Why I Give: How the Wilhelmina-Barns Graham Trust is supporting emerging talent at DJCAD

Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham knew that financial support could be the difference between a student succeeding and struggling. Today, her legacy lives on through the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust (WBGT), which supports DJCAD students experiencing financial challenges. We spoke to Trust Director Rob Airey to find out more. 

To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust, what it currently supports at the University, and how long this partnership has been in place?

The WBGT is a charitable trust, legally established by the artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in her own lifetime, as a body to not only look after her legacy as artist and the archive, library and art collections she left to the Trust, but to, where possible, also offer financial support to artists at different stages in their career.  

DJCAD was one of the first higher education institutions that the Trust started working with following Barns-Graham’s death in 2004, and has been offering financial support to students since 2006. 

The support is focused on students studying fine art who are suffering a degree of financial hardship and require some additional funds to successfully complete their studies.

Can you take us back to the beginning - what sparked the commitment and led the Trustees to decide, 'This is a cause we want to support'?

As Barns-Graham was not specific in the deeds of the Trust as to how exactly funds were to be used in support of artists, initially the Trustees looked at Barns-Graham’s own experiences.  As an art student at the Edinburgh College of Art in the 1930s, she benefitted greatly from a number of bursaries, so we looked to develop a contemporary equivalent for students studying now.  

Our discussions with DJCAD and other similar fine art-focused institutions revealed that students did occasionally need additional financial support to achieve their ambitions and complete their courses.

Setting aside the financial side for a moment, how does being a University of Dundee donor fulfil the Trust's mission? What does it mean to be actively involved in supporting our student community?

In doing so, we're hopefully delivering on the aims Barns-Graham herself had when she started the Trust back in 1987.

If you could speak directly to our readers, what is the single most important message you would share about the value of donating to the University?

It's crucial in a world where creativity seems to be increasingly stifled, governments are reducing support for the arts, and the critical importance of art as central to young people’s development is being lost, that those who choose to study fine art in higher education are supported as much as possible to achieve their potential.