We wrote last year about how 2026 would be a year of discovery. I hadn’t anticipated how deeply artist-led that discovery was going to be.
This is the first issue of this paper this year. It’s full of work by local artists and curators, all with some attachment to archive. Adrian Jeans exploring Williamson’s archive to explore deeply held artistic beliefs, but also uncovering the unseen history of the region. Brendan Lyons, who’s first exhibition of the year is covered in an interview with Leah Binns, follows this show later in the year with further archival explorations (TBA…).
Kenneth O’Hare’s retrospective exhibition explores the life of an artist through the eyes of his friends and peers.
As we head towards 2028, twenty years on from Capital of Culture, a lifetime for many of our readers picking this up, it’s as clear as ever that archive is essential to understanding space. Looking back doesn’t prevent looking forward. Occasionally, it benefits it.
Yes, we’re two years out, but that’s two years when its potently worth remembering the impact that the artists of the early 21st century have had on this city and the region around it. Not all of it has been positive, and some has been mixed.
Take the development of the Baltic. It’s thriving still, and filled with arts organisations, design agencies, and bars. There are a handful of art studios still there, but nowhere near as many as when it started.
North Docks, packed with culture, comedy clubs, studios. But it didn’t become the hub it could have, and then a football stadium made that harder.
You’ve almost got to go back to the 90’s, or 2004 at the earliest, to really find an example of genuinely supportive landlords and development opportunities for artists that had an honest or nurturing relationship. But that held together until around 2014, even 2018 at push, until Crown Buildings and Gostins were lost.
And yes, there’s sadness in losing so many spaces. That’s rooted in fondness, and occasionally in anger. But there’s also a future in that. Because right now, there’s a city full of artists who have been through that mill of development and loss, and they’ve got a drive to do it better.
I can’t write in detail about other people’s projects, or the trials of other groups, but there is a future. There are meaningful conversations with borough councils about spaces that will make a difference. They’re not permanent, but they’ve got a chance to be.
In those plans and proposals, is something that feels new; sustainability. Financial, reputational, and environmental sustainability. Artists who have been burned before, knowing the significance of material costs, public awareness, and public benefit. Some, because they’ve lost spaces, others because they’re being taught by the artists who lost those spaces, and are entering the world with a scepticism that makes them stronger.
I kind of hate it, because it means there’s artifice not just in creation, but in manipulating a system to enable you to create. But, I kind of love that too. Because artists are evidencing that they understand their social and economic value to the spaces they inhabit.
Over the next twelve months, and across all six boroughs of LCR, you’ll see exhibitions and new programme by independent artists driven by the need to self-sustain, or to celebrate the impact of other artists on them, and their circle.
It won’t always make a permanent difference, but some of it will undoubtedly change how we think about artists’ roles in developing the ecology of places. And it won’t be led by institutions, it will be led by artists themselves.
