The York Region Arts Council is thrilled to announce the relaunch of www.ExperienceYorkRegion.com featuring the Artist Portal!
The Artist Portal is a digital hub for the art community in York Region. The Artist Portal provides individual artists, artist collectives, and arts organizations the opportunity to connect and grow their network in a significant way. It is also a tool for the broader York Region community, Municipalities, and local businesses to connect with artists in a more meaningful way with the goals of increasing awareness and infusing arts and culture within our communities through increased opportunities for artists, new connections, and promotional capabilities.
The Portal gives artists, art collectives, and arts organizations the ability to register for membership and receive their own landing page where they can share their work, advertise their business, promote events, find collaborators, and start conversations!
The layout of the Portal is extremely user friendly and allows content to be seen and shared to maximize viewership, engagement, and communication.
Some of the exciting features include:
- Artist Directory – the Artist Directory features Artist’s, Arts Collectives, and Art Organization’s profiles who are current YRAC Members. The Artist Directory allows artists and arts organizations to share more information about themselves, their work, upcoming events, and opportunities in York Region. Artist Profiles are also featured in the “Our Communities” pages in accordance with which community the artist or organization hails from! Our goal with this feature is to make it easier for community members, local businesses, and municipalities to connect with local artists to engage them in opportunities in their community.
- Events – A key feature of Experience York Region has always been the event posting feature. Now, with the Artist Portal, when you post an event, it will be featured on the Artist Profile page as well as the event page so when visitors click on an Artist Profile, they can see what events are upcoming for that Artist, Collective, or Organization.
- Map – The expanded Map feature is a visual tool for visitors to the website to see all of the events happening in York Region! This feature will visually demonstrate how active our arts, culture, and tourism communities are in York Region. This feature also allows visitors to the website easy browsing of events near them.
- Art Discussions – The Artists Forum is open to Artist members and is a place where we hope open conversation about arts and culture in our communities can flourish as well as collaborations can develop.
- Opportunities – Whether you’re an Artist looking for a collaborator or are a business or Municipality looking to feature an artist at an upcoming event, this is a great place to share upcoming engagements in York Region for local artists to find them.
- Businesses and Venues – Experience York Region is a place where businesses and venues in the arts, culture, and tourism fields can share information about their business. Listing Partners who do not have Artist Profiles can still create and share business listings and events through this membership feature.
Operations Consultant, Chrissy King said “The exciting thing about the Portal is that it not only provides a space for artists to share their artistic practice online, but it is also a place where our community can discover artists living right here in York Region!”
YRAC’s goal in launching The Artist Portal is to create connections between artists and create a streamlined path for businesses and municipalities to hire arts professionals through the individual landing pages for each artist for events and different opportunities. YRAC believes that the more that art is featured in our communities, the more vibrant they will be!
The Experience York Region website relaunch also creates opportunities for businesses and tourism providers to share information about their businesses by becoming a listing partner member. Listing partners can share information about their businesses that will be featured on the curated explore tabs. By becoming a listing partner, businesses and tourism providers are also able to post events which will populate the new map feature where they can easily be found by site visitors!
Support for the Artist Portal project was provided by the Canada Council for the Arts. The Experience York Region relaunch and Artist Portal design was done by Peashooter Media.
