Turn of events
Coming out of Covid, long-time friends Susan Armstrong and Michelle Grey are seeking to entertain audiences showing an increasing appetite for intimate, bespoke, artled events that fuse culture with creativity.
Susan Armstrong and Michelle Grey are seeking to entertain audiences showing an appetite for intimate, bespoke, art-led events.
Susan Armstrong and Michelle Grey are like the ultimate party planners you never knew you needed. The long-time friends and co-founders of Arts-Matter bring that elusive X factor that makes an evening sing, and their sought-after events nourish the brain as well as the body. Chadwick Models agent Joseph Tenni describes it as “edutainment”, while Camilla Franks summed it up during a recent Arts-Matter event: “Everyone is so sick of cocktails and canapés. People want to socialise with a purpose.”
The ‘P’ word is certainly on trend right now, but if Franks’s observation makes the Arts-Matter events sound a little worthy, they’re anything but. As the name suggests, Arts-Matter is built around the belief that culture and creativity are crucial to a thriving society and that the people passionate about these things enjoy meeting and socialising with other like-minded people.
Arts-Matter surfaced towards the end of Sydney’s lockdown in 2020, when photos of its gatherings emerged on Instagram. No launch party or media release, just word-of-mouth and a few social media posts.
A ‘cultural programming and experiential platform’, Arts-Matter invites creatives and a small crowd of compatible people to interesting locations for an evening of conversation, drinks, sometimes dinner, often a creative endeavour and always a rollicking good time.
Recent events include artist-led Pictionary with Archibald Prize finalist Kim Leutwyler; sneaker-designing workshops with multimedia artist Tony Albert; a preview performance of Sydney Dance Company’s Impermanence, and a pasta-making class with Archibald Prize finalist and keen cook Jamie Preisz. Other creatives have included Ben Quilty, Angela Tiatia, Genesis Owusu, Ngaiire and Doctor Cooper.
If that sounds like fun, it is. But you have to be invited. Rather than create an elitist club, Armstrong and Grey are hoping to build a community of like-minded people and recently launched their $50-per-month paid membership platform. (To register interest, go to arts-matter.com.au/membership-application.)
The idea for Arts-Matter has been brewing for some time. Friends since their late teens, when Armstrong’s older brother was dating Grey, the pair remained close long after their lives took them in different directions. Both Sydney-born, Armstrong studied design at COFA (now known as UNSW Art & Design) before becoming an art director in the fashion, hospitality and lifestyle industries. Regular clients included Bonds, W Hotels, Vogue Australia, Ella Baché, Secret Sounds and The Apollo restaurant. In addition to having two children, Armstrong travelled between Sydney and Japan for 15 years running her own Tokyo-based business, Dual, representing Australian, New Zealand and UK labels.
Today she is the art director at creative agency Arc Factory in Sydney’s Surry Hills, and the art director and graphic designer for the global commercial digital art gallery Absolut Art, where Grey is the creative director.
Grey’s background is a little less linear. The firstgeneration Australian (her parents are American) attended high school in Connecticut (“my parents thought it would straighten me out a bit”) before returning to Sydney to study, of all things, molecular genetics and microbiology. That degree, coupled with part-time modelling in magazines and TV commercials helped her land an on-air reporting gig in London on Einstein TV. Back in Sydney she became founding editor of the young women’s fashion, art and current affairs magazine Yen, before moving to New York where she met her fashion photographer husband, Manolo Campion.
It was in New York, and after welcoming their first son, that Grey began working with Soho House, a social hub for people in the creative industries – “sort of like a Royal Sydney Golf Club but for cool people”, Grey quips. It was her job to refresh the invite-only membership base that had become diluted during the global financial crisis. Grey got rid of the committee along with 500 members, completely rejigged the membership and overhauled the events programming to create interactive artist-led hands-on audience events. Today membership exceeds 100,000 and there is an international network of Soho Houses from Barcelona to London, Mumbai and Istanbul.
From Soho House Grey moved to New York’s co-working space NeueHouse, transforming it into a cultural space complete with cultural programs in partnership with the likes of Art Basel Miami and talks with everyone from Marina Abramović (“really lovely, quite quiet”) to Ai Weiwei (“so sweet and interesting and sensitive and understated”) and Kanye West (“he was a favourite, but it’s difficult to say that now, post the US election”). She stayed four years, overseeing the opening of NeueHouse LA before moving on to become the creative and programming director of TimesTalks, a division of the New York Times, while welcoming a second son and consulting for Absolut Art.
