The Syllabus is a nomadic artist development programme billed as an alternative to formal art education. At its half-way stage, Anneka French speaks to the project’s organisers, artist Andy Holden and Wysing Arts Centre, and to two of the ten participating artists.
It’s been a busy and fruitful year for a-n/AIR’s Paying Artists campaign, with plenty of activity across the UK and internatioanally. Paying Artists Project Manager Julie McCalden looks back over 2015.
Six a-n writers – based in Glasgow, Manchester and London – pick, in no particular order, their top five exhibitions of the year.
Crowdsourced from the ideas of Middlesbrough and Teeside residents through a series of workshops and open calls, mima’s current exhibition Localism is about reasserting the importance of the local in both the development of society and the international art world.
Alice Cunningham’s solo exhibition at the Royal British Society of Sculptors, London, includes new works in marble developed while she was recipient of the 2014 Brian Mercer Stone Carving Residency in Pietrasanta, Italy. She speaks to Pippa Koszerek about how she worked with a specialist stone carving studio to create the four works included in the show.
British Art Show 8 opens in Leeds on Friday 9 October and the city – currently bidding to be European Capital of Culture 2023 – is responding with a raft of additional activity. Leeds-based writers and artists Amelia Crouch and Lara Eggleton report on what the city’s homegrown and artist-led organisations are up to as Leeds City Council throws its support behind a showcase of the city’s buoyant visual arts scene.
The fourth British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent comes as the industry in the city is enjoying a modest upturn. Reporting from the city, Bob Dickinson finds plenty of evidence of ceramic creativity alongside well-founded concerns over the loss of traditional industrial skills.
Now in its third year, London’s Art Licks Weekend continues to expand beyond its south east beginnings, and this year features an increasing number of venues in the south west of the city. Pippa Koszerek speaks to the two artists behind Streatham Hill’s DOLPH projects, who will be sharing the ‘secrets’ of their practice during the four-day festival.
The inaugural Plymouth Art Weekender presents work across the city by over 400 local, national and international artists. Artist and AIR Council member Steven Paige welcomes this audacious new festival and looks at how the city’s visual art ecology has developed in the five years since British Art Show 7.
The inaugural North festival of contemporary art opens in Warrington in October with a series of city pavilions and an exhibition that invites artists’ responses to Ikea. Laura Robertson speaks to some of the artists involved and the London-based gallerist behind the event.
Last year, artist and curator Emma Sumner took a research trip to India which saw her visit an extensive network of organisations at the heart of this vast country’s contemporary art scene. Here she highlights three of them and explores what can be learnt from their approach to art and funding.
An ambitious new artist-led festival is taking place across Manchester and Salford this weekend, with studio spaces and major venues hosting a number of projects produced especially for the festival alongside, open studios across both cities. Bob Dickinson meets artists and festival directors Elisa Artesero, John Lynch and Roger Bygott to find out more.
A recent symposium in Swansea, organised by Q-Art, brought together speakers from across the UK to explore the impact of location on art education and the art school. Rory Duckhouse reports.
David Dale Gallery & Studios in Glasgow’s east end is celebrating five years of its internationally-focused exhibition programme with the show-in-progress, Finite Project Altered When Open. Chris Sharratt talks to founding co-director Max Slaven.
As HOME, Manchester’s new space for art, theatre and cinema, fully opens to the public, Bob Dickinson looks at its place in the city’s arts ecology, the significance of its cross-disciplinary approach to commissioning, and where it sits in the city’s wider regeneration plans and the creation of a ‘northern powerhouse’.
A recent summit at Project Ability in Glasgow brought together support studios and learning disability artists from around the world for three days of art making, discussion and sharing of ideas. Emmie McKay reports on a conference with a difference that also included a residency by the artist Tanya Raabe-Webber.
Artist-led gallery and studio space The Royal Standard is hosting a quick-fire series of exhibitions by 26 studio members over three weeks. Laura Robertson reports on an exciting opportunity for artists in Liverpool.
Open exhibitions are becoming an increasingly common aspect of the visual arts landscape, with high-profile big hitters such as the BP Portrait Award and Royal Academy Summer Show joined by a growing number of smaller-scale shows. But with most charging an entry fee and with no guarantee of being included, are artists simply being asked to subsidise the sector with their own money? Jack Hutchinson investigates.
Artist-run Edinburgh space Embassy marks its 10th anniversary with a party, a publication and a new commission. Richard Taylor reports.
Manchester’s Castlefield Gallery is celebrating its 30-year history with a forward-looking exhibition featuring artists who are ‘shaping the future of contemporary art’. Liz West, an artist based in the city, speaks to the gallery’s director and to fellow Manchester artists, about the important role it plays in the area’s art ecology.
MODEL is a new artist-run gallery in Liverpool that aims to provide a flexible and experimental platform for artist-led activity in the city. Laura Robertson pays a visit and speaks to its three founders.
In less than four weeks, Scotland will be voting to decide whether to become an independent nation or remain part of the UK. Chris Sharratt speaks to artists and those working in the visual arts in the country and finds thinking that runs much deeper than nationalism, oil revenues and questions of currency.
This May Day bank holiday weekend sees the launch of the Bristol Art Weekender, a four-day event that brings together 16 of the city’s visual arts venues, producers and artist-run initiatives for the first time. We talk to some of those involved and investigate the wider context for the upsurge in cultural activity in the city.
As part of its New Art Spaces project, Manchester’s Castlefield Gallery has opened its biggest space yet, across a six-storey, 80,000 square feet building in the centre of the city. We pay it a visit and find out what makes it more than just another artists’ studio complex.
The artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman died on 19 February 1994. To mark 20 years since his death from an AIDS-related illness, a series of events and screenings are happening throughout the year, including two recently opened exhibitions in London. We talk to the shows’ curators and explore the riches on display.