Art Network North East is an advocacy and development organisation for the visual arts, working with individuals and organisations across the region to support existing activity, effect change where it’s needed, and raise the profile of the North East nationally.
We support the visual arts in the North East by providing information for the sector and public, supporting individual practitioners and art institutions, and developing and delivering projects with short- and long-term strategic aims. These include printed art maps and a website for public and professionals alike and the North East Artists’ Fund, a multi-partner, region-wide micro-bursaries initiative established in 2022.
We want to ensure that the North East continues to be a region where artists can thrive, and where the relationship between artists and institutions is mutually supportive. We want to activate the link between our region’s individual practitioners and its institutions. For us, the significant issues are those concerning individual practitioners, the sector’s structural conditions, and the North East’s external profile.
For individuals, these include, but are not limited to, the retention of early-career practitioners; opportunities for research, artist development, exhibition and employment; and support for facilities and networks enabling intra- and extra-regional activity.
For institutions, we’re interested in developing a more collaborative framework for organisations across the region, extending their ability to work across sub-regional boundaries, supporting their artistic activity by providing region-wide publicity and highlighting links and connections across the region, and scrutinising the extent to which they are representative of and engage with their constituents.
Our region stretches from Berwick-upon-Tweed in the far north, on the border with Scotland, through Northumberland, Tyne & Wear and County Durham and down to the Tees Valley, including Middlesbrough. It includes the conurbations of Tyneside – comprising Newcastle and Gateshead – Sunderland and Teesside. The total population of the North East is 2.17m, of which 823,000 is the metro area population of Newcastle upon Tyne and 345,000 in Sunderland (both 2023). Northumberland, by contrast, has the lowest population density in England.
Art Network North East currently has one part-time staff member, Adam Pugh, hosted by Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. It is supported by an advisory group of individual practitioners and institutional representatives in the process of redevelopment and renewal.