Meanwhile Armstrong was observing the interactive creative talk series Grey was running and devising ways to introduce something similar in Australia. “There was nothing going on here beyond artist-curator talks, but nothing like the inter-disciplinary thing Michelle was doing so well in New York. I thought there was a real gap in the market, so that was always our dream,” she says.
Armstrong tested the Sydney appetite by hosting an intimate conversation for 30 guests with journalist Jennifer Byrne in a private home and was pleased with the enthusiastic response. Armstrong and Grey in turn trialled an event for Absolut Art in March 2020 with an international guest, English-born New York-based artist Shantell Martin. The week-long series included dinner and a light show at Icebergs; a private dinner with Martin for 30 in Paddington including a live drawing performance and an in-conversation with artist Brook Andrew. “We had a very positive response, we jam-packed a lot
into that week and it showed us that there was a real appetite for that sort of thing,” Armstrong says.
The plan was to tour with Martin to Pride in New York and on to Stockholm, but within days the world was stopped in its tracks by the pandemic. Suddenly work and life took on a very different appearance and Grey found the excuse she needed to move her family to Sydney. “We had a really nice life in New York and Manolo had a great career, then [Covid hit and] some of his clients like John Varvatos went bankrupt. But it was mainly our kids – we were staring down the barrel of a year homeschooling. I was always dying to come back and everything in Australia looked like it was still going.”
The silver lining was that Armstrong and Grey were now living in the same city and had an opportunity to get serious about Arts-Matter. The concept of ArtsMatter isn’t new, harking back to the Belle Époque era of the late 1880s when people would gather in art salons to enjoy evenings of music, poetry and art. Somehow in the centuries since, art forms became siloed and audiences passive consumers, whereas Armstrong and Grey strongly believe there’s a hunger for art to be enjoyed in all its forms, often at the same time, while blurring the line between performers and audience.
Their first event was an evening of painting and poetry with Louise Olsen in Grey’s father’s spacious Point Piper home. Other events included a salon-style performance and talk with Sydney Art Quartet and Grandiflora’s Saskia Havekes, and a ‘creativity-meetswellness’ retreat in the Southern Highlands. “Almost all our events have a participatory element – it’s not just the artist showing slides of their new exhibition – and our artists enjoy the community we bring because they feel they can be more candid with a [small], respectful peer group,” says Grey. “It can be intimidating being at a gallery talk if you’re not completely immersed in art – this feels more intimate and you’re walking away with something other than a hangover!”
The guest list is ‘curated’ by a membership committee including Quilty, Ngaiire and Alex Zabotto-Bentley in an attempt to draw together a crowd of simpatico people. “Susan has an incredible community of people who have been so supportive. We’ve had so many events we now have a pretty robust database. And it’s inter-generational,” explains Grey. “A lot of people make the mistake of thinking they need young people, millennials, and it’s never just about that. Don’t alienate, cast the net wider.”
Upcoming events include a Vivid discussion about diversity and inclusion in the Australian music industry with Ngaiire, L-Fresh the Lion and Barry Conrad, moderated by Alethea Beeston, and an artist-led painting workshop with Perrier-Jouët. “It’s a bespoke audience that makes sense for the environment you’re trying to create, so we have people interested in the food world, others in music and theatre,” says Grey.
At this stage Arts-Matter is being funded by Armstrong and Grey themselves, but as word spreads of the integrity and quality of the events, cultural institutions and brands are lining up to collaborate. Already they have partnered with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Olsen Gallery and Art Month Sydney, and there are fashion labels, restaurants and alcohol brands keen to follow suit.
“Using our own resources has meant we can control the editorial direction,” says Armstrong. “We’re trying to promote and celebrate work, we’re not trying to sell anything. And we believe that if you lead with programming you attract a certain kind of person.”
At its most basic level, Arts-Matter hopes to create a sense of belonging. “Our passion is culture and the arts, so if we can create a platform where people are inspired and learn something, we’ll be happy,” says Grey.
“Almost all our events have a participatory element – it’s not just the artist showing slides of their new exhibition”