Working with artists

Made to break: museums, objects, people, and belonging

I am a Curator. I am a CURATOR. Growing up in a tenement, on the east coast of Scotland, I…

Beyond borders: transnational perspectives on place-based visual art initiatives for application in UK commuter hubs

Introduction Championed by the United Kingdom (UK), the ‘Levelling Up’ agenda is a pivotal governance strategy devised to address regional…

Foreword

Gallery education has its roots in community arts practice of the 1960s onwards; artists and communities engaged in radical work,…

The unspoken divide: class and the cultural sector

The conversation about class remains still too absent in the cultural sector. While discussions around low pay are commonplace, cultural…

Bringing us out of our living rooms: limitless imagination in Edenderry, Republic of Ireland

Shall we take a visit to Edenderry?! The journey is long and stepping off the #120 bus feels nerve wracking…

Valuing difference: how can alternative public spaces, like Modern Art Oxford, learn and engage with communities through place-based approaches to programming?

Publicly funded galleries are, of course, public spaces. Or they should be. Throughout this text we consider the responsibilities of…

Editor’s introduction

‘They don’t think that they are left behind and they are right.’ Boris Johnston, The Prime Minister's Levelling Up speech:…

Levelling Up and (not) placemaking: are we there yet?

It is hard to keep pace with the changing schemes and terminology used by UK governments and public bodies to…

Stoke-on-Trent: challenges and collaboration with the UK Shared Prosperity Fund

Stoke-on-Trent is a city in north Staffordshire with a rich history rooted in the ceramics industry. While the city’s significant…

Informal conversations and cultural infrastructures in Wales

Scene 1 - Panad with a friend Two friends and colleagues sit at a dining room table, chatting away about…

Engage 47 Communities and care takes a journey through visual art practice, engagement and participation in the era of placemaking and levelling up, simultaneously exploring the uses of the word care in relation to this work.

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About this issue:

Engage 47 Communities and care takes a journey through visual art practice, engagement and participation in the era of placemaking and levelling up, simultaneously exploring the uses of the word care in relation to this work.

It is a response to the UK Government’s ‘Levelling up’ agenda, a headline policy to invest in areas of economic disadvantage across the UK, intimately connected to a perceived lack of culture or other infrastructure. Core to this is the idea of engaging communities, most often used in the professional arts sector to refer to collective groups working together, defined by a distinguishing factor across a shared experience. This could be a geographical location or a protected category, for example, those based in a specific village, town, area of a city, or a group connected by LBGTQIA+ identification.

While Communities and care focuses on ‘Levelling up’ and the impact of this, particularly in England, there are reflections on the issues raised by such policies from colleagues in Wales and Scotland and internationally from Ireland, the USA, Netherlands and Japan.

The Journal was launched at the Engage gathering Groundswell in Plymouth in May which focused on the impact of hyper-local community-led arts interventions.