This research has limited its scope to the key art galleries along the south coast of Sussex, plus four charities, two in Sussex and two operating across the country. Also included and interviewed were art critic Geoff Hands and Central St Martins art school. These are:

Art Galleries: Pallant House, Chichester; Fabrica, Brighton; Towner, Eastbourne; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill; Hastings Contemporary, Hastings.

Charities: Project Art Works (PAW), Hastings; Superstar Arts, Worthing; Arts 4 Dementia (A4D), UK; Outside In, UK

Other: Geoff Hands, artist and art critic, Brighton; Central St Martins, art school, University of the Arts London (UAL).

All the galleries plus PAW and Outside In have ACE National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) status, meaning that they are considered leaders in their areas of activity. Collectively they have received NPO funding since 2018 amounting to a total of very nearly £6m, and other funds have been made available to them from ACE, particularly during the pandemic, through a cultural recovery fund and also through specific project grants. So it feels that the Sussex population has a lot to be grateful for in terms of ACE supporting our access to the visual arts. But how far does that access extend? How do the funds enable those not currently engaged with art, those who feel it’s ‘not for them’ or who face barriers created through disability or poor health? 

Guidance for would-be NPO applicants, published by ACE this year, describes the investment programme for 2023 to 2026 and the requirement for addressing those questions. It makes it very clear that, to be successful, applicants will need to respond to the strategy ‘Let’s Create’, show how they will meet the desired outcomes and demonstrate best practice in responding to the ACE vision. This is how they illustrate those outcomes and principles:

So the ambition is about so much more than persuading more people to go into galleries and look at artworks - albeit this is likely to be an indirect outcome; it emphasises the role of creativity and the creative process, thereby enabling organisations to be imaginative and innovative in how they engage the interest and develop the creativity of a much wider and more diverse population. And it also stresses the importance of collaboration thus supporting the role of partnerships and joint working. The result, hopefully, should be a continued strengthening of the sort of community programmes I have been investigating.

My initial motivation for exploring the role of partnerships in supporting creativity came from my involvement with Arts 4 Dementia. Though not an ACE-funded organisation, this first-hand experience was very much a catalyst for my researching the subject in more depth and so revealed the ACE role. Joining as a volunteer early in 2021, the first eight-week workshop I supported was with second and third year Fine Art students at Central St Martins and, as it was during the pandemic, was carried out online. 

The task was to support students in their facilitation role, using my past experience of working with people with dementia to monitor how participants were responding, make real-time suggestions to support their approaches and to feedback any observations at the end. I suspect the fact that I was also a fine art student helped us reach mutual understandings quite quickly about how to work together. As it transpired, the students were thoughtful, compassionate and, as they got to know their participants over the eight sessions, they were clearly enjoying the interaction with people who were older and had a wide range of life experiences they were happy to share.      

                         Online workshops run in partnership between Arts 4 Dementia and Central St Martins, 2021

Early in 2022, a new cohort of students facilitated a second programme of workshops and, this time, most of them could run at the art school in Granary Square, London. The participants were different as well but many of the outcomes were similar. Even working online, using mailed-out boxes of materials, participants often became very absorbed in the activities, telling stories about objects they were utilising from their home and clearly enjoying the ‘hands-on’ nature of producing art. Working in the CSM studio, with more space and facilities, a new kind of creativity began to emerge. Alex and the students were not interested, as Alex put it in our interview, "in playing with glitter and potato cuts" but involved working with clay, plaster casts, video, sound, paint, pastel and acetates.

Final A4D workshop exhibition of participants' artwork

Admiring the work of a participant with dementia at the end of one session, I was so surprised when he said to me “this is the first art class I’ve been to since I was 13 years old”. He had been an accountant all his life but his artwork was flamboyant and, well, creative! He spent the next sessions actively ignoring his companion who wanted his work to be more tidy and to keep things between the lines……. 

One Arts 4 Dementia participant at CSM discovering creativity for the first time since he was 13 years old, 2022

Intrigued by this experience, I began to look into what was happening around us in Sussex and it became clear that the extent of activity in community art programmes was significant. Also that ACE funding was playing a big part, as were partnerships between galleries and, particularly, social care charities and local community groups.

Perhaps the most high profile of these is the partnership between Hastings Contemporary and Project Art Works (PAW). While making a big name for themselves on the short list for the 2021 Turner Prize, PAW also had a major exhibition at the gallery as well as running interactive sessions within the gallery space where members of the public could join in. Visiting this exhibition in December ’21, I was blown away by the colour, size and sheer energy of the paintings. These were the work of neurodiverse artists, the people with complex support needs that PAW support. 

               Photos I took at Hastings Contemporary of artwork exhibited by members of Project Artworks, 2021 

Interviews with community programme managers revealed that at both Pallant House and De La Warr they have also collaborated with curatorial teams in recent years to create space in the main galleries for the work of artists involved in community programmes. Pallant House has approached this in several ways: there is a fundraising, non-selective exhibition each year for which community programme artists can donate work and a partnership with commercial gallery Oxmarket in Chichester providing opportunities to sell work. Also, when Outside In were based at Pallant House, they held their national exhibition in the main exhibition spaces and negotiated to get Outside In artists’ work included in the gallery’s collection. Similarly, De La Warr has devoted main exhibition space to PAW last year and is blending its community engagement and exhibition activities, supported by the Resolve Collective, so that a local youth group will show work they develop through the programme in one of the main galleries.

These examples show how an open mind, and it seems, some effective and willing collaboration internally between community engagement and curatorial teams, can enable even those living with sizeable challenges to have their art properly shown and its value recognised.

This is perhaps something that may only be happening at a local level as I’ve not yet seen evidence of this sort of curation at, for example, the big or well-known London galleries. Even having reached the Turner short list, PAW came in for quite a bit of stick from reviewers with, for example, Laura Cummings in the Guardian making, what seemed to me, an odd comment about their inclusion being patronising. Artist Sonia Boué picked this up, had very much the same response as me and wrote it up in her blog far more eloquently than I could have done!  The reviewers White Pube, commenting on the Turner Prize talked also about the difficulties of those trying to succeed alongside a system that they see as supporting the institutions much more than individuals or collectives:

Feels like the art world is literally structured to make conditions incredibly difficult for neurodivergent artists, or artists with any kind of support or access needs  (https://www.thewhitepube.co.uk)

There is certainly some justification for the White Pube view as, for example, ACE funding is for ‘institutions’ but, by adding charities like PAW and Outside In to their list of beneficiaries, my research has shown that they are in fact taking money directly to those who have the artists’ best interests at heart and use the funds to provide meaningful and effective support for individuals, particularly those who have support needs. And the partnerships that those charities then enter into with galleries, as we’re seeing on the south coast, indicate that historic structures are being challenged and many difficulties overcome.

Sparked in part by this comment from White Pube, a subject I discussed with community gallery programme managers during interviews, was about the correlation between the ACE vision - and, let’s be honest, the pressures of funding criteria - and the gallery’s own strategy and policies. I had responses such as "sometimes it’s hard to pull the two apart" and "most of the work we do already fits with the (ACE) investment principles". Fabrica did add that their Director has such a clear vision of what she wants to achieve that they would consider the ACE funding relationship carefully if it no longer fitted with their own goals. So "they were very relieved to see the strategy when it came out".

However, the overall view seemed to be very positive, particularly with the new strategy being an enabler for reaching out to the least represented audiences and so matching existing gallery ambitions. Also, my sense was that even though the funding relationship comes with quite a workload for the organisations, there was a feeling of collaboration with ACE.