A Hub for Welsh Contemporary Art/National Art Gallery of Wales

Wales today has an active, thriving network of visual art institutions and galleries. Every year, Cardiff’s Artes Mundi Prize attracts more than 800 entries from critically acclaimed artists across 90 countries. The National Museum Wales and National Library of Wales are seeing an ever-growing collection of contemporary art in everything from sculpture to mixed-media, photography to paintings. But all despite this, there is still no dedicated, national platform for contemporary art in Wales.

What would a new national contemporary art gallery for Wales look like? What would it mean for the country? And how will it improve on, and not damage, the country’s existing cultural offer? These are the questions we set out to answer when we were appointed by the Welsh Government, in partnership with Arts Council Wales and National Museum Wales, to develop a feasibility study and options appraisal for the proposed gallery.

There is no obvious silver bullet solution. It is not as simple as hiring a star architect, creating a landmark building in the capital city and parachuting a brand-new, shiny institution into it. This risks harming the existing cultural offer and draining capital. Moreover, Wales is a rural country with a dispersed population, language and culture. In this national context, it is just as important to support grassroots artists as it is showcase well-known ones. Plus, any new national gallery needs to root the arts into education, creative industries and tourist economies around the country. The aim is to create a National Gallery of Contemporary Art that is genuinely of and for Wales.

We began to ask – is a hub and spoke model better suited to Wales? Or perhaps investment in an existing space? By building on existing assets, and leapfrogging current trends about gallery building, Wales could become a world leader in creative citizenship. An alternative model could have the potential to achieve the country’s highest cultural ambitions and its commitment to a more sustainable, just and inclusive society.

Working together with a number of bodies, including the Welsh Government, we explored all the options on the table. This meant looking at things in the abstract, envisioning a mission, vision and mandate for a new institution, and assessing the hard data – capital investment requirements, visitor numbers, profitability. We came to several possible options for the new gallery. Each has its own pros and cons, which we neatly mapped out, before arriving at a preferred option. This piece of consultancy work has since developed into a fundamental strand of bigger thinking across the Welsh cultural estate.