NOBA Award & Network

Connecting the Nordic-Baltic art scene

NOBA is building a shared professional ecosystem for Nordic-Baltic contemporary art — a network connecting artists, art academies, curators and museums across countries and creating lasting professional relationships at a formative stage in an artist’s career.

At the centre of the network is the Nordic & Baltic Young Artist Award, established in 2016. What began as a Baltic initiative has developed into a cross-border collaboration with eight leading art academies across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and Sweden, bringing each year’s BA and MA graduates into a wider international context.

Today, the Award Network brings together the Estonian Academy of Arts, Pallas University of Applied Sciences, Art Academy of Latvia, Vilnius Academy of Arts, Uniarts Helsinki, Turku University of Applied Sciences, Konstfack and Umeå Academy of Fine Arts.

Graduation exhibitions and portfolio reviews are key places for discovering new artists and artistic practices, but following them across an entire region is practically impossible. NOBA brings this otherwise dispersed landscape together, creating a single point of access across countries and academies and making artists and their practices visible beyond individual exhibitions and institutional contexts.

Seen together, these practices also reveal something that is difficult to recognise within a single academy or country: recurring themes, differences, emerging tendencies and the particular characteristics of artistic practice across the Nordic-Baltic region. By creating a regional overview, NOBA makes it possible to see not only individual artists, but how a new generation is responding to its time and place — and what may distinguish the region within a wider international art context.

Through the network, artists become part of a wider regional context, while academies, curators and museums build connections across institutional and national boundaries. NOBA is now expanding this structure across the Nordic-Baltic region, bringing more academies and art institutions into the network and creating new possibilities for professional exchange, collaboration and discovery.

For artists

For artists, the NOBA Award & Network creates international visibility and connections at a formative stage in their careers. It places each artist within a wider Nordic-Baltic context, bringing their practice to the attention of curators, museums, art professionals, collectors and audiences beyond their home country.

Participation connects graduates from leading art academies across the region. Their work is presented and evaluated internationally, while the NOBA platform gives each artist a lasting professional presence, making their practice searchable and accessible across borders.

The network creates possibilities beyond the Award itself. Connections made through NOBA can lead to future exhibitions, collaborations and other professional opportunities, while artists can continue to develop their profiles and remain visible as their practices evolve.

Artists can also choose to make works available for sale through NOBA. Selling is not a requirement for participating in the Award or being represented on the platform, but provides an additional way to reach audiences, support an artistic practice financially and establish relationships with collectors.

The aim is not only to recognise individual artists, but to help them position their practice in relation to peers across the Nordic-Baltic region, build relationships beyond their home country and become part of a wider professional network.

For Art Academies

NOBA gives partner academies an additional international platform for highlighting their graduates and their work. This supports graduates as they move forward in their professional careers, while also bringing greater visibility to the academy, its programmes and the artistic practices emerging from them. The Award, its international jury and NOBA’s joint communication provide opportunities to introduce graduates beyond an academy’s existing audiences and national context.

Bringing graduates from different countries and academies together also creates a valuable basis for comparison. Over time, it becomes possible to see which academies’ graduates are consistently recognised by the international jury, which practices and approaches attract attention, and where the particular strengths of different schools emerge. Jury discussions and feedback also provide insight into how graduates present their work and portfolios, and which professional skills could be strengthened during their studies.

The network complements the international cooperation already taking place between art academies by creating an additional space for exchanging experience specifically around graduates and their transition into professional practice. Partner meetings provide opportunities to discuss different approaches to teaching, programme and institutional structures, and to share practical experience. Additional connections made through NOBA have also developed into new forms of cooperation, including faculty exchanges and joint initiatives.

NOBA is currently expanding the network of partner academies with the aim of building a more comprehensive representation of art education across the Nordic and Baltic region. The next phase focuses particularly on bringing in academies from Denmark and Iceland and broadening representation in Sweden, allowing the network to provide an increasingly comprehensive view of the artists, practices and tendencies emerging across the region.

For museums and curators

For curators and art professionals, NOBA functions as a regional research tool: providing structured, searchable access to graduating artists by country, medium and academy and making it possible to explore artistic practices across the region through a single platform.

This creates a resource for developing exhibitions, residencies, collections and research with a Nordic-Baltic focus, while the network itself creates direct connections between academies, curators, museums and artists across national and institutional boundaries.

The long-term aim is for NOBA to serve as shared digital knowledge infrastructure for the region: a continuously accessible gateway through which curators, museums, collectors and researchers can discover artists and artistic practices from across the Nordic-Baltic region, rather than navigating information fragmented across individual institutions and countries.

At the same time, NOBA is developing closer collaboration with museums, curators and residency programmes internationally, expanding the professional network around the participating artists and academies and creating stronger connections between the Nordic-Baltic art scene and the wider international art world.

For audiences and collectors

NOBA offers a direct way to discover a new generation of Nordic-Baltic artists at an early stage in their careers — to encounter new practices, explore what is being created across the region and follow artists as their work develops.

By bringing together graduates from leading art academies, NOBA makes it possible to look beyond individual countries and institutions and discover artists who might otherwise remain outside one’s immediate field of view. The platform provides a continuously renewed entry point into the Nordic-Baltic art scene — and the possibility of discovering tomorrow’s established names early.

The Public Choice Award gives audiences a direct role in this process. Visitors can explore the year’s nominees across countries and academies, discover their works and practices, and vote for the artists whose work resonates with them most.

For those interested in acquiring art, artists can choose to make works available directly through NOBA. This creates an opportunity to discover and acquire works while prices are still accessible and before wider recognition may influence their market value. Acquiring a work directly supports an artist’s practice and can create new connections and opportunities, while giving audiences the possibility to build a personal relationship with contemporary art through living with it.

A different approach to emerging artists

“Emerging artist” can mean very different things across the art world. Many programmes define emerging artists by age, which can result in the same artists appearing across competitions and selections over a number of years.

The Nordic & Baltic Young Artist Award takes a different approach. We do not define emerging artists by age. Reflecting the reality of lifelong learning, we focus instead on a specific stage in the development of an artistic practice: completing BA or MA studies at an art academy and moving into the next phase of professional practice.

Every year, NOBA presents the BA and MA graduates of its partner academies and their graduation works. The selection therefore changes completely from year to year — new artists, new works and a new perspective on what is being created across Nordic and Baltic art academies right now.

Around 300 artworks are brought together on NOBA each year, creating a continuously renewed overview of artistic practices emerging from the region’s art academies and a unique entry point for discovering artists at this particular stage of their development.

Support the network

NOBA Award & Network is built through collaboration across the Nordic-Baltic art field. Art academies, museums, curators, cultural organisations, companies and private supporters can contribute in different ways — by joining the network, creating opportunities for artists, supporting exhibitions and professional programmes, or helping us expand the shared digital infrastructure behind the initiative.

Support enables us to connect more artists and institutions across the region, increase international visibility for Nordic-Baltic artistic practices and develop new exhibitions, collaborations and professional opportunities.

Interested in becoming a partner or supporting the network? Get in touch: info@noba.ac.

Your support helps strengthen this network and expand collaboration to additional Nordic countries in the future.

By supporting the Nordic & Baltic Young Artist Award, you are investing not only in individual artists, but in the future cultural landscape of the Nordic and Baltic region.