Red Hot Arts Central Australia Incorporated
Also known as:
Alice Desert Festival, Desert Festival
This year Red Hot Arts continued to be a responsive arts organisation supporting remote artists and arts workers to live vibrant and sustainable creative lives. We did this by providing accessible support, resources, venues, events, and opportunities across our four strategic pillars communicating, connecting, developing, and sustaining. By investing in artists and art workers, we aimed to amplify their voices, enrich cultural experiences, and contribute to the societal wellbeing of our communities. Red Hot Arts delivered a successful program of activities. Desert Festival saw over 4300 people attend, ticket sales above $52K and total spending impact of $1.2M. Project Seed continued for a second year and invested in the development of new works by five local artists, engaging 59 artists and arts workers, and providing a needed local platform for skills and career development. Winter Chill was expanded to include local business engagement via a Chamber of Commerce Business at Sunset event, and a First Nations Night, an event 100% led and designed by local First Nations musicians. Our First Nations engagement continued to increase in 2023 with the addition of a commissioned murals project in the remote community Yuendumu, with extensive community consultation and Warlpiri led project design. We provided in kind event delivery support for the local NAIDOC Committee s Golden Oldies event, along with in kind venue hire and auspicing First Nations projects, demonstrating our commitment to increasing First Nations engagement in culturally safe ways. Significant improvements were made to the Bath St building and infrastructure, resulting in significantly higher venue hire in 2023 and increased profit to tenants for the first time in anchor tenancy history. Red Hot Arts hosted the local Sector Roundtable with Special Envoy to the Arts, Susan Templeman MP, a successful event showcasing and voicing our local arts and media sector needs to federal government. We were also one of eight national participants in Creative Australia s Digital Specialist in Residence Program, developing our digital capacity and using this opportunity to better understand our remote sector s needs and trial solutions to this in the form of online skills development workshop. Our programs and services benefit the local community by fostering artistic innovation, empowerment, connection, and economic development and sustainability, while contributing to cultural diversity, intercultural understanding, and social inclusion, and remote access and equity. The high standard of arts services delivered by Red Hot Arts and our degree of public value was reflected in our successful winning of the 2023 Chamber of Commerce Excellence in Business (Non Profit) for Central Australia and runners up for the whole of the Northern Territory. This demonstrates our ongoing commitment to excellence and the development of Northern Territory creative industries.