Sustainable creative careers through mentoring: Understanding social resilience in the art field

In recent years, there has been a rise in career development programs for artists, including various types of mentoring programs. However, research on mentoring is scarce within the field of cultural policy. In this paper, we analyse mentoring as a tool for developing creative careers by investigating three different programs implemented in the Norwegian art field. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with mentors, protégés, and administrators in the three programs, and survey data, applications, and reports from one of the programs. Building on studies that address the social and collective aspects of artists’ and other creatives’ work and using social capital and social resilience as theoretical lenses for our analysis, we argue that despite potential downsides and pitfalls, mentoring can offer a holistic approach to learning, and its activation of collective resources can contribute to resilience and sustainability in creative careers.