dance, animation, photography, artist talks, poetry, music and much more.
Nearer to the event, a free printed booklet and digital guide will be available to help you plan your routes and gain further information about POSE and its participants at www.cityartsportsmouth.com.
We are fortunate to be able to partner with some great local businesses, the local council and the city's other creative organisations to help deliver POSE 2025 together and make it an exciting and inclusive event.
POSE is an artist-led initiative by the independent arts organisation City Arts Portsmouth CIC, and we are looking for volunteers or collaborators to help in any way to support this great event. If you are interested or have any questions, please go to the City Arts Portsmouth website www.cityartsportsmouth.com and follow the POSE links and discover more about this event or email cityartsportsmouth@gmail.com.
Quote from Gavin Hodson : Director City Arts Portsmouth CIC :
​
“ The POSE team are very passionate about Portsmouth, the place we live, and our aim is to help develop and support local creatives together with opening access to the arts to all our neighbours in the city in any way we can, to celebrate what we have together and share the joy and story of making something, be that visual, written, dance or music. The Portsmouth Open Studios Event is just the start to enable us to build this with all our partners in the city.”
National Lottery Project Grants is the Arts Council’s open access programme for arts, museums and libraries projects. The fund supports thousands of individual artists, community and cultural organisations, thanks to National Lottery investment.
National Lottery players raise over £30 million for good causes each week, funding arts, heritage, sports, voluntary and charity projects around the UK. Over £43 billion has been raised for Good Causes since the National Lottery began in 1994.
Quote from Cllr Steve Pitt : Leader of Portsmouth Council (with portfolio responsibility for Culture, Regeneration & Economic Development)
​
"Portsmouth will hugely benefit from POSE's ability to utilise Arts Council funding to shine a bright light on the creative talent we have here among our visual artists and makers. There is a tangible shift in confidence for the creative sector in the city, and POSE is a key element of that."
For more information, please contact:
Gavin Hodson - Director City Arts Portsmouth CIC
​
​
​
​
​
​​
​
​
​
City Arts Portsmouth is a partnership organisation, bringing artists, makers and innovative creative people together to deliver workshops for the benefit of the community.
Through funded projects, our aim is to help the community build resilience and tackle problems such as loneliness and social isolation, helping improve health and wellbeing.
Arts Council England is the national development agency for creativity and culture. We have set out our strategic vision in Let’s Create that by 2030 we want England to be a country in which the creativity of each of us is valued and given the chance to flourish and where everyone of us has access to a remarkable range of high quality cultural experiences. We invest public money from the Government and The National Lottery to help support the sector and to deliver this vision. www.artscouncil.org.uk
Following the Covid-19 crisis, the Arts Council developed a £160 million Emergency Response Package, with nearly 90% coming from the National Lottery, for organisations and individuals needing support. We are also one of the bodies administering the Government’s unprecedented £1.96 billion Culture Recovery Funds. Find out more at www.artscouncil.org.uk/covid19.
