Committing to Our Future: Funding Success for Primary

Primary has had a string of funding successes this financial year from philanthropic organisations committed to building a better, more socially just future and supporting the sustainability of the arts in Nottingham. Their support continues to bring this community to life.

Image: Family Activity Day, 2024.

Since 2010, we have transformed our building into a cultural resource that includes multi-use spaces such as galleries, workshops, a garden, a bookshop, a bakery, and a free public programme of commissions, exhibitions, and events. We provide subsidised studios for 50 creatives and offer an artist development programme, addressing barriers to sustaining a career in the arts, particularly in challenging economic conditions. The community routing for Primary includes artists, residents, members, funders, staff, trustees, alumni, partners, and citizens locally, nationally, and internationally who have deeply engaged with and contributed to our work and those who have yet to begin their journey with us. We are proud that the unique environment we foster encourages creative research, where the collective value of our work far exceeds the sum of its parts.

Thank you to the Art Fund, Bagri Foundation, Henry Moore Foundation, National Lottery Community Fund, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and our core funders, Arts Council England and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, for contributing to this collective value.

Our track record of long-term curatorial support has rapidly grown because of this all-embracing community that our team collaborates with in innovative, attentive, and cyclical ways. This curatorial support is proven through the careers of respected artists such as Turner Prize winner Jasleen Kaur, Jonathan Baldock, Hardeep Pandhal, and Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad—artists who have trusted us with their work. We have also hosted renowned artists like Ellen Gallagher and Sean Roy Parker, recipient of the 2024 Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Art.

Kaur, who showed existing work recently in our experimental group exhibition, Imagining Otherwise, expressed to the team: ‘There is something specific about Primary and the commitment you have to working with artists, supporting their practice, that made this feel really genuine and couldn't (or shouldn't?) be replicated. We were being invited into your enquiry… your wonderings… about how and why you do what you do. I loved the openness of this invitation. By saying yes, it felt like investing in relationships with those at Primary and the invited artists. So yeah…it felt very different to saying yes to a group show'.

Image: Programme team walkthrough for Kolam, Primary, 2024. Photo by Rae Dowling.

Following our reopening in the summer of 2023, the organisation’s programme team and Programme Subcommittee, comprised of representatives of the Board, residents, members, and staff, spent over a year creating a collaborative artistic vision for the next five years. This vision, which we will publish later this year, expands on the ethos of why the changes to our building, which focus on visitor welcome, accessibility, and sustainability, are important. These changes are the foundational bricks of our ideas and plans to continue offering a high-quality and free programme.

It needs to be said that the team and their work have a stake in an international conversation and endeavour with our peers globally to define and explore what an art institution can be. With no organisation like Primary in the UK, how do we keep moving forward—to understand our relevance, stay mission-driven, and contribute to a sectorial collective vision in the coming years? We feel one approach is to reach out and say, 'Here you go'. Here are some resources, time, space, ideas and actions to make something remarkable or ordinary with us. A custodian of digital and physically welcoming spaces, the Future Atelier urgently works to become socially just—always moving together and leaving no entity behind. Over the next five years, we will go to you, and you can come to us and contribute and co-imagine the (im)possible future of the contemporary atelier. We look forward to reciprocal encounters with those reading.

Image: Madi Acharya-Baskerville, Creating Multimedia Sculpture Workshop, 2024. Photo by Rae Dowling.

Our passion and ambitions are bigger than our team's size and current resources. We care. We punch above our weight, and we do so with bravery, but as a profoundly under-resourced organisation, there is still a long way to go to move away from a position of instability. Taking stock of what we have overcome over the last decade to be in the position to receive a fantastic variety of support from our diverse group of funders, we also incredibly admire how far peer organisations that are formerly artist-led, such as Spike Island (formerly Artspace Bristol, est. 1970s) and Studio Voltaire (est. 1994) have come since their inception. So, today, we celebrate our successes, but tomorrow, we continue securing investment for ourselves, artists, and our neighbourhood. As a tiny team comprised of only part-time staff, we look forward to building on a shared enquiry with your support and fostering the 'specialness' that is Primary.