Gendai MA MBA: Mastering the Art of Misguided Business Administration

Gendai MA MBA is a year-long think tank and workshop series for art collectives to improve capacity-building skills in a co-learning environment. Addressing sector-wide challenges of precarity and isolation, this project creates a network for collectives to resource-share, co-learn, collaborate, and improve workplace sustainability.  

Gendai MA MBA supports collectives who have expressed a desire to collaboratively problem-solve challenges shared by ad-hoc organizations. We’ve partnered with eight diverse GTA arts collectives, each with different mandates and support different communities.

Working in collaboration, we’ve designed ten workshop sessions based on self-identified needs in aspects of arts administration and organizational management. Topics include governance, financial planning, accessibility, archiving, conflict resolution, and anti-oppression training.

The inaugural cohort: 

1. Gendai: an art organization with a 20-year history of experimentation with models of collectivity. Gendai MA MBA marks the beginning of a new iteration focusing on intercollective resource-sharing. 

2. BAM – Books, Art, Music Collective: Ontario’s first youth and newcomer-led collective that empowers equity-seeking young people to get involved in civics and community through Art.

3. BUMP TV: a 24/7 public access internet television station, supporting and commissioning artists who work in experimental and non-commercial digital and time-based mediums. 

4. Durable Good: a publishing studio that creates books about art, collaborating with artists, writers, and thinkers who work within feminist, equitable, and engaged frameworks. 

5. Glory Hole Gallery: a miniature gallery space dedicated to 2SLGBTQ+ artists, located in The 519, a charitable organization and centre for Toronto’s LGBT community.

6. MICE Magazine: an online periodical devoted to critical writing and artist projects about and within moving image culture. 

7. Tea Base: a community arts space located in Toronto’s Chinatown community, with a focus on intergenerational programming mainly serving the GTA Asian diaspora. 

8. Whippersnapper Gallery: an artist-run centre committed to cultivation of inclusive spaces for emerging visual and media arts, providing a flexible platform to expand parameters for professional practices. 

9. Younger Than Beyonce: an arts collective for the career development of artists and cultural workers born after 1981 or are otherwise emerging. 

This project is supported by the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council.