Is community ownership a viable option for visual arts?

Artist-run organisations are notoriously precarious. In the visual arts, spaces run by artists for artists offer a testing ground for risky, non-commercial work to be honed.

A glance through the CV of any Turner Prize winner will reveal shows at at least a few artist-run spaces in the early days, in the gap between graduation and institutional validation. But by their messy and cutting-edge nature, these nascent organisations often burn out quickly, with the pressing need to find stable employment, and the pressures of rising rents and redevelopment providing their downfall.

Two Queens should be no different. Operating in Leicester since 2012, we have held hundreds of exhibitions by emerging artists and we currently provide studios for 45 local artists and makers alongside regular learning and wellbeing programmes.

Initially established in a blast of youthful naivety and enthusiasm, the gallery has miraculously weathered the storms of the past decade to become an established part of the UK’s contemporary visual arts infrastructure, focused on working with artists to produce their first large-scale solo shows.

In 2013, Two Queens was included in A-N’s Artist-led Hot 100, directory compiled by artist Kevin Hunt to map the UK’s newest and most exciting grassroots projects. A look through this list a decade later backs up the precarity trend for artist-led spaces. Of the 100 listed, just 36 are still up and running, with the remaining having closed, ceased activity or fizzled out.

Community Benefit Society

Two Queens now faces its own existential crisis. Our lease runs out in March 2025 and, with no security of tenure, we face the threat of closure. We want to stay in the building that has become our home, where we can bring the most benefit to our community and city. So we are working hard to raise the money needed to buy the freehold. In all, just under £half a million is needed, small fry in capital project terms but to a micro-organisation like Two Queens, a huge challenge.

It was with this in mind that in March 2023 Two Queens converted to become a Community Benefit Society (CBS) – a form of community-owned co-operative and a structure that is relatively rare in the arts. As a CBS, we are now owned by our members, who can be anyone from our local community and the community of interest that supports our work.

Not only does being a CBS make us stronger, it also opens up options for raising capital that are under-utilised in the arts, namely the Community Share Offer – a type of social investment that allows members to contribute money towards projects, to be repaid with interest at a later point.

Our Community Share Offer project is ongoing and has been even harder work than we imagined. But is hopefully a first step on the road to Community Ownership, not only of the organisation but also the building it occupies.

Owning the building would make our business model much more sustainable, allowing us to keep running and grow our work self-sufficiently, without the need for external core grant funding to keep things going, and ensuring this important arts facility can remain a resource for Leicester far into the future.

Continues…

‘Cryptid’ exhibition at Two Queens by Joey Holder, 2024

Left in limbo

Since 2021, the concept of community ownership has received a boost through the former Department for Levelling Up’s Community Ownership Fund (COF), a £150m programme that, to date, has awarded £103.1m for 333 projects. The programme is designed to safeguard community assets at risk, allowing communities to come together and protect the buildings and spaces they care about most.

COF now faces its own uncertain future. At the time the general election was called in May, the final COF application window was scheduled to open on the 30th of that month. Our application for the capital we needed was ready but we – and hundreds of other community organisations who had received funded support to develop their applications – were left in limbo. There is still no announcement on the future of the programme.

Even more nerve-wracking is the wait currently being endured by those of us who applied in round 4.1 – the outcome of which remains unannounced. The present government has voiced its support for COF, with indications it may extend or remodel the programme, alongside new Community Right to Buy legislation. For now though, organisations working on time-sensitive projects face the real risk that COF will not re-emerge in time to offer them the lifeline they need.

Of the community ownership projects funded so far by COF, only a tiny handful have visual arts activity as their primary purpose – far outnumbered by community hubs, village halls, sports facilities, pubs, shops and even public toilets. Why, when the visual arts and artist-run spaces in particular face such precarity, has community ownership not been more widely adopted in the sector?

Opportunity outweighs the risks

When Two Queens set out to find a potential solution for the challenges we faced, through conversations with peers and sector leaders, it took a long time to find any arts professional familiar with the idea of community ownership or the community share offer. Or anyone who had thought about its potential application in the arts.

These initiatives are perhaps more closely tied in people’s minds to rural communities, with village pubs the most recognised examples, and therefore not seen as a viable option for arts venues in urban centres.

Perhaps, too, the visual arts have become too dependent on public and lottery-derived grant funding from a small number of sources for most of their support, failing to look outside that box to ways of raising accountable capital from communities, beyond the philanthropic donor model.

Community Ownership has its risks, requiring organisations to open not only their doors, but their governance structures to the communities they serve, but these risks are outweighed by the opportunity to do more than pay lip service to the notions of community empowerment and co-creation encouraged by Arts Council England’s current Let’s Create strategy.

With very little time left before Two Queens’ community share offer ends, there is still a long way to go. But I remain optimistic that community ownership could offer a way forward for artist-run spaces in the UK to overcome the precarity that has defined them for too long.

Daniel Sean Kelly is an artist and co-director of Two Queens Gallery & Studio. 
 @danielseankelly
 danielseankelly